Bill Morrow
Bill Morrow was born in 1932 and grew up in a fundamentalist community in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. He knew he was different by age four. In school he was bullied as sissy, fat and four-eyed. When he turned 14, he confessed his same sex attraction to his minister. He was told to come to church so they could “pray the gay away” but he did not show up. Instead, he says, he fired God.
He worked at Riverview mental hospital and Oakalla prison when he could have been locked up there for being gay. Bill worked as a teacher, nurse and social worker when he would have been fired immediately if he had not lived in the closet. He had a single female friend. They pretended to be dating to appear socially acceptable. He tried what we now call conversion therapy with a psychiatrist. It did not work. He began to question his long held internal homophobia.
Bill came out of the closet at the age of 54 when he moved to Vancouver. Because he was a nurse and worked in home care, by the 1980s Bill was able to care for gay men with AIDS without fear. He found a queer community by joining Quirk-e in 2007 and healed through writing honestly about his life.
His work appears in Quirk-e’s first 7 volumes. He loved attending QMUNITY Seniors events and sharing his stories with younger and older queers. Bill reclaimed his spirituality by being active in the SGI Buddhist Pride Group and joined them at Pride parades and festivals. Although he had no siblings, partner or children, Bill lived the 20 years of his retirement with chosen queer family in their beautiful purple house called Spud Palace.
He expressed his joy and wit by making a nude self-portrait at age 81 in the same pose he was photographed as an infant. When his health declined, he told the openly queer hospital staff how delighted he was that things had changed since the time when he worked there. Bill lived to the age of 84. His Buddhist memorial in 2017 at Britannia Community Centre was attended by 90 friends. Each friend took away a memento from his teddy bear collection. Bill said, “My second childhood was so much better than my first!”
