Underdog (7 page)

As time went on and I expanded my circle of those who knew, I felt like a huge weight was being lifted from my chest. I left my family to the end, first telling my brother after a 10K run we did together. When I said through tears that I was always afraid to come out for fear I'd be a bad example for my niece and two nephews, he told me not to think that for a minute. A few years later, my nephew Cooper, then ten, marched in my wedding, and to this day, all three of my brother's kids treat Denise and me like we're any other couple. Although I know young people still get bullied in school for being gay and I am not so naive as to think we as a couple don't have to be careful when we travel to certain countries and American states, it is thrilling to see how much more accepting kids of my niece and nephews' generation are. I often get asked now if I regret going through the pain and hardship I did, seeing as acceptance of gay marriage has changed so dramatically in the past five years – and especially south of the border within the last year. I try not to make a habit of dwelling on what could have been; nevertheless, I find myself trying to be as outspoken as possible about my marriage to Denise and about being gay, perhaps to make up for lost time.

I decided to tell my parents before the year was out and at a public restaurant, just in case things got out of hand (more on my part). It seems ages ago, but at the time I was a basket case. I don't remember how I managed to eat any of my dinner that night with all the tears. But I do remember telling them I'd always felt I let them down and my dad responding that my comment was nonsense, that he was proud of me
and that I reminded him of Ellen DeGeneres. Okay, I thought, not so bad. My mother needed time to let it sink in, although she did admit she'd always suspected. The next week, when I told Dr. Abrams about what had happened, we both started to cry. I felt free at last, except for one very major issue. Sadly, throughout, my ex continued to vociferously resist my coming-out efforts – even though we had told her family that what they long suspected was true and they now embraced our relationship. She was extremely upset with me when I suggested to our Muskoka vet that we were a couple, although I would bet the vet knew all along, seeing as we made no secret that Shopsy had two mommies. I believe to this day that the combination of her having been married before, being eleven years older, and trying to practise real estate in a small town made her afraid to admit what we really had together. Whether the fear was realistic or not, it was real to her. The tension between one partner living in the closet and the other coming out to the world proved to be our undoing – although I wouldn't admit it at the time. In May 2005, when my assailant from Structube pleaded guilty in court to sexual assault, my ex was so fearful of being publicly exposed as my partner – even though at that point her family and my friends already knew we were a couple – that she opted not to come to court with me. After convincing me to pursue the case to the bitter end, she convinced herself that accompanying me would damage my case, though that made absolutely no sense. I suppose I had so much to deal with at the time, I pretended it didn't matter. But looking back, it hurt me terribly and was probably the beginning of the end for us.

In the spring of 2006, some six months before we split, I learned of a support group for lesbians endeavouring to come
out, generously operated in their home by a lesbian couple, Carol Pasternak and Audrey Kouyoumdjian. The couple had both been married to men and had had children before meeting each other in 2002. I begged my ex to come with me to the group, but she adamantly refused. I will never forget Audrey's words when I first talked about how my ex and I had lived in the closet for so long, and raised the issue of her resistance to coming out. Audrey said, in her experience, such relationships usually don't last. In absolute denial, I responded adamantly that our relationship was different. But by that spring, we were fighting more than getting along and I started spending less and less time at my ex's cottage on weekends. When I ran my very first half marathon in Ottawa in May 2006 – after four long and arduous months of training – my ex didn't come to Ottawa to cheer me on. That same month, I went to visit my ex's mother in her assisted living apartment. Her mother was well into her nineties, gravely ill, and receiving twenty-four-hour care. She couldn't understand why her daughter and I were apart on a weekend when I was supposed to be at the cottage. She told me in her by then frail voice that she was so happy her daughter had someone with whom to spend her life. That was the funny thing. Even though she couldn't articulate the word
lesbian,
she accepted and was happy that we were a couple.

Nevertheless, Audrey's words were indeed prophetic. When my ex's mother passed away a little more than a month later, things really took a turn for the worse. By then I was out enough at the
Toronto Sun
to take three days of compassionate leave to be with my ex for the funeral and the shiva. But when I sat with her and the rest of the family at the funeral home to make the arrangements and to write the obituary, my
partner of twenty years adamantly refused to have me listed with her as a couple in her mother's obituary. Her brother and sister-in-law tried to convince her otherwise, but, no doubt again out of fear of being “outed,” she would not budge. To add insult to injury, she got very upset with her niece – who was delivering one of the final tributes at the funeral – for daring to suggest in it that we were a couple. Her niece was forced to mention me as a friend of the family. I was crushed beyond words, especially because I was by her side at the funeral and the shiva. I made it through another month of weekends at the cottage, but I knew I was just going through the motions. At that point, though, I didn't realize how quickly the relationship would come crashing to an end.

In the last week of July, I received a call from a lawyer telling me he had a great story for me – an issue symbolizing everything that was wrong with City Hall. He said his client, Denise Alexander, had just been to a meeting of the community council representing midtown Toronto, and her councillor, Michael Walker, was poised to pull a fast one by trying to yank her permit for a widened driveway. The city had approved the driveway three years earlier after she'd fulfilled thousands of dollars of landscaping requirements, and since then she'd been paying a permit fee to the city for the privilege of using it. As we later learned when I did a Freedom of Information search, the councillor had for almost a year been meeting behind the scenes with Denise's neighbours on either side.

Just a few months later, the neighbours sported Mr. Walker's campaign signs on their property and we learned after the election that they'd donated to his re-election campaign. That, sadly, is how easily most councillors are swayed
to action, whether for the positive or the negative. Denise's lawyer was hoping a story could run before the vote on her driveway came to full council. I was reluctant to do it because my plate was full. But her lawyer persisted and without even knowing Denise, I found myself incensed at the idea of the system, yet again, abusing innocent taxpayers. So, on a Friday, as I was packing to go to my ex's cottage, I did a pre-interview with Denise by phone. It was just one question that forever changed both of our lives. I asked her why she thought her neighbours would engage in such harassment – meaning, what was in it for them? Denise told me it was “off the record” but she thought it was because she'd been living with a woman. I responded that if it made her feel better, I was gay too and I'd also had issues with my neighbours in the condo where I lived. I could never prove it, but I suspected some of them changed the way they interacted with me after I came out. If timing is everything, this was proof. One can only imagine what I might have said, or not said, had it been a year earlier and I was not yet out of the closet.

My conversation with Denise that Friday morning, while strictly professional, haunted me through my entire weekend in Muskoka, not because of the subject matter but because of her. She came across, even over the phone, as a highly intelligent woman with a fabulous sense of humour and a tremendous warmth. To add to my confusion, my ex decided not to show up to cheer me on as I participated in my first Try-a-Triathlon event that weekend. Upon my return home Sunday night, I phoned Denise to confirm my interview with her for the next morning. When she heard my dog, Kishka, barking in the background, she asked what kind of dog I had. I told her Kishka was a long-haired miniature dachshund, to
which she responded that she had the same rare breed, fourteen-year-old Zigmund.

The next day, as I drove up to her house, I kept repeating the mantra “Oh please let her be fat and ugly.” When I arrived and she opened the door, I knew it was game over. I was immediately taken by her twinkly turquoise blue eyes and her hot body. I was so discombobulated, I could barely concentrate on the interview, and for the first time in my nearly eighteen years at the
Toronto Sun,
I had to really force myself to keep focused on the story. The next day, when my story appeared and helped get Denise a deferral at council (a major feat considering how often community council issues were and still are usually rammed through without question at council), she called me at work to say thank you and to invite me for Friday night dinner, as “any good Jewish girl” would do. I don't know where I got the courage, but I told her I was in a relationship and that it would be very dangerous for me to come over for dinner, seeing as I felt a chemistry during the interview. But Denise wasn't taking no for an answer. She said it was just a thank-you dinner, and once she had placed the food on the table, if it would make me feel more comfortable, she would give me some duct tape to use in whatever way I needed to feel safe. (When I arrived that Friday night, she'd set the table using the duct tape as a napkin ring.) I was still unsure about going until I had dinner with a former
Toronto Sun
colleague, Trish Tervit, who'd also come out, but after she'd left the paper. When I asked her what she thought, she simply said, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”

Especially mine, I thought. Here I was at a point in my life where I'd overcome tremendous hurdles, including surviving two assaults and coming out. I wasn't going to stop here.
So a mere seven weeks before my fiftieth birthday, I went for that Shabbat dinner. It started at 7 p.m. and ended at 8 a.m. the next morning, when I went home. Nothing untoward happened. Denise and I just talked all night. From that point forward, it was only a matter of time before my relationship ended with my ex. She had planned to take me on a cruise of the Greek Islands, starting in Venice, for my fiftieth birthday. Through my travel-writing connections, I had gotten us one of the best rooms on the ship, but I decided that in all good conscience I could not go. By the time my birthday rolled around, we had split. She kind of faded out of my life, sadly, after twenty years together, along with many of her family members and friends with whom I'd spent so many hours and years. It was a divorce with no assets to divide because we'd lived such separate lives, financially and, as I realized later, emotionally.

To the surprise of the politicians, friends, and family members who attended the cocktail party thrown by my parents at Toronto's old Four Seasons hotel in honour of my birthday, Denise turned up as my date. She met everyone in my life for the first time that night, handling herself in her usual bubbly and infectious manner. She'd even taken the time to go to Holt Renfrew to pick out a little black dress for my then very trim size 8 figure to wear to the party. From that day forward, Denise, who has a talent for design and decorating and who had worked in fashion before meeting me, became my advisor and guru in these realms, although her equally wonderful talents in the kitchen have cost me that size 8 figure. Despite the reservations expressed by my friends and family about my jumping from one long-term
relationship into another, I just knew that Denise was the woman I'd been waiting for all my life. I told everyone she was my fiftieth birthday present. I felt alive again. Two months after we met, Denise met me at the finish line with a bouquet of flowers following my second half marathon in Toronto, one that produced a time I will never be able to top, no doubt because of the adrenaline rush of showing off for a new love. Surprisingly, moving so quickly from one relationship to another wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I did have much to learn, however, about being open and out. Undoing twenty years of secrecy took time and patience. For the first few months, when Denise grabbed my hand as we walked along a Toronto street, I'd flinch and pull away, worried about what people would think.

The months went by and we settled into being a couple, travelling together first to Italy in March 2007 and to Israel in June. Both were reporting assignments, and Denise joined me on her own dime to visit two of her favourite destinations. We returned home from Israel just days before the 2007 Pride weekend, but at that point, the gay Pride festivities were merely something I could acknowledge more openly as someone who was finally out. We had no interest in being part of the parade. In fact, we'd been invited to two parties that day – one for Pride and another to celebrate Canada Day, which happened to fall that year on the same day. But when a column by freelancer Dave Menzies appeared in the
Sun
on the Friday before Pride Day, I decided that was a call for me to come out publicly. Mr. Menzies took offence with the gay agenda in general, and specifically with how mainstream the gay lifestyle had become. I was so upset reading it over breakfast, I started
to weep. I decided that this wasn't so much about us going to a party and a parade. It was the point it made. Perhaps it says something that today Dave and I are good friends.

With Denise's and my editor's encouragement, I decided to write a column about my own twenty-year journey of living in and subsequently coming out of the closet. The column ran on Pride Day 2007. Denise, as bubbly and outgoing as she is, is at heart a private person. But she understood the need to make a strong statement about coming out after so many years of living a lie. And I had a “public voice” that perhaps could help others dealing with the same issues. The day before the column ran, I phoned my parents to warn them. I told my mother I felt I needed to do it for all kinds of reasons. My parents took the news well. In fact, on the Sunday morning when the column appeared (the
Sun
staff neglected to let me know that my picture and a headline would be on the paper's front page) my father called to say he hadn't choked on his English muffin seeing it in print. The response was overwhelmingly positive – I was inundated with e-mails, starting with a lovely one at 5 a.m. from John Tory. Buoyed by the outpouring of support, I decided unambiguously that I'd spent all too many years hiding who I was. I would not base my entire identity on being gay, but from that day forward, I resolved to write about my lifestyle and advocate for others still afraid to come out of the closet, if and when the opportunity presented itself. I certainly felt there weren't, and still aren't, enough journalists prepared to be public about it – even those embracing the left side of the political spectrum. I also felt, and continue to feel, it is important to show that the
Sun –
despite the bad rap it regularly gets from the left-wing media elitists – has no problem with me being out and open about my views.