A Dream Come True...Literally!

It's 3:30am on December 6 and I have just woken up from a terrific dream. In it, a friend calls me to tell me that I have just won a "Canada Book Award" for The MoonQuest: my first book and the first installment in my Q'ntana Trilogy of fantasy novels.

In my dream, the award is to be presented by Peter Gzowski, whose daily Morningside program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio network was for 15 years a national institution.

As I reflect back on the dream in those pre-dawn hours, I figure that it must have been symbolic. After all, Gzowski has been dead for over a decade, and I haven't been in touch with the friend who alerts me to the award for even longer.

I have had prescient dreams in the past, but they're rare...and they have generally predicted bad news. In one, I dreamt that a friend called to tell me her husband had died. A few months later, he did. In another, I dreamt that my wife had left me. Very soon after, she did. (I tell both stories in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir.) 

But most of my dreams have been more metaphor than fact. So I have no reason to treat this one as literal. Besides, there's no such thing as the Canada Book Awards. Right?

Still, I'm grateful. I'm going through powerful shifts, changes and "upgrades" these days, and the dream suggests a positive outcome. On top of that, my dream mind is remarkably considerate: To make sure I see the dream as representing current success, The MoonQuest is displayed with its new cover.

In fact, I'm so pleased with the dream that I write about it on Facebook: "There's no such thing as the Canada Book Award," I write, "but it was still a pretty cool dream to wake up to. BTW," I conclude, "had it been real, the award would have been The MoonQuest's sixth!" Then I go back to sleep with visions of Pulitzers dancing in my head.

Cut to this morning, nine days after the dream, when I receive an email from...The Canada Book Awards!

"Congratulations!" it begins. "Your book (The MoonQuest: The Q'ntana Trilogy, Book I) has been chosen as a Canada Book Award-winner!

Huh?

It turns out there is a Canada Book Award...and I really did win it!! Just like the dream said! And to return for a moment to last week's Facebook post, this Canada Book Award, being real, is The MoonQuest's sixth literary prize!

Wow!!

While I'm grateful for all my books' awards, this one is particularly sweet: The MoonQuest was birthed in Canada – just as I was!

• Find out for yourself why The MoonQuest has won, now, six awards and garnered more than 30 five-star reviews on Amazon! Get your copy today – on most Amazon sites, from select other online booksellers, from my website or from your favorite ebook store. And watch for The MoonQuest Movie, coming soon to a theater near you!

Photo of Peter Gzowski: CBC Archives

AIDS Beyond December 1: A Tribute

I thought about posting this memoir-excerpt-as-tribute on World AIDS Day earlier this week, but decided to wait. After all AIDS/HIV is with us 365 days a year, and I knew that plenty of others would be focusing on the issue on December 1.

I'm old enough to remember the first public awareness of AIDS in the gay community – first the fear and panic, then the extraordinary coming together in the face of tragic loss.

I'm also old enough to have lost too many friends to AIDS in those early years, when no one really understood what was going on or why.

One of those friends was  Roy Salonin, so important to my own coming out all those decades ago in Montreal. Today I honor Roy with this excerpt from my Acts of Surrender memoir. Wherever you are, Roy, thank you!

But I also want to honor those more fortunate than Roy, those many have not only survived but have continued to live – and live passionately – with HIV. May they always remind us to celebrate life, whatever our age and HIV status...whatever our age and health status. And may they always inspire us to make this the last generation to have to know AIDS.

Gay and Jewish

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir © Mark David Gerson

One evening in 1975, with my mother and stepfather safely out and my bedroom door firmly shut, I again dialed the number for Gay Montreal. This time, I forced myself to stay on the line.

“Good evening, Gay Montreal,” a pleasant male voice answered.

“I-I think I’m gay,” I stammered after saying nothing for what seemed decades but was likely little more than a breath.

Charles was a pro, expertly navigating me through my fears, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone and inviting me in for a counseling session.

Next afternoon, freshly showered and looking my twenty-year-old best, I walked into the Peel Street greystone that housed Gay Montreal. Compassionate and to the point, Charles looked me up and down and asked, “Are you Jewish?”

Having been born into a generation of Jews with a contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust and firsthand experience of anti-Semitism, I couldn’t help but react inwardly to Charles’s question with a genetic spark of paranoia.

Trying to wipe my upbringing from my mind, I nodded.

“Then you’ve got to meet Roy Salonin!” he exclaimed.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Roy Salonin. He runs a gay Jewish group. It’s called Naches.” He pronounced it na-kess. Charles scribbled a phone number on a scrap of paper and shoved it across the desk at me. “Call him,” he insisted.

Next I knew I was back on Peel Street, Charles having already faded into some recess of my past. Cars pushed past me up the steep hill. Crushes of McGill students swallowed me up and spit me out as they rushed to class. I was oblivious to it all. A gay Jewish group? A gay Jewish group? Called Naches? Talk about chutzpah! Naches is a Yiddish word that expresses the joy a parent only gets from children. For a moment, I wondered how much naches I would bring my mother when I told her I was gay. Only for a moment. With my next breath, I felt calmer and more alive than I had felt in months. A gay Jewish group!

For the next eight years, the group that Roy Salonin had created formed the cornerstone of my gay experience. I attended weekly meetings and became one of the group’s organizers. I demonstrated with fellow members to protest police raids on gay bars and bathhouses. I wrote provincial and national legislators on behalf of the group to press for equal rights. I manned the Naches booth at the city’s early Gay Pride celebrations. I let my name be used in articles in the Montreal Gazette and Canadian Jewish News, then sifted through the resulting answering machine messages — all ugly or obscene.

The hateful comments didn’t matter. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged and was comfortable with who I was. No one was going to take that away from me. 


Read more about my many coming out-type experiences – and much more – in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir, available on most Amazon sites, from selected other online booksellers, from my website or from your favorite ebook store.

Photos: Roy Salonin's square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt; "Peel Street Golden Square Mile 1" by abdallahh from Montréal. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.