"'We don't do dark in Vancouver,' says Chilean-born writer Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco of his adopted city. 'We do running and dieting and fleece.

"'But you just need to have good nails to scratch the surface. Underneath all the propaganda about Vancouver being a livable city and the home to the 2010 Olympics is the dark side: crystal meth, heroin and poverty.'

"Ibáñez-Carrasco isn't afraid of the dark. In his 2002 novel Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers and his 2004 story collection Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando, he writes of illness and AIDS, drugs and drag queens, power games and rough trade, homophobia, racism and heartache.

"It isn't easy stuff. 'I know my work will never be read to a child as a bedtime story,' he says. His work swells with an extravagant political rage that harkens back to the early years of the AIDS crisis, the very time that Ibáñez-Carrasco says his sensibility as a writer was being formed.

"In 1985, six months after he arrived in Canada at the age of 22, Ibáñez-Carrasco was diagnosed as HIV-positive. His immigration and diagnosis, he says, 'have everything to do with everything I've done since.'

"'I was young, I had an illness with a great stigma attached to it and I had an accent. It was like being in the middle of a war. It was such a rich landscape and such an interesting place to be. I don't mean to make light of it, but I was motivated to capture it. That specific situation and time.'

"Like so many other queer and trans people from places where their desire and identity is illegal or widely condemned, he arrived in Canada as what he calls 'a sexual exile.'

"'We see it all the time now,' he says. 'Gay migration and HIV refugees. People come here for better medication and a chance to explore their sexuality.'

"In between earning his doctorate in education at Simon Fraser University, Ibáñez-Carrasco wrote for political magazines like Borderlines, Angles, and Diseased Pariah News and hesitantly put down roots in Vancouver, where he currently works as a researcher at the BC Persons With AIDS Society.

"'I struggle with Vancouver, which feeds my writing. It still is very much a Victorian city. Twenty years ago, it didn't seem like a city at all. Vancouver hasn't always given me what I wanted, but it's always given me what I needed. If I had gone east to New York, I would have ended up hooked on drugs or dead. Instead, I stayed and got the best medical care in the world. I got educated. I have a partner. So I feel a little guilty when I criticize it. I'm such a Catholic!'

"It's not surprising that in this religious guilt, a souvenir from his Chilean childhood, Ibáñez-Carrasco found another rich territory to mine. His writing is full of themes of blood, repentance, sacrifice and sin.

"'Catholicism is a fertile, perverted landscape. All the corruption and pageantry and liberation and repression, the sin and atonement. All these men living the lie of purity and celibacy. And all of it is sex, sex, sex! Think about it. Every day, around the world, priests, so-called celibate men, transform a piece of bread into the flesh and then eat it. It's such crazy shit.'

"His latest obsession is velocity. 'Everything moves so fast. It's like cell phones. Everyone is connected but no one is talking about anything of substance. We have instant access to sex, food, drugs. We have Viagra and crystal meth, but are we happier?'

"When asked to define his idea of true liberation, sexual and otherwise, he pauses. 'It would be being at ease with one's self,' he says. 'It's about having time. It would be being able to slow down. Speed is deadly for sexuality. Maybe I'm just a Luddite of sex,' he laughs.

"'After Queer As Folk and the legalization of gay marriage, we've bought the illusion of freedom. But there's still so much to do. We're still afraid; we still want to fit in. I see 45-year-old men working out to maintain their perfect bodies and then going out to the clubs all night and taking drugs and I think, 'Where's the liberation in that?'"

—Rachel Giese,
Xtra