Category Archives: Denmark

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No Big Deal, Uncle Roy

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(This post is from 2014) My Uncle Roy was a gay man in Denmark during a time when being gay was pretty much a death sentence, and not because of AIDS.

I don’t know a lot about his story because, sadly, he committed suicide during World War II when the Nazis not only threw Jews into concentration camps, but homosexuals too.  The Jews were made to wear yellow Star of David armbands and the gays wore pink triangles as in the photo above.

I remember in the 80’s before I moved to Victoria, I saw a theatre production in Vancouver called “Bent”, which was all about a homosexual concentration camp like that.

It was pretty disturbing. Whether my Uncle Roy killed himself to avoid being thrown into a camp, or he was afraid of being found out or simply depressed, I don’t know. He must have come to the conclusion that he didn’t have any choice but to make his exit.

My Danish cousins loved my Uncle Roy, but they didn’t know he was gay until I told them a few years back. Their parents had never mentioned it to them, but my mother had revealed Uncle Roy’s secret to my father and to me many years before.  I know she loved her older brother very much, so his death must have been devastating to her.

When I was in high school, I found out that one of my best friends was gay.  I didn’t understand too much about what that meant at the time, so I told her she’d grow out of it.

Stupid, eh?  Well, what did I know?  The fact that she was gay didn’t really bother me very much, but it did bother members of my family, who told me they didn’t want me to spend any time with her, in case I “caught” something.

It sounds silly now, but at the time I think that sentiment ran high with a lot of people.  You certainly didn’t talk about that kind of thing in high school, so my friend didn’t come out to anyone other than those closest to her. I’m sure this was the case with other gay high schoolers at the time.

My friend attempted suicide too, a couple of times, although she didn’t succeed.  She did end up with an addiction to alcohol, however, and her life spiralled downward after that.

I told a story in this blog once about a security guard that I had a mad crush on, who turned out to be gay and eventually died of AIDS. They used to say that one day everyone would know someone who died of AIDS, which turned out to be true for me.

These days AIDS is no longer an absolute death sentence, thank goodness.  There are fewer and fewer names being etched on to that memorial in Stanley Park that I was describing in the post linked above. It’s almost like nearing the end of a battle. But there still exist a war.

A part of me would like to think that things have improved and attitudes have changed since my Uncle Roy died, but of course societal change happens excruciatingly slow, especially with my generation and older.

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me to hear that same-sex marriages finally became legal in the UK a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t realize it WASN’T legal there!

It horrified me to hear the stories about the anti-gay bill in Uganda which not only makes it illegal to be gay, but they can actually impose the death penalty.  And who can forget just before the Winter Olympics earlier this year when the Russian anti-gay bill was announced;  another sign that ignorance rules. Honest to pete, can we get over it now?

I suppose I should give credit where it is due;  at least the UK DID change their laws, as some states are doing in the U.S.  And the Pope SEEMS to be less worried about homosexuality than his predecessors.  Not that I’m Catholic and have much to do with the Pope, but it’s something.

In the end, I believe that it’s my kids’ generation and younger who are the ones who are really going to change attitudes.  The local high school that my daughters attended had, according to them, lots of openly gay couples and no obvious problems because of it.  I’m sure there were those who didn’t like it, but that seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

It just wasn’t a big deal.  And that’s what needs to happen.

It has to stop being such a big deal.

As frustrated as I am with how slow progress is, I do wish my Uncle Roy could have experienced the changes that have taken place so far.

And I especially would have loved to have met him. Skål, Oncle Roy.

IJ

Godt Nytaar!

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I am three quarters Danish;  my mother was born in the tiny fishing village of Karrebeksminde on the coast of the island of Sjaelland (Sealand, if you prefer) in Denmark.  Sjaelland is also home to Denmark’s capitol, Copenhagen.  My father, as it turns out, was conceived on the high seas as my grandparents immigrated from Denmark to Canada.  He was their first child, born in Calgary, Alberta.

My parents met in Vancouver and were considered rather old when they had me;  my father was 35 and my mother 37.  As a result, I was an only child, and all through my childhood I heard about Denmark.  My parents both had Danish friends, so I remember visits between them, fat cigars smouldering, Danish delicacies like festsuppe and vienerbrod (translated literally as “feast soup” and Vienna bread or Danish pastry), and at Christmas, little Danish flags everywhere.  I remember visiting the Danish Lutheran Church in Vancouver, where I had been baptised, and its red roof and model ship hanging from the rafters, a site in pretty much every Danish Lutheran church, and I recall attending the Danish Bazaar in the church’s basement every year.  My first words were a mishmash of Danish and English, and my mother loved to brag to her family back in Denmark that I spoke that language.  I found out years later that my Danish was actually pretty much a hybrid between the two languages and my grammar was all wrong, but as a child it seemed perfectly natural to me to converse in either language.  When I first went to school, I remember being given a spelling test and asked to spell the word “milk”, which I dutifully spelled “melk” because that was the Danish spelling.  I was offended to be told that it was wrong.  How could it be wrong to spell something correctly in Danish??

Eventually, my Danish was overshadowed by English, although I kept it up in conversation with my parents over the years.  In the spring of 1970, my mother’s sister, my Aunt May came to visit us.  It was a real adventure for me to have my Aunt May, who spoke a little English but not much, staying with us for a few weeks.  We introduced her to Vancouver, where she marvelled at the skyscrapers and mountains, both unheard of in Copenhagen.  I loved to tease her at her inability to pronouce English words starting with “th” and “shr” because they came out of her mouth sounding hilarious to me!  She good naturedly went along with my teasing and we got along famously.  I didn’t know at the time that the reason my Aunt May came to visit was because my mother was dying, and this was their last chance to see each other.  When my aunt was preparing to fly back to Denmark, I was upset that my mother wouldn’t let me go with them to the airport, but of course, I know better now.

My parents were planning a trip to Denmark when my mother passed away.  In a phone conversation with my Aunt May shortly after my mother’s death, she convinced my father to rebook the trip for the following year, 1973.  And so that spring, my father and I flew to Europe, neither of us having been out of North America before.  By this time I was 15 and a real teenage brat, but we spent five weeks in the country of our heritage, travelling from Sjaelland to Lolland Falster where my grandparents were born, enjoying Copenhagen, riding bicycles and light trains and buses and visiting with everyone we could on both sides of the family.  I was able to see the house that my mother was born and grew up in, the church where my father’s parents were married and the country that I had, up to then, only imagined.  I spent my 16th birthday in a pub with my Aunt May and my Dad, which would have been unheard of here in Canada.  My Aunt ordered me a pint of beer and after that, I was blitzed!

At a dinner out one evening, we decided to have Chinese food, and I was absolutely entranced listening to the Chinese waiters speak Danish…it was utterly fascinating to me.  I was also perturbed to hear the Danes talk about “pizza”…what?  There’s no Danish word for pizza?  I bought and wore Danish clogs as my father and Aunt May and I wandered the streets of Copenhagen, visited the real Little Mermaid and enjoyed the sites and sounds.  There were beautiful castles, cobbled streets, fairgrounds, a depth of history I could barely grasp, great food and wonderful people.  When I said goodbye to my Aunt May, I was sure I would be back again some day.

As it turns out, I have not been there since, and I recently found out that my Aunt May passed away just before Christmas 2009 at the age of 95.  Many times I have had dreams about being there or flying there, but life has always found a way of distracted me from actually going.  I have kept in touch with some of my cousins, and every now and then I think about and talk about going back, perhaps with one or both of my daughters.  In the meantime, every Christmas I put Danish flags on our Christmas tree, and once every year or two I hold a smorgasborg for my good friends with traditional Danish food and lots of beer and schnapps.

My father remarried a couple of years after my mother passed away, and I inherited an unusually blended family of Danish and Chinese.  My brother, who looks more Chinese than caucasian, was told as a child by his Danish grandmother “Never forget that you’re a Viking!”  I smile, imagining this little boy who always indentified more with his Chinese roots hearing that from his grandmother.  I often tease him that I’m going to bring out the Dane in him, but I have yet to succeed :-).

In the meantime I’ve never forgotten my Danish roots, and although my mother worked very hard at speaking English without an accent and becoming a Canadian, I’m happy that she and my father gave me such a wonderful, rich culture to celebrate.

Godt Nytaar means Happy New Year. 
To all of my readers, here’s to a year full of happiness, harmony and good health!

IJ

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A Rant About Stuff

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The audio cassette greatly increased the distr...Image via WikipediaWith all the hoopla about Apple’s latest iPhone problems, I’ve been thinking about things that get re-designed or “upgraded” and end up being less than satisfactory.  And what do we do with the old ones?  Okay, some of the stuff I’m going to talk about may not seem as fancy schmancy as the iPhone 4, but IT’S MY BLOG!  Dammit.  But I really did have to stifle a laugh when I saw the disaster that became the iPhone 4.  All of that hype, all of that excitement, and all it would do is drop calls.  Yeah, put all of your attention into the appearance and these things called “apps” and “oooh, it does this! and it does that!”.  And forget that it’s supposed to be a PHONE, you idiots.

First of all, why change something that works just fine the way it is?  I spent a long time looking for a bra the other day because all a person can find these days are these foam type cups that are supposed to “smooth” out the look of your bust, I guess.  But all they do for me is make me feel like I’m a massive, over-stuffed double D.  I hate them.  And since when are subtle traces of nipples on a person’s top so disgusting or unappealing?  I mean, they’re BREASTS for pete’s sake.  They’re supposed to have nipples!!  Personally, I believe that the truth is that young women simply want to look bigger.  Of course they do.  I guess I was exemplifying exactly that when as an 11-year-old, I got a bra from my Aunt in Denmark who had never seen me and didn’t know I was flat as a pancake.  I put it on and stuffed it with Kleenex, like any girl would do, excited to have her first bra.  Two boys asked me if they could come to my house after school.  I guess it worked.

But I’m 53 now, for crying out loud.  I have no desire to lure anyone with the size of my boobs anymore.  It would be disturbing if someone wanted to come to my house after seeing me in one of those foamy bra things.  I’d be calling 9-1-1.

Well, after hours of searching I finally found what I was looking for at Sears.  The real slap in the face was that the bras that I ended up buying actually cost three times as much as those foam-stuffed things.  Hopefully they’ll last three times as long.  Things are just not made to last anymore.

For awhile now we’ve been using a crappy old microwave that my husband inherited from work because our “new” one pooped out on us after only a couple of years.  The very first microwave we got was given to us as a wedding present 26 years ago.  It lasted almost 24 years.  Stoves and fridges and washers and dryers are lucky to last 10 years, if that, anymore. 

My father calls it “built in obsolescence“.    And it makes sense, doesn’t it?  Why would a company want to make ANYTHING that lasts 24 years?  That means it’s going to take 24 years for them to get any more money out of you.  That goes for anything electronic.  In this case, it’s not even that they can’t make something as good as they used to.  It’s that they don’t want to.  And I won’t even go into this madness for the next “great” technology that has taken over the universe.  Holy crap, how many 2- or 3-year-old cellphones are there out there lying around unused because their owners don’t actually even care to use them for their expected (short) life spans, because the next iPhone has come along?  Sheesh!

Okay, I’m calmer now.

But where do we put all of this stuff when it stops working or suddenly doesn’t suit us anymore?  For me, it’s in the basement.  There are a couple of old TVs down there, a gazillion cassette tapes (nobody uses those anymore!), some old books of my Dad’s, wires, boxes of boxes, two space heaters that barely lasted two years each, two fans, same thing, a dead coffeemaker, a couple of old computers and monitors, boxes of my daughter’s stuff (hopefully they going to take it with them when they move out?), some of my brother’s stuff, and the rest I can’t remember because it’s been so long since I’ve even looked through it all.  A few years ago, I convinced my husband to spend the money to hire one of those junk hauling companies to empty out the garage and some old stuff from the basement.  I was so relieved to get rid of it all.  And then, much to my horror, it seemed only months before the basement filled up again.  How did that happen?

Tomorrow I have to go to Richmond and pick up my mother’s secretary/desk, a beautiful piece of furniture that I always loved because it was hers.  And I have no idea where I’m going to put it.   Years ago I fantasized about having that piece of furniture, and now it’s just another (rather large) thing that I don’t have room for.  I guess when I was younger, it was all about acquiring stuff.  You moved out and took your stuff with you, and when you could afford it, you bought more stuff to fill your place with.  And you dreamed about the “big” stuff like a car or a house, until you could at least afford a car loan or a mortgage.  And then you filled your new house with more stuff, until your kids came along and you had to move into a bigger house to be able to fit them and their stuff…

Okay, that’s how it happens.

But I don’t want all of these things anymore.  And having to deal with my parents’ stuff because they are at the point where they can’t take care of it and don’t have room for it leaves me (and my siblings and many others I’m sure) with this enormous pile of someone else’s stuff that I’ve never even wanted. I guess my parents didn’t plan on being stuck with so many things either.  We don’t realize when we’re younger, that the things we think we want will eventually just become the things we have to find a way to get rid of.  I put that in bold so that when I read it again later, I will remember.

How did I get on this whole rant?  Oh yes, cellphones.  Well, the last several months I’ve been at the end of my contract with my cellphone company and had nothing but offers for the “newest” and “latest” new cellphone.  Complete with another 3-year contract of course.  My old cellphone works just fine, but like all other technology geeks I am tempted by these new offers.  Except, unlike younger geeks, every time I think about a new one, I can’t think of what to do with my old one.  Nobody in my house wants it and it’s such an old model that I know for sure it isn’t going to become one of those “refurbished” ones.  This particular cell provider talks about recycling your old phone…but what do they really do with it?  I have hellish visions of poor people in third world countries working for next to nothing taking these electronic things apart and breathing in and handling horrible toxins from their components.

I call it my old cellphone, but is it really?  After three years, oddly enough it hasn’t died on me.   Crap.

IJ

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