Time has blunted our awareness of the impact of AIDS. When I told my well-informed young adult daughter a few days ago that Vancouver artist Joe Average had died, she didn’t recognize the name. I said he created the image of distressed tulips on our dining room wall.
That, of course, is a minor detail. Joe Average was a critical public face in Vancouver of a disease that devastated the gay community, at a time when most prominent gay people were still closeted.
It’s too easy to forget. Gay people could not marry. They did not enjoy the rights of being family. When the very first mysterious cases of AIDS emerged in 1981, homosexuality had been legal in Canada for just 12 years. I remember my dad telling me at the time that he had never known a gay person. Of course he had. They were all around him. He just didn’t know who they were.
Joe Average’s abundant kindness and hope have been widely recounted since his death on Christmas Eve. Back then, we really needed it. Society’s ideas about homosexuality were littered with straw figures. As AIDS emerged, many people were afraid to shake the hand of a gay person. Without open conversations with real people, understanding can be hard to find.
When Joe Average was diagnosed with AIDS 40 years ago, the disease was considered a death sentence. He was 27. Three years later, “the doctor told me that I should consider getting my affairs in order, and that I probably had six months to live,” he told CBC last year.
Joe Average was unemployed. But people admired the doodles in his notebooks, so he decided to commit his remaining months on Earth to art. There would be no what-ifs.
Soon after, when the landmark XI International AIDS Conference came to Vancouver, Joe was in an unlikely way its most public face. He created the conference’s visual brand. The “One World, One Hope” image, with its bold simplification, open eyes and big lips, was a unique and approachable image of community and love. “It’s the way I want to see the world,” he said to CBC. “Just happy and bright and colourful and without confusion.”
Vancouver knew then who Joe Average was. The 1996 AIDS conference marked a global turning point in treatment — the introduction of protease inhibitors. For those who could afford the drugs, AIDS soon became a serious but chronic disease. Yet there was still enormous need. Joe Average donated his art to fill empty plates, and to find beds for the homeless. Always. Through the generosity that was in his bones, he became an icon of Vancouver’s gay community.

Kindness is again in short supply. Straw figures are increasingly central to civic conversation. Perhaps that’s part of the reason that Joe Average, although he never went away, enjoyed a bit of a resurgence these last few years.
There were a couple of coins, and a postage stamp. In 2021, “One World, One Hope” was recreated as a mural on Helmcken House, a social housing building on Granville Street. Joe was named to the Order of British Columbia.
Early in December, he launched a new website. A documentary was in the works.
Twelve days before he died, Joe Average flew to Ottawa to receive the Order of Canada from Gov. Gen. Mary Simon. He had come full circle. Before “One World, One Hope,” he was one of 50 Canadians invited by Gov. Gen. Ray Hnatyshyn and his wife Gerda to meet Princess Diana, because of an AIDS awareness poster he had made.
On Joe Average’s Facebook page, under his given name Brock Tebbutt, he recounted the trip with absolute joy. I knew Joe Average best through that page. It’s a trove of the first order. His stories of kindness in chance encounters with strangers, his love of others, his appreciation at being buoyed up by the affection of his community were a perfect antidote to all the junk that Facebook dishes out. He got a lot of likes.
He created this legacy in the face of enormous adversity. Childhood bullying and abuse, illness caused by the medications that kept him alive, the struggle to make ends meet, the fading vision that lately kept him from making art.
Longtime friend Elaine Smookler had been helping him write a memoir. “He told me that what he wanted most was to try to inspire a world of kindness, love and beauty.” She spoke to him on FaceTime the morning he died, and said he was happy.
Other conversations were darker. “He read to me from his journal and spoke of how lonely he was. He told me he only had enough money to pay for two months’ rent. He told me over and over that it was important to him that I write honestly and did not hide the difficulty that he experienced.”
We all face challenges, and how we rise to them, for ourselves and others, is the measure of us. Most of us feel that right now, right around the world. I’ll try harder to be kind. Thanks, Joe.
Donations to Helmcken House can be made through the McLaren Housing Society.
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Read more: Health, Art, Gender + Sexuality