OBITUARY: Torvald (Tom) Patterson (1964-2005)
‘All the dreams we had, I will carry on.’
The following is an excerpt from PETER DRUCKER’s obituary for Torvald Patterson, who joined the New Socialist Group shortly after it was founded in 1996.
To read other obituaries and memories of Torvald from far and wide, please visit www.newsocialist.org/torvald
Torvald had long and close ties to the Fourth International’s school, which he and I attended for the first time in the fall of 1987. The school was a place not just to learn facts or theories (though Torvald was great at absorbing facts and theories) but also to reexamine our politics and understanding of the world in a critical-minded way. Torvald and I loved it.
Torvald has been one of the few comrades from English Canada we’ve had at the school in the past 15 years. He came several times as an interpreter-a gifted and enthusiastic one. His love for languages, including sign language, was an _expression of his strong desire to communicate across boundaries. He was willing to work at it too, despite being paralyzed by bouts of depression, which got in the way of formal education or training. He was never just an interpreter of course; in the corridors and late at night he was often in the thick of political discussions. He devoted himself to participants’ practical education as well-if there were any cute guys among them, Torvald was not the man to leave their sexuality untested.
Torvald participated (both as an interpreter and speaker from the floor) in the FI’s most recent World Congress in 2003, where a long resolution on lesbian/gay liberation was adopted. It was always a struggle for him to get money together to pay for his trips. He rarely had a steady job, and at the end was surviving on the laughable income that an “advanced” capitalist state considers appropriate for someone with a disability. These difficulties prevented him from attending the first LGBT Strategy Seminar in 1998. However, he helped with the follow-up to the 2000 and 2002 seminars, particularly by managing a couple of queer left email lists. He’ll be missed on the net as well as in person; that was another way he helped people communicate across boundaries.
Queer politics was Torvald’s first and foremost political love. The Vancouver branch of Socialist Challenge, as I met it through Torvald in the late 1980s, was the only branch of the FI I know of anywhere in the world ever to be made up of a majority of gay men, organically connected to and playing a leading role in a local gay community. Though I never lived in Vancouver, I felt at home with those comrades in a way that it’s hard for a lesbian/gay person to feel fully at home in most Marxist organizations.
I always admired Torvald for intransigently sticking to the ideals of gay liberation in his own life. In hindsight I think that in the first years I knew him, when I was head-over-heels in love with him, I idealized his sex life too much. He gave a lot of sweetness and love to his sexual partners, and thanks to him I got glimpses in these last years of the warmth and affection that exists in the leather community, which is not something an outsider necessarily expects. But besides the difficulties in his relationships that his depression caused, there were forms of alienation there characteristic of the surrounding capitalist society. Torvald never became middle-aged; I can’t imagine he would have, not at heart, however long he lived. The example of his life has helped me keep on trying to sustain a queer revolutionary socialist feminist politics against the odds. I hope his memory will help sustain me in the future.
Part of why Torvald will be so badly missed is he was always happy to explain in detail the realities of Canadian society to comrades from other countries-and there are a lot of complicated details in the Marxist analysis of this medium-sized imperialist country of yours, especially for foreigners, who don’t pay all that much attention to it-but also to explain what it means being queer, or living with depression, or living with HIV/AIDS, or being into S/M, or working in the sex trade. Even revolutionary socialists were not always happy or comfortable with what Torvald had to say, not that he ever claimed to have the last word on anything. All the more reason for us to keep the discussions going and keep pushing back the frontiers of our sexual politics, even now that he’s gone.
Peter Drucker is a socialist in the Netherlands.
The title of this article is from “For a Friend,” by Jimmy Somerville, a song Torvald loved.
