Vancouver Courier
for March 8, 1998

"Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice." Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

That's the epitaph over Sir Christopher Wren's tomb at St Pauls, his London masterpiece.

Vigorous to the point of vicious debate over a proposed AIDS memorial in Vancouver reminded of Wren and his great church because it too was controversial to say the least.

St Paul's came in grossly overbudget and would certainly have cost, in 17th century terms, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds. It's design didn't suit many and Wren had to agree to eliminate the dome, only to slip it back in by sleight-of-hand after it was too late to stop it.

Merchants and consumers were upset because it was financed by a coal tax which hit their pocketbooks. And on it went.

What's so fascinating about St Pauls are all the monuments within the cathedral, most of which commemorate people and events which have faded completely from memory. Indeed, there's a plaque marking where Sir Winston Churchill's catafalque rested during his State Funeral in January 1965 and recently I heard a lad in his late teens ask his father who Winston Churchill was. The father, American, wasn't quite sure!

Closer to home, on Hornby Street, signs tell us that this was "Jack Wasserman's Beat". I bet there isn't one in 50 passersby who know who Jack Wasserman was. Most monuments have almost no long term impact.

That's what's so puzzling about the fuss over the AIDS memorial proposed for Stanley Park, the Nelson Street entrance to the park or Sunset Beach. It'll soon be just another memorial.

The fuss isn't about homosexuality. Of course it isn't. Why, almost everyone opposed makes it clear that others may homophobic but not them, by golly. When they go on to complain that it's a memorial to people with nasty lifestyles, why they don't mean that to be critical of gays! Surely not!

Funny. The calls and letters I get always have the same theme. "I've nothing against queers but, dammit, why should they get a monument?" Or something similar.

Others of this "some of my best friends are" ilk go a bit further. Tolerant though they say they are, if you're not careful, you could easily confuse them with full fledged bigots. This monument is, according to their lights, part of an overall plot by the Gay Movement (whatever that might be) to infect our children with homosexuality. Presumably, after viewing it, kids will rush to find a same sex partner to play gay "doctor" with, probably on the hallowed ground of Stanley Park itself. It's part of a master plan to inculcate homosexuality into our kids. We must join God's army and strike back, starting with the AIDS Memorial.

This group has as its inspiration Jerry Falwell - who believes in a world wide Jewish conspiracy too - and his Moral Majority. One publicity seeking woman from Langley even hears the voice of God inspiring her to counsel a 16 year old single mother to disobey the law and the rest of us to rise against the spiritual rot seeping into every pore because of homosexuals and their complicit politicians. Besides being privy to the wishes of the Lord, this woman has another very important qualification which makes up for what would otherwise be a deplorable lack of any training whatsoever to preach on serious and complicated matters - why, she's a Mom!

I hate to admit this but I do have suspicions. Be kind to me now, but for some reason I detect just a teensy weensy bit of homophobia here and there.

One of my callers recently told me that he'd been a Petty Officer in the Navy (Royal I gather) and, by God, the navy knew how to handle these types - syphilis, gonorrhea, AIDS and the like. He was reluctant to elaborate but it took little imagination to visualize lashings followed, in the case of repeat offenders, by keel hauling and ultimately by a stroll on the plank.

And the faxes and email get downright nasty, usually punctuated with strong doses of biblical quotations to lace the venom. The phone calls to my producers are, if anything, worse and make clear the sort of fixations which, with the right mix of circumstances, make the terrible atrocities in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Palestine explainable.

The AIDS Memorial is, by all accounts, rather attractive. It will be privately funded and privately maintained. It recognizes the deaths of millions from a scourge which is less than 20 years old and rapidly spreading.

AIDS does indeed involve homosexuals who practice quite lawful sex unsafely. And it involves careless drug users.

But it also involves innocent partners, both homosexual and heterosexual. And receivers of Red Cross blood. And children - hundreds of thousands of them.

Of considerable importance too is the fact that many of our leaders have made it much worse by opposing education of potential victims.

Surely a caring society offers its heart to all who suffer without questioning why it happened.

Let the monument be built.