Vancouver People with AIDS Society
Lim’s return to Vancouver afforded new creative opportunities. For example, he contributed design and art direction to local gay publications Angles and Q Magazine in 1986 and 1987. But these endeavors became secondary priorities for Lim when Reid suffered from bouts of pneumocystis pneumonia and when Reid’s HIV progressed to AIDS. As Lim became Reid’s caregiver – and, as McCaskell recounts, as the British Columbia legislature considered a proposal “to intern HIV positive people, the same way they had interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War” – the two found solace in humor and in spirituality.[1] Even when Reid was near death, Lim later told Higgins, “he could make a flower bloom across the room with his mind.”[2] Reid’s passing, at age thirty-one or thirty-two in 1988, affected Lim deeply. He arranged a tribute to Reid that showcased his late lover’s wit in Q Magazine’s 1988 “Proud Lives” AIDS memorial issue, at the time the largest such memorial in western Canada.[3] Lim also arranged a plaque for Reid in Stanley Park near their home, beginning a local tradition of dedicating park benches to the memories of PWAs.[4]
As an AIDS activist, Lim found it imperative to balance fighting for the living with the need to grieve well. In 1989, he joined a collective enlisted to reenvision Vancouver’s annual AIDS Candlelight Vigil and Memorial. The group included writer and historian James Johnstone, communications scholar Martin Laba, renowned sex educator Loree Rose, artist François Vallant, and AIDS Vancouver staffers Sean Stephenson and Eddie Matsuda and volunteer Georgeanne Cathrea. A “collective of fertile minds from different backgrounds” as Laba put it, the collective recognized that AIDS needed to be addressed on terms that were simultaneously medical, spiritual, and political, and reimagined the vigil as a more grassroots affair.[5] Where speakers’ lists had once been dominated by politicians, the new memorial sought instead to prioritize making grief public and meaningful, emphasizing the names and lives of PWAs taken before their time. “Lim brought great energy, insight, and magic to those meetings,” Johnstone reflected. “He had a great understanding of ritual and how to help move people through their grief to healing. The spirituality and format of our memorial bear Lim’s unmistakable stamp.”[6] By 1992, the crowd at the event had grown to nearly 1,000 people, an indicator of both the vigil’s moving reverence and the ghastly extent of the epidemic’s toll.[7]
Lim’s move west was also informed by a yearning to live in a city with larger Asian communities. In Vancouver, he observed, “I don’t feel so much like a tourist…. I can go to any bar and I will see a few gay Asians. I don’t feel so alone.”[8] Lim drew on ties to Vancouver’s Asian and gay communities in his work with the Vancouver PWA Society, teaching tai chi, organizing qi gong classes, and setting up a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinic for PWAs. Using his airline industry connections with Canada Customs to facilitate the importation of herbal medicines, Lim enlisted Dr. J. Z. Shen, a doctor trained in both Western medicine and TCM, to prescribe and administer them.[9] The clinic dispensed Chinese herbs – and special acupuncture treatments designed to avoid breaking the skin – to about eighty patients of diverse racial, gender, and sexual identities every Wednesday and Friday. For a time, it was the Vancouver PWA Society’s most popular program.[10] Through Vancouver PWA, Lim also helped organize the city’s Walk for AIDS, which in 1991 raised over $250,000 for AIDS service organizations.[11]
In newspaper interviews and an appearance in Fighting Chance (1990), Fung’s documentary about HIV/AIDS in Asian North America, Lim stressed TCM as a complement to Western medicine, rather than a replacement.[12] Such framing mattered at a time when understandable frustration with institutional medical indifference led some PWAs to reject the medical establishment altogether – a rejection that came with tragic, sometimes deadly consequences.[13] Lim described TCM, qi gong, and tai chi as tools for managing the symptoms and supporting the immune systems of PWA, which were often weakened both by AIDS and the medications then available to treat it. Lim also maintained his abiding sex-positivity, declaring candidly, “There’s no need to stop having sex.”[14] The fight against AIDS, he insisted, was a matter of embracing safe sex, of reimagining “how we love and live” – not of conceding even an inch to homophobic messages of sexual shame.[15]
[1] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 243.
[2] Chris Higgins, interview with the author, June 7, 2024. This image would recur in Lim’s AIDS diary.
[3] “Proud Lives,” Q, May 1988.
[4] Fighting Chance; James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author. Apr. 23, 2024; Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, interview with the author, June 3, 2024,
[5] Martin Laba, interview with the author, March 8, 2024; “What I Remember: Twenty Years of the AIDS Candlelight Memorial and Vigil,” Xtra! West, May 26, 2004, 16.
[6] “Pei Hsien Lim Poetry,” 1992-1996, Box 13, Richard Fung Fonds, The ArQuives.
[7] “Lit Candles to Mark AIDS Vigil,” West Ender, May 21, 1992, 9; “Mourning Just Part of AIDS Memorial,” Vancouver Sun, May 25, 1992, B3.
[8] “Racism and Gay Male Porn,” Rites.
[9] “AIDS Awareness… and Chinese Medicine,” Angles.
[10] “AIDS Patients Try Chinese Medication,” Vancouver Sun, Aug. 8, 1991, A1; “People of Influence: P.H. Lim,” Vancouver, Dec. 1991, 52, 56.
[11] “People of Influence,” Vancouver.
[12] Fighting Chance; “AIDS Patients Try Chinese Medication”; “People of Influence,” Vancouver, Dec. 1991. Fung’s film was part of Toronto Living with AIDS, a series that Ryan Conrad notes was, “the largest and most organized community-based effort to create audiovisual work about the AIDS crisis in Canada.” Conrad carefully retraces how Fung’s film was unfortunately targeted – for “a loving, but not explicit communal shower scene” – for censorship by Rogers Cable. See Conrad, Toronto Living with AIDS, 10.
[13] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 251-252, 262-263; Conrad, Toronto Living with AIDS, 17.
[14] Fighting Chance.
[15] “AIDS: How Health Campaigns Have Missed the Mark,” Toronto Star, Oct. 6, 1991, B1; Fighting Chance.