Memorials and Legacy
The loss of Lim devastated LGBTQ communities in Vancouver and Toronto at a time when funerals for loved ones lost to AIDS were all too frequent features of life for many in those cities.[1] Those who knew Lim emphasized his keen intelligence, crackling wit, gifts as a storyteller, graceful physicality, elegant sartorial style, compassion and wisdom as a friend and adviser, and profound sense of spirituality, an ethos that informed his political work and his everyday life. On September 15, 1992, MacLean, Johnstone, and Laba eulogized Lim at a funeral service at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Vancouver to a full house.[2] In lieu of flowers, Lim requested that donations be made to the Vancouver PWA Society.
In Toronto, Gay Asians Toronto and the recently established Gay Asian AIDS Project held a memorial for Lim at Woody’s bar, then a new bar on Church Street.[3] In a jointly written tribute for GAT’s newsletter, Fung, Choy, Li, Paul Cheung, Lloyd Wong, and other comrades celebrated Lim for his prolific creative and political contributions, for “marching and cheering the advances of gay and lesbian people of all ages and colours,” and for living “his life with a vivid and gentle audacity.” Invoking the Tao Te Ching, Lim’s friends reflected that he had “achieved ‘the path to serenity’ and ‘done his work and stepped back.’” And yet, they continued, “we who love Pei Lim will never entirely let him go.”[4] Lim, for his part, found ways to sustain the embrace of his loved ones, even in death. His bequest of $1,000 to Higgins – who was then starting a family – went a long way toward enabling her to buy a home. “We had like fifty cents between us and a new baby,” Higgins recalled. “Lim is a very special person. He will always be in my heart.”[5]
Traces of Lim continue to circulate in Track Two, which was brought back into circulation by Pink Triangle Press in 2011, and in Fung’s body of work, which is widely discussed in Asian North American, LGBTQ, and Caribbean academic and community spaces.[6] Excerpts from Dark Night of the Soul were published in Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry (1999), and every so often, a coveted copy of Men Loving Themselves surfaces in an online used bookstore.[7] Fung still rues the day he lent his copy to a friend who never returned it.[8] Lim’s name appears on the Vancouver AIDS Memorial in Sunset Beach West and on the Toronto AIDS memorial near the 519 Community Centre, both the products of formidable grassroots organizing efforts.[9] Fung’s 2016 film Re:Orientations, which revisits the interview subjects of Orientations (1984), includes tributes to Lim, drag performer Nito Marquez, and artist and intellectual Lloyd Wong, all lost much too young to AIDS.[10]
Lim’s friends’ loving refusal to let him go – though no easy task on their part – has also been a gift to younger generations in LGBTQ, Asian North American, and HIV-positive communities eager to find historical precedents for their own existence, to identify political and creative role models, or simply to “feel possible.”[11] Henry Koo, a public health leader who began working in AIDS services in British Columbia in the early 1990s, recalled that “As a young gay Asian trying to come out then, I was inspired by him.”[12] Many who knew Lim remarked that his work setting up a TCM Clinic for PWAs was ahead of its time, anticipating the formation of other ethnically specific AIDS service initiatives and organizations in the city by many years.[13] And Re:Orientations, which intersperses follow-up interviews with Fung’s 1984 subjects and conversations with younger generations of Toronto LGBTQ Asian artists and activists, offers further attestation of Lim’s continued reach. The film concludes with a response to Lim’s dance “Reconnaissance,” a piece titled “Shatter Whiteness” choreographed by Sze-Yang Ade-Lam of the queer multiracial ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company. As Ade-Lam reprises Lim’s struggle to discard a white mask and the rope binding their limbs, they observe that Lim’s work is “still really relevant now.” Capturing their sense of Lim, they ask, “What can you do to liberate or free yourself or shatter whiteness, if you can, and then emerge from that with a sense of self that exists outside of always being placed behind?”[14]
Lim also has a special place in “In My Day,” a recent work of theater artist and HIV activist Rick Waines, a friend of Lim’s from the Vancouver PWA Society.[15] A compelling instance of what Theodore Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz call “AIDS crisis revisitation,” or renewed interest in HIV/AIDS after a long cultural silence, the play uses the technique of verbatim drama, distilling 108 oral histories conducted for the University of Victoria’s “HIV In My Day” into a coherent dramatic narrative.[16] Jackie Haywood, another Vancouver PWA Society comrade, remarked upon the play’s debut that “decades of living during the AIDS times have come full circle in this intimate theatre surrounded by artists, academics, activists, and young dreamers of a future rising from a past that burns for many of us.”[17]
Indeed, the past still burns – and the battles in which Lim placed himself as a front-line fighter continue. For organizers and scholars interested in activism and art that flout racist hierarchies of desirability, affirm sexual freedom as open to everyone, embrace the links between sexuality and spirituality, and assert the agency of immigrants and people with HIV, there remains much more to learn from Lim’s pathbreaking work. At a time when anti-LGBTQ and anti-Asian sentiments appear to be on the rise in many corners of the globe, and as nondisclosure of HIV status remains subject to criminalization in Canada and elsewhere, it seems crucial that Lim’s defiant presence – and the irreverent joy and deep compassion he brought to struggles against racism, homophobia, and AIDS – be remembered, honored, and carried on.
[1] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 316-317.
[2] “Biography – Pa-Ph,” Box 893-E-01, BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, City of Vancouver Archives.
[3] James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author, Apr. 23, 2024; “25 Years of Woody’s,” Toronto Xtra!, Oct. 1, 2014, https://xtramagazine.com/power/25-years-of-woodys-64006.
[4] “In Loving Memory, Pei Lim,” CelebrAsian Jr., Oct. 1992.
[5] Chris Higgins, interview with the author, June 7, 2024. For more on queer family formation in Canada in the 1990s, including Higgins’ family, see Queer Nineties, directed by Nancy Nicol, (Intervention Video, 2009).
[6] See for example Kim, “Calling on Queer Asians”; Seitz, “What Do Gay Asian Men Want?”; Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto, eds., Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung, (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002); Thomas Waugh, “Good Clean Fung,” Wide Angle 20, no. 2 (Apr. 1998): 164.
[7] Andy Quan and Jim Wong-Chu, eds., Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1999).
[8] Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, interview with the author, June 3, 2024.
[9] “Vancouver AIDS Memorial,” AIDS Memorial Info, https://aidsmemorial.info/memorial/id=24/vancouver_aids_memorial.html; “Toronto AIDS Memorial,” AIDS Memorial Info, https://www.aidsmemorial.info/memorial/id=22/toronto_aids_memorial.html.
[10] Re:Orientations, directed by Richard Fung, (Charles Street Video, 2016); Conrad, Toronto Living with AIDS.
[11] Lauren Berlant, “Love, a Queer Feeling,” In Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, eds., Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 448.
[12] Henry Koo, interview with the author, May 8, 2024.
[13] Rick Waines, interview with the author, March 6, 2024; Ed Lee, interview with the author, Mar. 20, 2024; Catungal, “The Racial Politics of Precarity.”
[14] Re:Orientations.
[15] Rick Waines, “In My Day,” Zee Zee Theatre Company, https://zeezeetheatre.ca/production/in-my-day/; “HIV In My Day,” University of Victoria Libraries, https://vault.library.uvic.ca/collections/d4feeba5-d1bd-4b4c-b950-602bf93a523d.
[16] Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, “Stacked on Her Office Shelf: Stewardship and AIDS Archives,” The Centre for the New Humanities (13 Jan. 2017), https://centerforthehumanities.org/distributaries/stacked-on-her-office-shelf-stewardship-and-aids-archives; “HIV In My Day.”
[17] Jackie Haywood, “From Front Lines to Curtain,” HIV In My Day (Aug. 2022), https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/hivinmyday/from-front-line-to-curtain/.