Salah Bachir is an-already impressive entrepreneur, philanthropist, art collector, movie industry insider, activist and more.
The business mogul got his start in 1980 when he and his brother published Videomania, Canada’s first consumer video magazine. From there, the queer trailblazer quickly learned how to use his platform and connections to help support causes in need.
The multi-hyphenated Bachir can add best-selling author to his seemingly endless resume, with the publication of his memoir First to Leave the Party: My Life with Ordinary People… Who Happen to be Famous. According to In Magazine, it’s also one of the first books – if not the first – to feature the author’s pronouns on the cover.
The memoir, which is available now, details Bachir’s life and career and all of the fascinating people he has met along the way. From Old Hollywood starlettes like Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn, to some of music’s most iconic like Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald, to Muhammad Ali, Doris Day, Céline Dion, Stephen Sondheim, to Jerry, a custodian he used to work with, everyone Bachir crossed paths with left a lasting impact, as he left on them in return.
Bachir recounts his encounters with some of the biggest names in the world as he reflects on his own life; his rise to success in business, his experiences as a gay Arab person, living through the AIDS epidemic, and becoming a philanthropist. With opening remarks from Alan Cumming and Atom Egoyan, the book offers readers an inside scoop on what famous people are really like, all while telling the life story of an inspiring and deeply caring person.
For a sneak peek of what to expect in First to Leave the Party, read an excerpt below:
k.d. lang sings at our wedding
I started to change my mind about marriage around my thirtieth birthday, although I did not actually get married until after my fiftieth. Old habits die hard.
An old married lover from New York had come back into my life and wanted to take me on the Concorde to Paris to celebrate. Nothing had ever entirely ended between us except that we still lived in different cities and he was still married. He loved me, and he also loved his wife. Anyway, long distance relationships worked best for me. It was like being on vacation. I couldn’t go with him to France on the actual date of my birthday, October 3, 1985, because I was living part-time in my parents’ basement and Mom was making my favorite dishes for my birthday dinner. Mom’s dinner ranked higher than any three-star Michelin restaurant. For a time, my parents’ basement in Rexdale was my sanctuary. I had moved back in because it was closer to my office and also helped me resist temptation—my downtown place had become a revolving door of it. I still kept an apartment with a friend but hardly ever went there.
Paris was different this time than on other trips. I was in someone else’s snack bracket, which afforded a different, more refined experience. But there was a black cloud overhead. Rock Hudson had died a few days earlier, on October 2, of AIDS-related causes. Talk of his sickness and death made it into almost every conversation. The grande dame of French cinema, Simone Signoret, had also recently died, on September 30, and France was still in shock and mourning. Her comments about husband Yves Montand’s affair with Marilyn Monroe— “Marilyn must have good taste if she was interested in my husband,” and “Chains do not hold a marriage together”—assured me that it was okay to have a mistress. Or, in my case, a mister.
At dinner one night in Paris, Mark and I ran into Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé—a loud, loving, laughing couple, unashamed to display it. The world was changing, I thought. More male couples were open about being together. And if those two could be a couple, why shouldn’t I think about it for myself ?
Yves spoke to me in French and Arabic and suddenly I didn’t feel like a hanger-on. I had never met him before, but it was one of those cases where, hey, if you’re at this person’s party then you must be worth talking to. He seemed genuinely interested, despite his reputation of being notoriously shy. He had the most beautiful skin and soft silky hair—you know, that Nice ’n Easy shampoo commercial type. His fabrics were what I bought my mother to make her dresses. Her seamstress friend took the black banded hem from inside the fabric of one of the dresses to add bands to both sleeves. Mom went along with it. In Lebanon, which was a French protectorate at one time, it was Dior and Saint Laurent who held sway.
I knew Yves suffered from depression, and a friend who was also bipolar said that he could not imagine how such a couple functioned day to day. Clearly, it was about support—having someone who supports you, whatever you are going through.
All these strands wove together and preyed on my mind, including a dinner with Mark and another friend at one of Paris’s many three-star restaurants. This Parisian friend, like Mark, was married—although I was sure he was simply gay when he was in New York and L.A. He mentioned that he had waited too long to have kids. “I should have had them when I could still lift them,” he joked. He was forty-five and athletic, but the point was not lost on me.
Which is why, on the flight home from my thirtieth birthday celebration in Paris, I decided that from then on, I needed to get serious and make it on my own. I would pay for my own trips, throw my own birthday parties, and have my own kids before my back gave out. A few years later, I got engaged. To a woman.
She was someone I knew—and that our families knew—from neighboring villages in Lebanon, and I really did love her. Her name was Daad, the same name as my favorite aunt. We had glorious times together and got along famously, but for me it was all about wanting to have children. I had a four-carat diamond ring made from one of my designs and I stopped in Paris along the way to pick up some Saint Laurent and Chanel jewelry and accessories.
We got engaged during Christmas and set the date of our wedding for July 14, Bastille Day—which, in retrospect, was ominous. Almost everyone in my orbit encouraged me to go ahead and get married. Maybe it was because it was the eighties, the time of AIDS, and there were still very few options for gay men who wanted to raise a family. The only person who told me to get out, the way audiences yell at the screen during horror movies, was a closeted doctor friend. “End it right now. It’s like surgery,” he said. “It hurts at first, but it will heal day by day.”
I ignored him and went ahead with the plans. The custom in Lebanon is for the groom to pay for the bride’s dress, and I had a dress made for Daad that I’d be proud to wear myself! It was Belgian tulle with Swarovski crystals and hundreds of freshwater pearls individually sewn in. It was from the same designers who would do my Fashion Cares wedding dress.
The nuptials—with eight hundred guests, including sixty-five who would fly in from overseas—were to take place in Lebanon. The parties continued. A huge bachelor blow-out. The carousel kept going round and round, and I, though dizzy, clung to it. It was only when I set foot back in Lebanon after a weekend of wild abandon in New York that I knew it was all impossible. I couldn’t see it through, partly because it wouldn’t be fair to Daad. I had just come from partying in one of the epicenters of AIDS. It wasn’t right to assume that I was safe.
Many friends told me it was possible to do this and still enjoy my flings. Sure; I knew the scenario, but I decided I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to sneak around and have dangerous sex in parks or with a serial killer, as had happened to a friend. I also did not want to take the chance of bringing HIV home. I genuinely loved the woman but needed to stop this charade.
My fiancée was disappointed, certainly, and even said that she was still willing to go through with it, after learning I was gay. But I didn’t want to continue to lie or go have sex in some park. I have met too many men doing exactly that.
Word quickly spread between our two villages that the wedding was off. One of the bride’s male cousins from Atlanta and a female cousin from Australia stopped by my place the same night. They told me they admired my courage and asked if they could take me out for the night. Gazing at the male cousin with his dark black eyes during a slow dance, I thought I had definitely made the right choice. It was also the only fair thing to do for Daad, and for me.
Predictably, Daad’s family and village took her side, and my family and village took mine. Everyone had an opinion. Naturally, the story about my sexual leanings was circulating. I sometimes think that all the projects I did and still do there, like building a community center and a park, are a form of penance—or at least my way of apologizing. It hasn’t always gone well, though. An archbishop asked my family for help building a medical facility, and I helped them out on the condition that it accept and treat individuals with HIV. Later, it and the American University of Beirut were the only facilities to deny me dialysis because I had become HIV-positive.
When we prepared to return to Canada, my mother insisted that we bring the dress home with us. It still hangs in the closet. Well, something’s got to be in the closet! And it eventually got worn: Canadian artist Attila Richard Lukács wore it for one of Greg Gorman’s photo portraits.
In time, my mother was satisfied that someday, I would have my own children. Although I never did, and realized along the way that children aren’t necessarily for everyone, I do have a stepdaughter, and many nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews. I even have a nephew and a grandnephew with the middle name Salah. Fifteen different people call me godfather, and I never had to change a single diaper!
In the ensuing years, I fought for the right to gay marriage, even at the expense of the occasional death threat—most notably in 2005 after placing ads for marriage equality on the movie screens leased by Famous Players, a division of Viacom. I was a partner in the media division and ran day-to-day operations, and we decided to place the ads in February, the month of Valentine’s Day. It was so perfect! One of the slides in our ad said: “‘I do’ means the same thing, whether you’re straight or gay. Let your member of parliament know you support our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Another said: “Marriage is a fundamental human right, whether you’re straight or gay.”
Lovely sentiments. Followed by death threats and harassing calls. Sabre-rattling from organizations that had the words family and civil rights in their titles, although I’m not sure whose family or civil rights they felt they were protecting.
To read more, get your copy of First to Leave the Party here!