Pierre Bélec

“We die bravely and well, so many of us, giving all the way to the end – and those of us left mourning hold to that and cherish it and grow from it. But dammit, the end is too soon, and children born today will never know things that might have known if the end were not so soon for so many of us. That’s my rage, that’s what my grief is for: what’s lost.”

— by Rick Bébout, 1988 from “A Queer Love Story – The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout”

My uncle, Pierre Bélec, was born in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, June 22, 1964 and grew up in Québec, Canada. He came out to his parents at the age of fifteen. His mother, my grandmother, was a little taken aback at first, but ultimately, it’s my grandfather who told her that it changed absolutely nothing and that they loved him exactly the same.

Pierre went on to Cégep to study computer sciences and arrived in Toronto in the fall of 1984 to study at UofT (Major in Linguistics, Minor in Italian).

He suspected that he was sick at the end of his last year of university. He had just started his first long-term job. My uncle was hospitalized in Québec twice. One morning he told the nurse he needed to see his parents – he passed away with his parents present that morning, March 20, 1989.

2019 marked the 30th anniversary of my uncle Pierre Bélec’s passing. Over the past few years, I have been researching and piecing together my uncle’s story. My uncle passed away before I was born but he was always present in the stories my grandparents told me growing up: I have been lucky enough to discover so many things about his life as a young gay man through pictures, documents, letters, and I was fortunate enough to reconnect with some of his close friends from Québec and Toronto and get to know my uncle through them and their stories.

On June 18, 2019 my uncle’s name was added to the AIDS Memorial in Toronto during the 35th annual AIDS Candlelight Vigil.