GLR November-December 2024

ileostomy, followed by six months of rehab and a couple of life or-death moments. They threw my dentures out at one of the rehab places, so I lived for a year without them, and the anti-re jection drugs rejected the new ones. I was to attend a ceremony where I would get the Order of Ontario, a medal given by the province, and it turned out to be the night the Covid lockdowns were declared. I went to the ceremony with no teeth! But I just felt like: This is who I am, and people will have to deal with it. And then I think going through that and having worked with enough people who have different disabilities, I realized my sit uation was nothing compared to someone who has to go through it every day. While I was recuperating in hospital, I couldn’t think in longer chapters, only in terms of brief stories. That’s why the book is organized that way. MH: You’re frank about your health in the book, the kidney transplant, HIV, diabetes. What was the most difficult thing about writing this book? SB : I wrote it with an old friend, Jami Bernard. I didn’t want to have a sensationalist book. I mean, even my flings with Keith Haring and Edward Albee are barely mentioned. I tried to skate between delivering a Wikipedia entry and a tell-all book and find a new way to relay my story. As for being upfront about my HIV status, it wasn’t an issue for me. I’d had dialy sis for seven years before the kidney transplant, and when I was traveling all over the world and getting dialysis in other coun tries, the first thing I would mention was my HIV status. I had a fear that certain countries wouldn’t allow me to do dialysis because of it, which did happen on a couple of occasions. I’ve been very active with AIDS organizations in New York and Canada since 1983. MH: I love what filmmaker Atom Egoyan says in the intro duction: he likens being interviewed by you to analysis. I know you’ve interviewed a lot of people—how do you prepare? How do you decide what approach to take in the questioning? SB : I’m not interested in their celebrity per se, but in what they do with it. And, in some cases, why don’t they do more with it. I try to get at the heart of why they chose to do what they did. Sometimes we all do things for the money, but that does not de fine who we are. I do as much research as possible and try to ask questions that are not commonly asked. I do appreciate getting to know people on a different level; sometimes it comes across, and sometimes you have to sell a magazine, so you ask the kind of questions that help you sell a magazine. MH: In the book you report that you had a run-in with Joan Rivers. What was that all about? SB : I had known Joan from different occasions and through sev eral friends. And like everyone else, I loved Joan at one point, until I realized how toxic her humor could be. The falling out began when we hired her to do a gala for one of the largest and most prominent queer community centers in the world, The 519 [in Toronto]. She was so insecure, she even insisted that we pull an opening act offstage, saying: “Get that bitch off stage, she’s stealing my thunder.” She also told a joke about survivors of AIDS, saying I bet you didn’t know you were going to survive: “What are you going to do now without all the money you spent recklessly on hookers and drugs?” It was so offensive. Her rou 24

tine about Liz Taylor was so tired. Yes, Liz had put on weight, but people forget about her intense health issues. She broke her back several times, had a brain tumor, had both hips replaced. But for many in the audience, Joan Rivers’ jokes about fat wouldn’t just be directed at Liz Taylor; they were personal, no matter what health issue you’ve had or which drug you needed to stay alive. MH: This is the first book that lists the author’s pronouns (he/him) on the cover. Why was that important for you? SB : For me, it was a just courtesy that I didn’t have to think about. I was shocked to learn it had never been done before. You know, I still get letters, even from people I’ve worked with, addressed to “Ms. Salah Bachir.” Salah isn’t such a common name, so mix-ups can happen, but it’s liberating and empower ing to be able to tell the world exactly how you want to be ad dressed and how you identify. MH: You worked in journalism for many years. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty distressed by the state of the news media today. SB : It’s a very dangerous time as well because there are lots of stories that are manufactured propaganda and aren’t fact checked. If you’re trying to read the news, even to read an arti cle online, you can’t read it without having ten advertisements in your way. The technology means the experience has shifted. And so, you’re reading about something very serious—this morning I was reading about a mass shooting somewhere in the U.S.—and suddenly these ads were popping up for the latest movie. It’s jarring and inappropriate. Our attention spans have been shortened even further, and there’s often no historical con text to what we’re seeing or reading. I think it’s a very danger ous time. And then there’s the terrifying fact that journalists are being killed in record numbers. MH: Now that the book is out and people are reading it and you’re being interviewed about it, what has been the most grat ifying part of writing and launching the book? SB : Initially, I think people just saw it as a book about celebri ties. But when people read it, they can see it’s really about what people did with their celebrity, the extraordinary lengths they went to, how they stood up for certain things—whether it’s gay rights or human rights or another issue that was important to them. So, once people are over the initial reaction—wow, you had Marlon Brando in your backyard! Elizabeth Taylor tried on your pearls! Ella Fitzgerald cooked eggs for you!—they get into the idea that many of these people actually put their lives on the line for something they believed in. It’s about community and acceptance. How we handle race, sexual orientation, health struggles, accessibility, and belong ing. No matter how big the celebrity, we sometimes discard them like yesterday’s trash. There’s a point in the book where I describe walking with the great actress Patricia Neal on Martha’s Vineyard. She held onto my arm for dear life. I did n’t get it then—but now, with my mobility issues, I feel the same way when I hold onto my husband Jacob’s arm. A celebrity is not any different than any friend. We all have the same issues. We can’t always be “on,” unless maybe we are on something .

TheG & LR