QUEERMONTON Week of May 15, 2008, Issue #656

GET INTO BED WITH EDMONTON, EVEN WITH ALL ITS FARTS AND SNORING
TED KERR / ted@vueweekly.com

A few weeks ago I found myself alone in my boyfriend’s bed. Usually I wake up before he does or we wake up around the same time, so to find him not laying beside me was strange. I looked over at the time and it was only 5:34 am. It’s not like him to get up that early.

I got up to look for him. We usually sleep at my place so I carefully went about his house scared I would bump into something or wake up his brother. He wasn’t taking a shower, he wasn’t in the living room reading, and he wasn’t in the kitchen making breakfast. Finally I found him asleep on the small couch in his spare room. He was scrunched up and looked uncomfortable. I started to think I must have done something to make him leave the comfort of his own bed. Had I been snoring louder than usual? Talking in my sleep? Hogging the covers? Kicking? Dry humping? Farting? Suddenly I became really embarrassed by my own humanness and the fact that that I could have done something that caused him to get up and leave. I watched his chest rise and fall and felt very insecure about myself in the face of what I saw as all his perfectness.

As I walked back to bed I began thinking about how truly intimate sleeping with someone is, even more so than sex. With sex most of the time both people are under the umbrella of the moment and, be it lust or love, a lot of blind eyes are cast. But by sleeping with someone you are putting yourself in a situation where you are unconsciously being yourself. No postures to hide behind. You are vulnerable.

This thought frightened me as I began to doze back off to sleep. Was there something about me that my boyfriend discovered while I was sleeping that made him reconsider our relationship? It brought up the fear I have of being seen as a fraud—like at any moment someone is going to discover that I am not the very thing they liked about me. This very easily led me to consider any and all of my failings and wonder how I got a boyfriend in the first place, as well as to question why he stays with me. I fell asleep very sure that this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. It took everything inside of me to stay in the bed and not sneak out. I was overreacting, but I was tired and it was bringing up bigger issues.

The next thing I remember was my boyfriend crawling back into bed. Although I was awake I didn’t let him know right away. I was nervous about what he might say. Was he going to tell me how gross I was or how bad I smelled? Was he going to say maybe we shouldn’t sleep together anymore or create some “ground rules” that we would now have to follow? Was he going to suggest we take a “break?” Nope—instead the first words out of his mouth were, “I missed you.”

What? I was relieved and confused. “Why did you get up?” I asked.

“I was coughing so much I thought I might wake you up” he said.

I smiled, “I missed you too.”

I had made a mountain out of a molehill. I told him everything that ran through my head and we talked about it. I wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t perfect and there we were going through it together.

I share this story because in a way I think it illustrates how important it is for one to be comfortable in their own skin not only in terms of maintaining a relationship but also in how they are as citizens. How we interact with each other is not that different with how we interact with a city, it is all relationships.

I have been thinking a lot lately about why I stay in Edmonton. Just last week I was in Montréal and I was moved by seeing homos of different ages, sizes, colours and combinations living as gay as they want to be—and yet there was nothing inside of me that wanted to pack my bags and move away from Edmonton.

For all its farting, snoring and hogging I love Edmonton. It is my home and while it is not perfect I know that as a citizen I have an opportunity to contribute and make it better. As much as people are products of a city, a city is a product of its people. Just like a relationship with a person, making a better city takes work. It takes declaring your needs and working with others to get those needs met. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and you have to break up or move away but always if you have tried and put yourself on the line you learn something about yourself along the way.
This summer I will be travelling to Toronto, New York and Mexico City for various gay jobs, and for the first time in my adult life I won’t be going with one foot ready to leave Edmonton forever but instead with a mind open to see what qualities those cities have that I can bring to Edmonton.