Ejaculations from the Charm Factory

E jaculations from the

Charm Factory A MEMOIR

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E jaculations from the Charm Factory A MEMOIR

Sky Gilbert MISFIT

ECW PRESS

Copyright © ECW PRESS, 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of ECW PRESS. C A N A D I A N C A T A L O G U I N G I N P U B L I C A T I O N DATA

Gilbert, Sky Ejaculations from the charm factory A MISFIT BOOK ISBN I-55O22-432-8

i. Gilbert, Sky. 2. Dramatists, Canadian (English) — 20* century — Biography.* 3. Independent filmmakers — Canada — Biography. 4. Actors — Canada — Biography. I. Title. PS8563-I474Z53 2000 0812'.54 000-931728-7 pR<ji99.3.0524824164 2000 Cover and text design by Tania Craan Layout by Mary Bowness Cover image by David Rasmus Printed by Transcontinental Distributed in Canada by General Distribution Services and in the U.S. by LPC Group. Published by ECW PRESS 2.120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, M4E IE2 ecwpress.com The publication of Ejaculations from the Charm Factory hashas been generously supported by The Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. CanadS PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

This is the way I am Yes I'm just made this way And when I want to laugh Why then I laugh all day I love the guy that loves me So how am I to blame If the guy who loves me Is not every night the same? So that's the way I am I'm made this way you see So what more do you want? What do you want from me? The Queen of 42nd Street JACQUES PREVERT (TRANS. ERIC BENTLEY)

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Then suddenly, in the midst of some very witty dialogue, the entire cast will walk to the footlights and shout Chekhov's advice: "It would be more profitable for the farmer to raise rats for the granary than for the bourgeois to nourish the artist, who must always be occupied with the undermining institutions." The Dream life o/Balso Snell — NATHANAEL WEST

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This book is dedicated to the true Buddies in Bad Times Ken McDougall, Patsy Lang, David Pond, Edward Roy, R.M. Vaughan, and (especially) Sue Golding

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I luould like to take this opportunity to thank tiuo people luho supported me during the writing of this memoir: Michael Holmes and lanjarvis. Michael, my editor, is everything an editor should be — tactful, judicious, and incredibly sharp. This memoir would not haue been possible without him constantly nudging me to dig deeper and 'Wire proud." Ian Jaruis, my boyfriend, is my inspiration. He offered me canny aduice on countless trickycly issues. Also, I loue him.

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a mAKING bUDDIES

I write this with trepidation. Mainly, I wonder why you would want to read it. What is there about Sky Gilbert's life that's going to hold anyone's interest through a whole book? I certainly don't think my personal history is particularly fascinating to anyone but a dear friend. If this book has any value, it will be because of the important period of time onto which my life has trespassed. This memoir spans the 18 years, from 1979 to 1997, when I was Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. It was a time when my life intersected, intimately, with two worlds — theatre and sexual politics. And I was able to watch both change, gradually but fundamentally. What's so important about the period from 1979 to 1997? March 18,1979, was the closing night of the Broadway play On the Twentieth Century. This brilliant musical comedy was directed by Harold Prince, with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Cy Coleman. On the Twentieth Century was one of the wittiest, "singingest" musical comedies to be born from the hothouse of American musical theatre. It was also a gigantic box office flop. Why? Because by 1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber was developing the "mega-musical," and Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line was already on its way to becoming one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. In 1979 the tide was changing in New York theatre; intelligent lyrics, good books — talent — didn't matter anymore. Big bucks did. Not coincidentally, as the brilliant librettists seemed to disappear, so did the serious playwrights. Also not coincidentally, as New York was experiencing this dumbing down of the mainstream, there was a corresponding renaissance of the avant-garde. Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, and Elizabeth LeCompte concocted astounding visions with experimental theatre companies like the Ontological Hysterical Theater and the Wooster Group. These fundamental

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changes in New York's arts scene would eventually have their effect on my professional theatre life in Toronto. And two months later in San Francisco, on May 2,1, 1979, Dan White was given a lenient sentence for a heinous cold-blooded hate crime — the murder of gay city hall supervisor Harvey Milk. Near riots ensued outside San Francisco City Hall. The murder of Milk was symptomatic of the furious backlash that accompanied the rise of gay liberation in the 'yos. From Anita Bryant's rage against homosexuals (who, she said, "eat sperm") to Toronto's bathhouse raids, the war was on. Gay liberation changed its very nature during the '8os, especially when the hatemongers were given additional ammunition by the mysterious "gay epidemic" that was to surface two years after White's sentencing. These changes had a significant effect on my work as an activist in Toronto. Through Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, these two worlds — theatre and sexual politics — intersected and sometimes merged. The most important and absolutely true thing I can tell you about that time is this: I was there. The whole thing really started in 1979.1 remember the day very clearly. I was living in a rooming house on Huron Street, in "The Annex" in downtown Toronto. I remember that there were lots of youngish people living there. One woman, who acted as a sort of housemother, was a dedicated salesperson for Amway products. I remember hearing that Amway was connected with Scientology. And that Scientologists never blinked. I remember watching to see if she ever blinked. (She did.) I remember a girl across the hall who was an aspiring country-and-western singer. And going to see her sing in a very tacky bar in Parkdale. I remember that Beverly D'Angelo lived in our rooming house before she became a big Hollywood star. And I remember spinning around my room that day. I had just discovered Patti Smith. The song was "Because the Night." It went: "Because the night belongs to lovers." I was ecstatic because I had just decided that I was a homosexual. I was spinning because I felt so happy. Free at last. How does one decide these things? Well, my very special spinning day was a long time coming. You don't just spin around like the Wicked Witch of the West and melt into a homosexual.

No, it was a torturous journey. A year before that spinning day, when I founded Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, I wasn't officially gay (though I suppose I was, unofficially). After . uating from the honours theatre program at York University in 1977,1 enrolled in the Masters program in Drama at the University of Toronto. But I dropped out in 1979, just shy of getting my degree. My last year at U of T was very frustrating. The academic world was somewhat constricting for a young gay man struggling to burst out of his sexual cocoon. Yet it was also a safe and reassuring place. For instance, I liked my classes with Robertson Davies. He was somewhat pompous, but very funny. All you had to do was accept the fact that he came from another world. Robertson Davies taught Edwardian theatre, and it was if he had been freeze-dried in that era. He was irrepressibly heterosexual and embarrassingly racist. On the first day of class he went around the room and asked everyone about their origins. He would linger a little too long on the stories told by the pretty, white, blonde-haired girls, because these were his favourites. When he came to a dear friend of mine — Forster Freed — he figured out, of course, that Forster was Jewish. "Oh, you would enjoy the plays of that great Edwardian playwright Israel Zangwill," said Professor Davies. My friend was so insulted by the implication that a Jew would only be interested in Jewish literature that he dropped the class the next day. I understood completely. Would Forster be allowed to comment on Christian plays after Davies had pigeonholed his thesis subject as "Jewish Edwardian writers"? At the end of the year, Davies made a particularly revealing anachronistic comment. It was a tradition for his wife to serve lunch on the last day of class. So there we were, sipping our soup in his "chambers," the sombre basement seminar space that usually served as our classroom; on this day a door was quietly opened and we realized it was connected to the private apartments of Davies and his Australian wife. Mrs. Davies had more personality than I had expected. While she was deftly slipping the elegant dishes in front of us, and cleaning up after us, she managed to support and occasionally critique her celebrated husband's pronouncements. Robertson Davies asked everyone what they were going to do for the summer. One of the girls said, "I've got a job as a waitress." And Davies, peering down at her through his ponderous bifocals observed, with generous Edwardian condescension, "Oh, that must be very difficult for you." The girl answered, "No,

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actually I enjoy it." Davies's wife helpfully chided him. "Oh dear, being a waitress is not the awful job these days that it used to be. Some girls quite like doing it." All of which just made me think of Bette Davis in the movie of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, acting the part of the vicious, sluttish cockney guttersnipe — probably the image in Davies's mind whenever you said the word "waitress" to him. Davies seemed to like me a lot. Of course, I wasn't a homosexual then. Since childhood I had struggled with gay feelings, scribbling endlessly in diaries, trying to quell or control my desires for men. I knew that I was able to have sex with women and I did so. Rarely. While I was at the Drama Centre at U of T, I had a very pretty girlfriend named Paula Turko, who was a Radio and Television student at Ryerson. We'd met when she was a candy girl and I was an usher at the Uptown Cinema. I loved her beauty and cheer; we had fun together. I tried to have sex with her at least twice a month, but for me it was a rather odious task. Not because of Paula, who was a wonderful partner, but because I was trying desperately to fulfil my duties as a heterosexual man without any real desire. Don't ask me why it took me 27 years to come out of the closet. I don't know. It's not even that my background was particularly strict or religious. I was, however, a very good boy. My mother tells a couple of stories which, I think, are revealing. Apparently, when I was very young my room was quite messy. My mother took me aside one day and told me to keep it clean. Well, after that discussion my room was always spotless. In fact, I insisted on keeping my room so clean it gave my mother the creeps. Soon after I was born, a sister arrived, and there was much sibling rivalry, although we get along fine now. Lydia was smarter (apparently she learned to tie her shoes before I did) and, being a very pretty little girl, she got a lot of attention. My mother found me one day, banging my head against the radiator. Of course she was alarmed. The doctor told her not to worry — I was only trying to get attention. Some might say I've been banging my head against that radiator ever since. And then there were the letters to God. As I mentioned, we were not particularly religious. We belonged to a New England Protestant sect called the "Congregationalists." The nearest my parents could come to defining the religion was to say ths.t this sect believed in allowing the congregation to have

power in running the church. Still, as a child, God was very real to me — so real that I would send him letters. I'd fashion them into little airplanes and hurl them out the window. I'm not sure what was in the letters. But I'm certain that God (if she exists) received them, and, as usual, proceeded to do whatever was necessary, regardless of my missives. I was born in Norwich, Connecticut, which is a very small town. But we moved to Buffalo, New York, when I was six because my father (who was a manager at the Travelers Insurance Company) was transferred there. In Buffalo, I was a precocious student at Harlem Road School. I was precocious at home, too, organizing the neighbourhood kids into impromptu performances that I wrote. I once gathered a whole bunch of Beatles songs and rewrote the lyrics so that they would apply to my little play, which had something to do with a witch and a frog. In Grade Six I was Mrs. Zielinkski's favourite and I was asked to write my autobiography. Because of these impromptu performances, I titled the piece "The Autobiography of a Playwright." When I was 12 and my sister was n, my parents divorced. It was a traumatic time for both of us, because we'd lived an idyllic life in a Buffalo suburb. What had been a kind of Leave It To Beaver existence suddenly turned strange. We had done a lot of figure skating in Buffalo, and my parents were quite active in the local curling club, so my mother thought that Toronto, a very popular figure skating city, would be an ideal place for us to start our new life. Perhaps I should say something at the outset about being an American in Canada. I'm still an American citizen — some Canadian immigration guy talked me out of taking Canadian citizenship years ago, saying that I have all the advantages of dual citizenship as a landed immigrant. The fact is, I talk like an American, walk like one, and think like one. If you've spent the first 12 years of your life in the USA, it's hard to leave your Americanness behind. The influence, in my case, is mainly cultural. I was brought up on American sitcoms. You might say that many Canadians are, too. The difference is this: Americans identify with their own cultural icons. Canadians, though they watch American TV, distance themselves from American stars and dare to judge them. For example, in Buffalo, everyone from my parents' generation idolized Judy Garland. When I came to Canada I heard people say things like "I find her very loud." Judy Garland, loud? In America, that's like calling the Pope a dirty old man. And I'm convinced that

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my mother — though she might deny it — modelled herself after Lucille Ball. (And not just Lucy's wacky side, but her glamorous, motherly side, too.) These people were not just characters we watched on TV or in movies; they were role models and gods. In those early expatriate days, I wore my Americanness as sort of a badge. In junior high I found myself ridiculed when I defended American politics (I was a very right-wing adolescent; my mother campaigned for Barry Goldwater). I was the "loud, argumentative American" and proud of it. I'm still loud and argumentative. And there's a huge American influence on my work. There is very little that is bucolic or ruminative about Sky Gilbert's novels and plays. My work is controversial, funny, and often makes direct or indirect reference to American cultural icons. I think this has made me a bit of a misfit on the Canadian art scene (never mind that I'm an outspoken drag queen). Or maybe it's the fact that I think what I've got to say is actually important. It seems to me that lots of people everywhere have writing or acting talent, but it's the ones who are brave enough to trumpet their speciality who get noticed. That bravery is something I learned from being an American. (That came out sounding patriotic; I didn't mean it to, honest.) It seems to me that every damn TV show and movie I watched as a kid repeated one theme and one theme only: Follow your own path! Be an individual! Open a new window, open a new door! Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, I took the one less travelled. Do you get my drift? Unfortunately, even though Americans go on and on about the importance of individualism, they're not very good at handling real individuals. That's what makes me glad I live in Canada. I followed my own path and it led me to become an outspoken homosexual and drag queen — an entity that is tolerated, I think, slightly better in Canada than the U.S. The American cultural message is contradictory, to say the least — be your own person, but don't act too strange. Go figure. But I've digressed. Suffice it to say that my mother took my sister and me to Toronto, where we could continue our schooling and be near ice rinks to pursue our figure skating careers. We joined the Granite Club and worked hard with our skating "pro," Mr. Menzies. (Figure skating stardom, however, was not in the cards for me; Mr. Menzies said I jumped like a ton of bricks.) Then we moved to Don Mills. I remember my mother mentioned that Don Mills rivalled New Rochelle, New York (where Dick Van Dyke and Mary

Tyler Moore lived in the famous sitcom), as a clean, upwardly mobile middle-class suburb. At Milneford Junior High, I became famous for being a "browner," as well as for being an American. My average was somewhere in the high 905. Also, because music had been required at my elementary school in Buffalo, I was quite proficient on the cello and far ahead of the rest of my junior high class. I used to love history classes, where I'd get into furious arguments defending the U.S. About this time, I also discovered Ayn Rand, imagining myself as Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. I started writing. At first, it was mostly journals and poetry. When I reached high school, my marks sank a bit, because I was obsessed with my own world of music, Ayn Rand, and writing. A passionate loner at age 16,1 wrote a very Ayn Randish novel about a heroic pianist who composed Rachmaninoffian music. Rachmaninoff was Rand's favourite composer, so I was devoted to him. I would listen to his second piano concerto, and then roam about the tall buildings on Don Mills Road and stand alone in the wind. In my mind, I was evoking Howard Roark's passion for architecture. It all seems a little silly to me now, but I was developing what would become a lifelong habit: searching for the inspired moment. I could feverishly call up inspired feelings by listening to my favourite music when alone. These "inspired feelings" consisted mostly of feeling misunderstood and sorry for myself. In high school there were few girlfriends. I spent most of my time alone in white shirts and pleated dress pants, dressed like a geek. It was the late '6os and kids were smoking marijuana on their lunch breaks, but I sure didn't know about it. I was conscious of having gay fantasies, but I was very ashamed of them — Ayn Rand didn't approve of homosexuals, and I knew that my family wouldn't either. Late in high school I started experiencing anxiety attacks and visited a psychiatrist for a while. Something else helped me deal with my anxious feelings. I discovered that I loved the theatre. Previously, my inspired moments were completely solitary. But one evening, while I was playing the cello for a high school production of Annie Get Your Gun, I had an epiphany — only this time it was in the presence of others. It seemed to me that being a part of this production was so enthralling that it took me far away from my adolescent anxieties and propelled me into a moment of ecstasy. I thought, This is the way I want to feel all the time. I had a very sympathetic theatre teacher, Mr. Boone, who

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encouraged me when I asked him if I should try and write a play. He acted as dramaturge. I wrote a one-act called The Mark about a peace-loving youngyoungh man who can't resist his parents' pressure to fight in the Vietnam War. The boy dies in battle, and his mother and his girlfriend have an intense climactic argument over his coffin. The play won a Simpsons Drama Festival Award (for distinctive merit) in 1972. Amazingly, the lead was played by Dan Hill, who went on to some success during the '705 as a sensitive, barefooted pop folksinger. When I knew Dan, he was a sweet and political high school student. He was straight as an arrow, but we had a lot in common. I remember some very agonized adolescent conversations in which we discussed life, death, right, wrong, and our respective futures. After we left school he invited me over to his new apartment to hear a recording of his song "Rollercoaster," which would be his first big hit. I remember telling him that, to me, it sounded just as good as Paul McCartney. As well as starring in it, Dan wrote the theme song for The Mark, called "Do The Duty (For Your Country. ..)." The success of the play made me feel like I'd found a home, a public arena into which I could bring my private, inspired moments. That place was the theatre. I was very proud of The Mark, but still very guilty about my homosexual feelings. I thought I should have a girlfriend. My psychiatrist convinced me that I could have sex with women, so I did. I started wearing jeans, and seemed to join the human race — at least tentatively. Then I was accepted into the acting program at York University. I still had an interest in music, but getting a place in the much-coveted acting program at York made me think I might have a future in the theatre. I enjoyed four years there, but I quit the acting program after two and took courses in playwrighting and theatre criticism instead. Angus Braid was a wonderful young playwrighting teacher, and he was very encouraging. Mavor Moore, the venerable veteran of Spring Thaw, also taught the craft. He was very concerned about punctuation. In my final meeting with him, he gave me some sage advice: "Write a play about a deaf girl who is sexually abused. You'll make a lot of money." He was referring, of course, to his own play, Johnny Belinda. I really had no idea if he was being funny or not. Mavor was one of those people who, as far as I'm concerned, must have been born a wise middle-aged man with a bald head and glasses. Despite his experience as a comic writer for Spring Thaw, it was always hard for me to imagine

him ever being young or saying something ironic. I decided not to take his advice — to my professional detriment, some might say. It was at York that I met Sally Clark, who would become a lifelong friend. She was a willowy blonde with a face of such Pre-Raphaelite wistfulness that it belied her sharp intelligence. I had a closer relationship with her, in some ways, than I did with my new girlfriend, Paula. Sally was a writer and a painter. At York, we took a poetry class with Irving Layton that I will never forget. Layton was as much of a character as Robertson Davies, but he was as modern and scandalous as Davies was pinched and Edwardian. Early on in the course, he generalized, provocatively, that "Women can never be poets." Since the class was made up mostly of women, the reaction was hostile. He always played the devil's advocate, so when he picked out one of my poems as "a true modern love poem," I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted. The poem, entitled "Blue Room," was not as much about being in love, really, as about my disillusionment with straight sex (though I didn't know I was disillusioned at the time). Irving, however, thought it very heterosexual and charmingly cynical. The funniest thing about that class was that Layton happened to meet his future wife, Harriet, there. She was a very pretty student, and always sat next to him. I had no idea that they were flirting. They married soon after the term ended. I asked Sally, "When did all that happen?" Sally thought I was naive. "Don't you remember that poem Harriet wrote? 'The Fire in You Inspires the Fire in Me?'" I did, vaguely. "Well, she wrote that for Layton. To seduce him." I was shocked. I didn't know how I missed it. When the opportunity came to continue my theatre studies in the MA program at the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto, I decided to put off growing up and dealing with the real world a little longer. At the Drama Centre I was considered, and provisionally accepted, as a Ph.D. candidate. The only thing that threatened to ruin the perfect picture was my impending homosexuality. Which I still wasn't quite willing to admit to. Let me make this perfectly clear: 1 wasn't a closeted practising homosexual. I wasn't cheating on my girlfriend. I had never had sex with a man. And I was monogamous with Paula. The young man who presented himself each week for class with Robertson Davies for his MA degree was well-scrubbed and scrupulously

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heterosexual. (Only last year I returned to the University of Toronto to finish my Masters degree. Jean, the accommodating secretary at the Drama Centre, remembered me from when I was 27 and in the closet. "Oh, I always remember you were such a nice boy. So polite," she said. I suppose I was.) I think that I left the Drama Centre because I was yearning to come out. I just couldn't do it there, for some reason. I had been a university student for almost eight years. For some reason, being a heterosexual was linked with university life; leaving there would mean I would have to be myself. Perhaps this notion had something to do with my frustration with theatre studies. One of the reasons for my decision was that my off-campus aspirations were competing with my academic duties. I was so busy being involved with numerous off-campus productions that I had little time for school. Since my undergraduate years at York, I had been staging small but ambitious productions in library spaces and at the 519 Church Street Community Centre with a little outfit called the Cabaret Company. A lot of these productions originated in the York Cabaret Theatre, where I had collaborated with a close-knit group of student friends to put on rather silly musicals. I remember one was called The Gold-Diggers ofip^ and another was called God Rest Ye Merry, Melvin. There were a couple of more serious endeavours, both of which involved my friend and roommate at York, Matt Walsh. There was a Brecht cabaret, which featured a huge number of Brecht/Weill songs culled from various operettas hooked together with my own libretto. There was also City Nights, a musical that featured my first gay characters. I've reread the old script and I'm amazed at how accurate these early depictions of gay life were (for a closet case, that is). Strangely, I was able to create from my imagination details about a world that I was about to enter and knew very little about. And, significantly, there was a musical called Buddies in Bad Times, which was a collection of songs by Jacques Prevert and Joseph Kosma. I was enthralled with Jacques Prevert. He was a French poet of the '305 and '405 who began as a radical surrealist. In the '405, he left that intellectual crowd, but his work always retained the unexpected fantastical images and the orgiastic rhythms of surrealism. He became a screenwriter and a "poet of the people." In fact, he's still my favourite poet. His most famous creation is probably the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis which, like his other collaborations with filmmaker Marcel Came (Quai des brumes, Le Jour se leve),

is considered a classic of French cinema. (It's a little-known fact that Prevert wrote the lyrics for the popular standard "Autumn Leaves," which also has music by Kosma.) The Prevert poem "Le concert n'a pas reussi" was translated, again by Eric Bentley, as "Buddies in Bad Times." It served as the finale of the show that Matt and I produced at what is now the Helen Gardiner Phelan Theatre at the University of Toronto in 1976. It goes, as far as I can remember, like this: Buddies of mine in bad, bad times — I'm on my may! Box office receipts have been too small. It's all my fault, yes, I'm completely in the wrong. I should haue listened to you all. I should haue played "The Handsome Poodle" — that always goes doom well. But I followed my inclinationionn and later on I got depressed and sang the melancholy tale of a miserable abandoned dog. And people don't go to concerts To listen to a dog's despairing howls.1awg (That other song, about the dog pound, that number hurt us most of all!) Buddies of mine in bad times — luhen you wake up, later on once in a while think of me.

Think of a fellow who, with a smile, sings a mournful melody somewhere at night, beside the sea, and passes 'round the hat to buy something to eat something to drink.

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Buddies of mine in bad bad times — I luish you all goodnight I'm on my iuay! This song always held special meaning for me. The story of a group of itinerant musicians who are having trouble finding box office success because of their desperate need to sing the song of a "miserable abandoned dog" touched me deeply. Prevert was the poet of the poor and the French Resistance. Some find his so-called "people's poetry" of the '405 to be overly sentimental. And it is sentimental. But he is one of the few poets who match sentiment with restraint and consistency. In Prevert's image system, children/birds/lovers are good, and soldiers/teachers/old men are bad. It's a simplistic view of the world, but it is the key to all his films. I like to think it's the key to my world view, too. Matt and I had great success with the show based on Prevert's work. After the original production at the University of Toronto, we revived it at Harbourfront Theatre. Much of the acclaim was the result of Matt's talent. He was a strong, stocky, straightforward, masculine young man who loved Jack Kerouac and acting. (He invited me out to lunch recently, after many years; it turns out that he's now in the printing business and has a family.) When we were at school together, Matt was an idealistic and extremely talented young actor. I enjoyed directing him. His energy onstage was honest and the audience liked him; it made him a good leading man. Matt was very straight and I guess he thought I was, too. I was surprised to find out later that, because we were roommates at school, people assumed we were lovers. But we weren't. When I look back on that time, I try and remember what it was like to be so near, and yet so far, from being a gay man. I certainly harboured sexual fantasies about other men. I told Paula, and she, with admirable open-mindedness, informed me that I was bisexual. She said she understood. When I encountered gay theatre — which was tentatively peeking its head above ground at that time — it angered me. Two incidents stand out in my mind. Lindsay Kemp brought his internationally acclaimed production Flowers — based on the writings of Jean Genet — to Toronto Workshop Productions (which, ironically, would become the home of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

15 years later). Every theatre person in the city was going, and I considered myself ro he a budding director/writer/ actor, so I went with Paula. I remember being impressed by Lindsay Kemp's amazing physical work, as well as by his trim, muscled body. I attributed the latter reaction to my "biscxuality." 1 also remember being very angry after the production, thinking that it was basically all a load of shit. Kemp's sensibility was the opposite of mine; most of the words were transformed into images, so there was almost no dialogue, whereas my own theatre work is verbal, and more cinematic in its rhythms. And Kemp's actors moved incredibly slowly — it was as if they were making their way through water. Paula and I had a good laugh after the show; we left our seats in slow motion, creating a bit of a scene in the audience, giggling and mocking what we saw as the intellectual pretensions and incredible larghetto seriousness of the production. I told friends that 1 enjoyed the play — grudgingly. My contemporaries were amazed by my arrogant dismissal of Kemp's genius. But was I dismissing his talent or mocking him in order to quell my own sexual insecurities? I also went with my friend Danny Zanbilowic?, ro see a Theatre Second Floor production called Jekyll Play Hyde, directed by Paul Bettis. Danny wass a close heterosexual friend from Angus Braid's playwrighting class at York, although his friendship was one of the many I lost when I finally came out. Anyway, I don't remember much about the production except that the two male actors (one of whom, Bruce Vavrina, would later act in my play Art/Rat) were naked most of the time, writhing about on the floor. At thealorooaty yth end of the piece the room was plunged into darkness except for a disco ball. Bertis pumped up the disco music and the boys danced. Danny and I were outraged. I was shy, but Danny was particularly provocative, and went up to challenge Paul. "What was that supposed to mean?" demanded Danny. "Are you saying that life is just a disco?" Paul grinned that cat-who-ate-thc-canary smile of his and said, "Yes." Danny railed at him for a while, and 1 listened in energized silence. I hated Paul Bettis and his stupid play. Something about the lack of evident meaning combined with the semi-nude men made me furious. Danny and I ranted for hours after. Didn't the obfuscatory Mr. Bettis have a responsibility? Shouldn't such a shocking production supply meaning? I think it was the unabashed homosexual aesthetic of the production

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that angered me most of all — though I never would have admitted it at the time. Three or four years later I, too, would be producing plays that featured male nudity and confounded critics. All I can say is, beware of what infuriates you — therein lies your future. Homosexuality began to rear its ugly head in the oddest corners of my life. New friends and old ones — in a series of unrelated incidents — all pointed me towards coming out. Even my breakfast was giving me a sign. Michael Carlevale was a gay man a few years my senior who ran a restaurant on Avenue Road just north of Dupont. Paula and I lived in adjoining apartment buildings just up the road, and now and then I would go to Carlevale's for breakfast. Michael wandered up to me one day and asked, "Why don't you come here more often?" I didn't know he was gay at the time. He just seemed like a suave and handsome older man. I told him I didn't have the money for big breakfasts. "What do you do for a living?" he asked. I told him jokingly that I was a starving artist. "Oh, well, then, I give starving artists free breakfasts," he said. I got my breakfasts there for a while. I have a feeling that Michael was flirting with me; at the very least he probably knew I was gay way before I did. My friend Sally Clark suspected it, too, I think. Around this time she did a comprehensive astrological chart for me. (I'm a Sagittarius, with Leo rising.) The results were fascinating. She said, "I see men everywhere. Men are going to have s. big influence on your life. Men, men, men." I asked her if there was anything else she saw. "Just men," she said, "men and change" I was so dense, I had no idea what she was getting at. A year after she did my chart, I came out. "So that's what you were trying to tell me," I said. I worked at the Book Cellar on Yonge Street just north of St. Clair in the Delisle Plaza for a couple of years in the mid-'yos. (For a while, John Krizanc of Tamara fame worked there, too.) I was just a lowly shelf-stuffer, but one of my favourite assistant managers was a girl named Liza. I loved her platonically. She was sweet, smart, and very beautiful. Then, one day, she said her brother Sean was going to work with us for a while. Well, Sean turned out to be a slender blonde kid — sharp, and full of quirky personality. I fell for him immediately. At the time I only knew that I desperately wanted to spend time alone with him — I didn't want to think about why. I finally got up the courage to ask Sean to lunch on a brilliant summer day; we munched our

sandwiches nervously, picnicking on the grass by a church. 1 was so enamoured of him. Bur of course, I didn't make any moves, and neither did he. We met years later, at Woody's, a bar on Church Street, when we were both finally out of the closet. Sean told me he always remembered our luncheon and that he had been quite in love with me, too. In 1978 I finally met my first gay friend, who would become one of the founders of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre — Ken McDougall. We were both acting in a play called Games to Play While Waiting for the Revolution, directed by Ken Gass at the Factory Theatre. The cast was a sort of government-funded youth make-work group, and Gass's technique of collective creation made us very competitive. We each were asked to bring in some our own material on the theme of "revolution" and perform it for Gass; he created rhe play from these contributions, but also threw in some Gilbert and Sullivan excerpts. The show turned out to be four hours long and quite a hodgepodge. The purpose of the play was, I think, simply to alienate the audience, to confront them with their own complacency. Gass was discouraged when the audience responded negatively, which annoyed me: after all, how could he expect an audience to enjoy four hours of alienation, scrambled with arbitrary bits of G and S and more than a dash of tedium? But Gass was really hurt. I felt just like I did after seeing Bettis's play — I was angered by the confrontational nature of the piece. I would wrestle with this issue in the future, and I'm sorry now that, instead of dismissing Ken's efforts, I didn't learn a lesson from the experience. Much later I would produce "alienating" productions of my own and then be deeply hurt by an audience's disgust. It's an important lesson, a deep contradiction inherent in avant-garde theatre. Theatre is essentially a philistine art form because, after all, most people long to be entertained. Still, the medium attracts troublemakers like Gass (and, eventually, me) who, tempted by a vast audience of the seemingly shallow middle class, want to dump smelly shit all over their bourgeois complacency. When you do, you have to be prepared to be ignored or even reviled. Though I wasn't ready to learn this important theatrical lesson during Games to Play, 1 did get to meet Ken McDougall. In deep contrast to my other actor friend at the time, Matt Walsh, Ken was thin, effeminate, and bisexual. His girlfriend, coincidentally, was also named Paula. I wasn't so much attracted to Ken sexually as I was entranced by his personality. Once a

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dancer, then a singer, and, when I met him, a singer/actor/dancer, Ken had what seemed to me to be a devil-may-care attitude. Unlike me, he cheated on his girlfriend with men and experimented with drugs. He sought out experience, and when experiences came, he let them happen. He was enormously funny, and, compared to me, enormously relaxed. Meeting Ken and quitting school, it seemed that I had a licence to do pretty well anything I wanted. Paula and I started to have some huge fights, and I finally decided to break up with her and come out of the closet. I think I was just tired of repressing my feelings, and the heady tonic of quitting school and befriending Ken at the same time finally turned the tide. So, that fateful "spinning day" occurred, and — inspired by Patti Smith's "Because the Night" — I decided to move, with Ken, into my first "gay" place. Ken was great friends with the Nylons, an all-male a cappella singing group that burst onto the Toronto music scene in the late 'yos. Two of the Nylons lived in a two-floor walk-up on Spadina Avenue with their manager and another fellow. I don't know how to describe moving into a house full of gay men at age 27, and then gradually coming out. A description of the flat says a lot. It was at the end of a very long staircase, above a store that seemed to sell everything. At the top of the stairs was a living room with a very high ceiling. The room was decorated in what could only be described as "high Victorian whorehouse." Red, red, red, old, fantastically thick curtains, chairs encrusted with fake gold that ejaculated dust when you sat down. Above the diningroom table was a bed. Yes, a loft bed. It was for entertaining guests. Behind the loft bed was a powder room, painted black and decorated from floor to ceiling with mirrors and pictures of nude men. Over the bathroom was a stairway that led to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms, another bathroom, a den, and a kitchen. Strangely enough, it is that second bathroom that has remained most clearly in my mind. It had a window overlooking a huge deck and the walls were lined with wood panelling; it had the feeling of a sauna in Key West. To me, the whole apartment just seemed like a sex palace. I had certainly fantasized about what men did together, and this apartment seemed to be the perfect place to realize all those fantasies. Ken moved there first, and, after another one of die Nylons moved out, I moved in, too. I thought I was being very naughty living there. There was a hole in the wall that one of the guys told me was caused by somebody fuck-

ing somebody too hard against it. The guys who lived there were always talking about "the baths." They were always running around in towels and talking about their sexual experiences very frankly, and, 1 thought at the time, crudely. The flat on Spadina began to rekindle my bathhouse fantasies, although they still seemed like very jaded and cynical places to me. Dripping with a kind of pathetic convenience. It seemed sad that these attractive men were always going on endlessly about "tricking." I was new to the game, and all I wanted was to find the perfect man and fall in love. But I was titillated. For a while I thought I was in love with Ken. But basically we were sisters, not boyfriends. When we went out to bars together, Ken was the cute one and I was the ugly stepsister (I was still sporting some extra pounds and frizzy hair). Men would obsess over his slender, dark good looks and ignore me. I was quite jealous. And we were a bit too much alike in temperament to be in love. So we were more "in like." I persuaded him to have sex with me once — a new thing, because when I first came out, I had a terrible time persuading anyone to have sex with me! It was much against his better judgement and I don't think it proved anything at all except that 1 could finally say I had had sex with a man. I remember Ken was so small and thin it seemed 1 could hold his body in the palm of my hand. We were kinda the same, only different. Ken was the practical one, the realistic one, and a perfect person to give me advice on the budding Buddies in Bad limes Theatre. One day Ken and I had a fight about something. I'm sure it was something practical I'm sure Ken said, "Sky, you'd better not do that without planning it first." I was vcty dreamy and impatient and inspired; the sign I put over my door was a street sign 1 had found that said ''Inspiration Avenue." Anyway, when we had this fight, I screamed, "Fuck you, I'm leaving!" And then I slammed the door to his little room. 1 could hear Ken behind the door saying, "You'll never open that door again." At the time I was very hurt, because it seemed to me that Ken was saying, "Our relationship is over forever. The door to my heart, my soul, is forever slammed shut." His exclamation just served to spur my angry imagination and 1 left the flat on Spadina, probably to go get drunk in some bar. When I got back much later that night, Ken and Frank, the Nylons' manager, were sitting in the kitchen, staring ruefully at a tin kettle that looked like it had been through a war. "Where were you?" Ken asked. 1 told

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him I was sorry, that I shouldn't have gotten so upset, that I had left to drink off my anger. "Well, that's just fine and good," said Ken, "but do you realize you almost started a fire?" "No," I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. He pointed to the kettle. "That kettle was on the stove when you left. You slammed the door of my room so hard that it jammed shut and I couldn't get out. All the water burned out of the kettle and the kettle started to melt down. Luckily Frank came home and turned off the stove and let me out of my room." "We were all lucky," said Frank. "Very lucky." I was mortified. I was a new tenant and I felt terribly guilty. "Why didn't you let me out?" asked Ken. "I told you that the door would never open again." "Is that what you were telling me?" "What the fuck did you think I was telling you?" "I thought you meant that, uh, the door to our friendship was forever shut." "No, I was talking about the door. The actual door. I couldn't get it open." That's pretty much the difference between me and Ken. Ken meant what he said. I was a creature of emotions and metaphors; to me, every statement had twenty meanings. But Ken's practicality was important to the genesis of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, just like Matt's honesty and idealism, and the ambition of another guy — Gerard Ciccoritti. Gerry was a schoolmate of my ex-girlfriend, Paula. He was quite a bit younger than me and an avid filmmaker. I remember I was sort of attracted to him at the time. He's compact, dark, and furry, with piercing eyes and a warm Italian charm. I'm convinced that Gerry was (and is) a heterosexual, but there was always something incredibly bicurious about him. He seemed fascinated by sex, and talked about it a lot; perhaps for that reason, I found it hard to believe he was actually having it. He and his Italian lothario friends were always talking about their romantic exploits, and my friend Sally and I were always trying to separate the truth from the hyperbole. I remember a particularly close friend of Gerry's named Luciano. He was as attractive as Gerry, only in a lithe, blonde, northern Italian way. He liked to write poetry in cafes with the particular purpose of seducing very serious young women. I have no idea whether or not it actually worked, but he talked a good game. Gerry Ciccoritti is now a successful

Canadian commercial filmmaker and television director who has even tried his hand at the art-film genre with Paris, France — a movie I find as naive and curious about sex as Gerry always was. I'll always thank Gerry for introducing me to the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, which inspired two plays later in my career. I also thank him for rendering my aesthetic into one sentence. Apparently a friend showed him one of my later plays and Gerry said, "You know, Sky's writing is really all about saying 'Fuck you!' to his parents." Well, frankly, I can't think of any more admirable enterprise for a writer than rebelling against the previous generation. Anyway, when Gerry, Matt, Ken, and I talked it was a collusion of passionate ideas and ambitions. I soon told Gerry about a new play I had written about the beat poets, called Angels in Underwear. My fascination with Jacques Prevert had led me directly to the beats. Kerouac's own poetry had the innocence of Prevert (as did the undervalued gay beat poet, Frank O'Hara), with its long stream-of-consciousness lines and fantastic, unexpected images. And then, of course, there was Allen Ginsberg, who I found a little too academic for my taste. But I liked Howl— the repetition and profanity, and its shocking debut. (Strange that the guys at my new flat were freaking the hell out of me, but at the same time I fancied the idea of dramatizing poetry in order to shock other people!) Angels in Underwear was the first of many of my plays that incorporated poetry into a text, interweaving it with scenes and monologues to evoke the romance and atmosphere of a place and time. We had to find a place to perform our play. But I had only my part-time job at the Book Cellar, and, later, Classics. Matt and Gerry were working at various odd jobs and Ken was dancing and singing his way through the odd musical — and they were odd, like The Music Man at the Limelight Dinner Theatre, which Ken called "The Slimelight." None of us had any money. Where could we put on our show? Somehow we stumbled upon the Dream Factory. It was a very real place, with a very romantic name, that, for me, it lived up to. It was probably Cynthia Grant who recommended it to me. I had met her when I was putting on my little plays with the Cabaret Company. I think she was running the Helen Gardiner Phelan Theatre when it was called the uc Playhouse — we performed Buddies in Bad Times there. She was a beautiful

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blonde with a very serious demeanour and a calm, extremely measured manner. Cynthia was the artistic director of a little feminist theatre called Nightwood. She was incredibly supportive and very assertive, smart, and articulate. She was actually starting to get grants from the Ontario government for her theatre company. I couldn't believe it — money from the government to put on a play? Well, her last name was "Grant," so for a while I jokingly put her extraordinary good fortune down to that. The Dream Factory was housed in an old brewery on the north side of Queen Street just west of Sackville. (Now? Condominiums, of course.) The building was gigantic, stretching for a city block. But high up on the fourth floor in the easternmost wing, someone had created an open theatre space, lit by skylights, with high banked shag-carpet-covered boxes for seats. The Dream Factory was run by Vincent Kamberk and Ari Giverts. They were twin forces, physically alike, but aesthetically opposite. Both were curlyhaired, dark, and Semitic-looking. Very Omar Sharif. Ari was a tall, handsome young photographer. Vincent was short, odd-looking, and barrelchested. Both were "artists." Sort of. But their differences epitomized the divisions in the so-called "art" world that were to become so important in my creative life later on. Ari was an artist (after all, he made pictures — pretty sexy ones) but he was also very concerned with turning the Dream Factory into a Warholesque party palace. He had visions of celebrities making the Dream Factory a hip hangout. He was straight, but I think he liked me because he imagined I might add that touch of glamour that only fags are blessed with. (Although I wasn't very glamorous at the time, being overweight, with long curly hair, and a rather messy sense of fashion. But I was homosexual. I had had sex with Kenf)Vmcent, on the other hand, was a poet. He was also openly sexual, and really liked the ladies. He would recite his memorized stream-of-consciousness poems at the slightest provocation. I liked him and his dedication to his art. Vincent and Ari used to have these gigantic bathtub parties at the Dream Factory during which everyone got drenched. It was very '6os. Of course, this was 1979, when bodily fluids weren't considered dangerous, when getting wet was still fun. Ari and Vincent lived at the Dream Factory, and it was interesting visiting them because you never knew who they might be pushing out of bed and onto the cold Queen Street pavement. Actually, it was more like Ari to do that. Vincent picked up people and took care of them as if they were stray dogs. At the

time, to him, I was a bit like a wet, abandoned puppy (like in the lyrics to Buddies in Bad Times}. Anyway, Gerry, Matt Walsh, and I had just signed the incorporation papers for Buddies, and we went to visit Vincent and Ari one day when they were recovering from one of their bathtub parties. We fell in love with their fabulous space. Vincent said that if we didn't have any money, we could put on our play there for free. Free! It really was the Dream Factory. The mandate for the original Buddies in Bad Times was to dramatize poetry onstage. The impetus was my dedication to French surrealist and beat poetry. We rehearsed Angels in Underwear in the evenings after our day jobs. Gerry, being very European-looking, was perfect for the young Ginsberg after we got him some black glasses. Matt would play Kerouac, his idol, and Ken would play Frank O'Flara, the thin, witty, campy beat poet who lived in New York instead of San Francisco. Amanda West-Lewis, who went on to write children's books and marry Tim Wynne-Jones, was in it, too. The blueprint for the play was a lot like those of my other productions for Buddies in those early years. I was afraid of writing a script all on my own, so I kind of hid my writing between the various poets' work. My name only appeared on these early posters as "director" — 1 wouldn't take full credit as writer until the play called Racliguet. The mix of poetry and other scenes seemed to charm people. I remember that Bill Glassco came to see Angels and seemed to enjoy it. He was a good friend of the woman who later became Mart's first wife, Gay Revel 1. I suppose I should tell you something about my complicated relationship with Bill Glassco, who was the artistic director of the Tarragon Theatre in 1979. You see, his opinion meant a lot to me because I had already endured a lengthy professional relationship with him. While I was at York, I wrote a play with the unlikely title of The Rape of the Penguin. Reading that play now, it's easy to see that 1 was still recovering from an adolescent obsession with Liza Minelli's performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. The Rape of the Penguin was, in retrospect, a gay man's exploration of his feelings for (and identification with) a wacky, sexual straight woman. It was about a flaky girl named Gilda (based on a university friend, Linda) who lives with two men. One, Orson, is outgoing, while the other is a very shy man who is hiding a dark secret. Gilda

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is profane, sexual, and funny in a Sally Bowles sort of way. After a student production of the one-act play, I sent a copy to Bill Glassco at the Tarragon. I was shocked by his positive response. A meeting was scheduled. What ensued was approximately three years of meetings with Bill at his home and at the Tarragon Theatre. The experience put me off dramaturgy — and the revision process — forever. Of course, being very young and ambitious, the excitement of having a big artistic director discuss my play with him at his house was almost too much! But, oh, the revisions! The endless talks and revi sions! I did at least five drafts during the three years that I worked on the play with Bill. It expanded from a modest one act to a full-length piece and grew from a simple and, I think, charming comedy to a monolithic comedy-drama. Bill kept asking me about the serious aspects of the play and about Orson's relationship with Gilda. And about the other man's dark secret. "Clarify that!" he would say. I tried. But at a certain point, I began to think that the play was losing any of the charm it originally had, and that something weird was going on between me and my dramaturge. I'm not going to say that Bill Glassco was trying to seduce me (in fact, it might have been better if he did!). No, instead, it seemed that his homosexuality and my homosexuality were the unspoken subject of our discussions. It was as if we were discussing our homosexuality without discussing it at all. After all, we were just talking about the play — but he kept insisting that it had a deep, dark subtext that I needed to explore. I remember one of my fellow students at York cautioning me about Bill Glassco's homosexuality. "That's probably why he's interested in you. He just wants to get in your pants," he said. (Needless to say, this student was quite jealous of my association with Bill.) I want to make it very clear that Bill never came on to me. (And in a whiny, bitter-old-fag sort of way, maybe I'm just bitching about that now.) What I mean is that I needed someone to help propel me out of the closet. And I needed someone to tell me that I was repressing the gay aspects of my writing. Bill told me that I was holding sometkingba.ck, but he didn't — I think because of his own reticence — tell me exactly what. Eventually, we stopped meeting because Bill "didn't have time." He passed on The Rape of the Penguin to Bena Shuster, his assistant. She kept telling me that I had to find my "voice." Did they both know I was gay? If they did, why didn't they just tell me? It would have been traumatic, but helpful.

I have to say that my professional relationship with Glassco was a precursor to a more romantic and sexual relationship that was to happen, with another theatre director, later on. You see, because I was writing plays and starting a theatre company I really needed to get support from someone older and wiser than myself. Someone who was gay and out. Someone I could respect. I've always had a love/hate relationship with older gay men. On the one hand, their wit and wisdom excites me. On the other, I'm frightened of their bitterness and attempts to dominate. Many gay men who grew up in the '405 and 'jos encountered such enormous prejudice that it's hard for them to maintain a healthy self-image. And so often they would try and order me around! I can act pretty boyish (and girlish) at the drop of a hat, so older gay men often think I'm easily dominated. But I'm extremely independent. These contradictions make it difficult for me to have relationships of any kind with older gay guys. So, though I yearned for an older gay man to confide in, it was hard to find an out-of-the-closet gay man who was older and who I could respect. In fact I wasn't even totally out of the closet myself. I mean, I did spin around the room and tell myself I was gay. I had persuaded Ken to have sex with me. And my play Angels in Underwear did have some gay characters. But I wasn't going around telling everybody. All that began to change after Angels in Underwear. I think it was partly due to living in the gay house with Ken. And I began to become closer with Ken than with Matt. Then, eventually, Matt and Gerry left Buddies. Not before we started Rhubarb! though. Along the way, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre had collected another very talented straight writer, Fabian Boutillier. He was almost as interested in French surrealist writers as I was — he introduced me to the work of Jean Tardieu. Fabian was a small, precise man who wrote beautiful, sentimental, poetic little plays that reminded me of the work of Jacques Prevert. I think he's the one who came up with Rhubarb! as a name for our annual festival of experimental works — a festival that survives at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre to this day. Matt, Gerry, Ken, and I had decided to have a festival of new writers, thinking it would give the company more visibility and help us to meet more theatre people, and at the same time give new writers a chance. The first Rhubarb! was called, I'm embarrassed to say,

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New Faces of'79. But we quickly realized the name didn't measure up. We tossed around several ideas and then Fabian, feeling very dadaist, suggested "Rhubarb!" Why? He said that he just liked the absurdity of the word. Of course I got inspired by the idea and configured all sorts of intellectual justifications. "It could mean the noises the bit players make in a big production for crowd noise," I said. We looked it up in the dictionary and saw that it meant "to complain," which seemed appropriate somehow, too. So we had our first Rhubarb! Festival. I don't remember that much about it. I think there were about five plays, staged at the Dream Factory. I remember some of the people involved: Charlotte Freedlander, Amanda West-Lewis, Bruce Dowbiggen, and Beverly Yhap. Bruce went on to be a TV newscaster and Beverly founded Cahoots Theatre Projects, devoted to producing work by people of colour. There was also Maureen White, who was a part of the Nightwood Theatre collective with Cynthia Grant. Maureen also starred in Life Without Arnold, an early comedy of mine about a straight guy who couldn't get laid. Another detail about that first Rhubarb! at the Dream Factory: about the same time, Richard Rose and his newly formed Necessary Angel Theatre were performing a modern version of a Greek tragedy there, too. Matt and Gerry leaving the company was relatively traumatic for me. Why did they go? Well, I have to admit that I still think their sudden disappearance had something to do with my equally sudden conversion. Neither of them said that, and I know that both deny it to this day. At the time, Matt told me that Gay Revell just didn't think Buddies was going to have much of a future. And he was getting very serious about acting, which meant that he didn't have time to run a theatre company. Gerry was, of course, primarily interested in film. So, you could attribute their departure to "other interests." But I'm afraid I can't completely discount homophobia. The reason I say this is that Matt and Gerry weren't the only people who left me; I lost every single straight friend I had. The only person who stayed, and who is still my friend today, is Sally Clark, When I look back on it now I wonder how I did it. Why did I persevere? There I was, nearly 30 years old, just out of the closet, just out of school. I didn't have any money. I had no mentor, no older, wiser, more established person to lean on. My best friends had abandoned me (most likely because I was gay) and the little theatre company we had started together. Suddenly

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre was "my" company, and no one in Toronto seemed to have any interest in what I was doing. I took Paris Spleen to Clarke Rogers at Theatre Passe Muraille just before we did Angels in Underwear. Paris Spleen was based on Baudelaire's short stories, and had a short run, with Ken playing Baudelaire, upstairs at the Factory Theatre on Adelaide Street before we formed Buddies. Clarke asked me, "Why would you want to write a play about that?" I sent all my early plays to artistic directors around town, and, outside of the abortive dramaturgical fiasco with Bill Glassco, no one seemed interested in my work. I did have a blossoming friendship with the ambitious and knowledgeable Cynthia Grant, but she was still a no-account kid like me. Basically, I was doing it alone. I remember one specific dark night of the soul. I think it was during the rehearsals for Angels in Underwear. While I was trying to figure out what to do the next day in rehearsal, I found myself having an anxiety attack. Here I am, I thought, trying to motivate a bunch of actors to work on a play that hardly anybody's going to see! On top of that, the actors were working for free (none of us were paid until we started to receive government grants). Suddenly the actors terrified me. Who was / to tell them what to do? What authority did I have? As Noel Coward said, actors only have one important motivation: their paycheques. I was a nobody, doing a play about a bunch of bisexual beat poets at the Dream Factory. Why should the actors listen to me? Was I actually talented? What right did I have to call myself a playwright? Wasn't I just a fraud? I was frozen with fear. I didn't think that I could face my cast. What got me through? Well, I simply blocked out all the fear. I thought, "If you give in to the fear, then that's it. You'll have to stop. You won't be able to face them. You'll just run away and your theatre career will be over." It sounds incredibly corny to say it, but / had a dream. A dream that started many years earlier in my backyard as I ordered around the little kids in the neighbourhood, and then continued with the epiphany while I was playing the cello in a high-school production of Annie Get Your Gun. In the late '705 there was a slight possibility that the dream might become reality. I thought to myself, "You love playwrighting, you love directing. If you block out the fear, and concentrate on the joy of working, then everything will be okay." This was my work, and I loved it. Since that day, whenever I become afraid — and it's happened often

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— I've simply blocked it out. It's an either/or situation. Either soldiet on and ignore it, or just give up everything. I always chose to go on. Many years later — just before I left Buddies in 1997 — I came to a significant realization with my therapist. I told her about all my achievements at Buddies, and wept unabashedly. She was a practitioner of "narrative" therapy, which holds that people should be in charge of creating their own "stories." In other words, if a person narrates their own life, rather than letting others do it for them, they have a better chance at happiness. I realized that in all my years at Buddies, I had thought of myself as the hero of my own life. How did I manage to make myself my own hero? I don't know if it was the early encouragement I received from my parents, or supportive teachers — or just a bit of Ayn Rand still rattling around in my head — but from the time I started Buddies, it was true. And that vision kept me going. But, interestingly enough, I was still very shy in two areas. I was still pretty much of a boob as far as love and sex were concerned — Ken was my only conquest. And I still didn't have the courage to call myself a writer on publicity material. The posters always read "directed by Sky Gilbert," even though I had written all of the prose in the early poetic productions, because I wasn't brave enough yet to display my dream to the world. What if I wasn't the great writer I imagined myself to be? Then something happened. After Matt and Gerry left, I became Buddies, and Buddies became me. I invested everything I had in this little company — which was really just myself, the incorporation papers, and some wild theatrical fantasies. I found courage by identifying with the company; it was a kind of camouflage for my dream of being a writer. This early personal identification with Buddies was to have huge ramifications in the future. The company's next production was Art/Rat. I had moved from the beats to someone who might be considered a contemporary beat — Patti Smith. I was in love with Smith's poetry. She was the perennial outsider weed who grew into an awkward adult flower. I loved the anti-heroes who obsessed her: the alien, the hardhearted abstract expressionist, the rock star, and the nearsighted nerd girl. I wanted to bring these characters and her outcast sensibility to life. And I wanted to hear actors recite her profane, orgiastic poems. Punk rock was still popular, so we billed Art/Rat as a punk musical

(there wasn't much actual rock 'n' roll in the show; the music arose mostly from the rhythms of chanting her poetry). It was a series of scenes and monologues written by myself, interpolated with Smiths poetry. Ken McDougall starred along with Mary Hawkins — an intense, hauntingly beautiful, gawky girl who almost seemed to be Patti Smith herself. Ken choreographed and Matt Walsh came back to do a late-night performance of monologues by Jack Kerouac just to put Smith in the beat context. We performed the piece at Cinema Lumiere (now a paint store) at College and Spadina, right around the corner from where Ken and I lived. I felt alone after losing Gerry and Matt. And although in some ways I was ready to face the challenges myself, I was eager to find new artistic compatriots. Cynthia Grant and the other Nightwood Theatre women (Maureen White, Kim Renders, and Mary Vingoe) quickly became those theatre pals. Cynthia had been coming to see my work and I had been going to see hers, and Nightwood's work opened up a new world for me; Cynthia was much more knowledgeable about contemporary avant-garde theatre influences than I was. It's true that my background at York was completely avant-garde. The chairman, Robert Benedetti, wouldn't allow acting students like myself to perform musicals. (My lighthearted work at the York Cabaret was frowned upon.) And York brought a whole bunch of experimental dance companies up to the campus from New York City. I remember particularly the James (no, not Merce) Cunningham Dance Company because the dancers would suddenly start talking and it would seem that we were involved in a realistic family drama, except that they were still dancing. I remember seeing Joseph Chaiken and being very impressed by the physical ensemble work (unlike James Cunningham, who was very campy, Chaiken didn't seem to have a sense of humour). But by 1980, these influences were old hat — very '705. The newer New York City theatre companies were the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysterical Theater. Cynthia had been to New York City to see the Wooster Group and was a big fan of Elizabeth LeCompte. I saw two productions by the Wooster Group much later. I remember a fantastic surrealistic monologue by Lee Breuer. It involved an excruciatingly funny telephone conversation and a breathtaking moment when a curtain behind him opened to reveal a window and a real city street. But before I could see the Wooster Group for myself, I got most of my new ideas about avant-garde

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theatre from Cynthia and her close associate Richard Shoichet (his company was called AKA Performance Arts). They were always talking about "the image," about how theatre was all about images. This was very important for me, because I'm a lover of words. I had always approached theatre from a literary standpoint. My theatrical needs, up until I met Cynthia and Richard, were simple: tell a. story. My plays at that time were a bunch of little collected stories arranged around poetry. And the stories always had to be funny, smart, and dirty. I couldn't see any point in art that wasn't funny, smart, and dirty, my three favourite things. But I didn't think visually. As I worked on Art/Rat, and hung out more with Cynthia and Richard, I began to see that theatre should be made up of images, and that sometimes the images could speak more loudly than words. I began, in fact, to think that there was something dishonest or just plain wasteful about plays that didn't take advantage of the specific aspects of the theatrical medium. Until I started hanging out with Cynthia and Richard, I wrote radio plays. My new friends also made me think about breaking up narrative. And about having no narrative at all. In a way I had already discovered this idea, because, after all, poetry was the organizing factor in my plays, not plot. But then Nightwood created a very beautiful play about Alex Colville, the Canadian painter. The piece was based on a series of images from his paintings. (This play gave me the idea for one I wrote a few years later based on the paintings of David Hockney, called Life Without Muscles?) The language o. this work was pure visual poetry. Cynthia, Richard, and I decided that we could reduce our theatrical expenditures considerably if we rented a space together. We figured that if we banded together we might be able to get grant money to support our endeavours. Cynthia was the one who introduced me to the whole grant system. I was suspicious of government help, but Cynthia had some long talks with me. She explained to me a principle that today is self-evident. You see, with the lingering American Ayn Rand free-enterprise model rolling around in my brain, I still believed that my work should have to prove itself in the marketplace. I thought quality work would find its reward in large audiences, and hence large box office returns. Cynthia explained to me that my work, though of quality, was challenging. And that if I wanted to continue to produce work that challenged audiences, I should take advantage of the government funding that was available to help me when my experimental

ideas moved ahead of the audience's ability to accommodate them. I was naive; unaware that in the late 'yos most Canadian theatres were still mounting commercial productions of proven American hits or plays by an already established group of Canadian playwrights. I was trying to create new work that many might consider controversial and experimental — this was unusual and deserved support. Her reasoning made sense and I owe a lot to Cynthia for helping me see that. We decided to ask Richard Rose and his Necessary Angel Company to join us, as well as Thom Sokoloski and Theatre Autumn Leaf. Thorn was working with some very interesting actors: Mark Christmann and Dean Gilmour, who had trained with LeCoq in Paris. The six companies decided to move in together and call ourselves the Theatre Centre. We found a space that was already being considered by Richard Nieoc/ym of Actor's Lab, on the southeast corner of Broadview and Danforth on the third floor above a Greek disco. The main thing we had in common was the shared space, but between Cynthia, Richard Shoichet, and I especially there was a shared sense of the avant-garde as well. Richard Rose and Thom Sokoloski were rethinking the classics. Nieoczym had been exploring Grotowski-based work for years. (The Polish director Grotowski was certainly an icon for theatre students when I was at York, he preached asceticism and a physical theatre that was almost religious in its intensity. So did Nieoczym. But he was from another generation, and for that reason was a bit of an outsider to our group. He didn't remain part of the Theatre Centre for long.) Then, through Cynthia, I met the very first love of my life. Cynthia invited me to a party at Mike Chapman's house. Mike and Steven MacKay, both avant-garde musicians, had a little synthesizer band called Late Capitalism and were smart and supportive as hell. (They later did the soundscape for Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) I was very nervous, because I hadn't done much partying when I was straight. Imagine, a real theatre party, where I would have a chance to meet other contemporary artist types! And when I caught sight of Glenn, I was mesmerized. He was a very handsome ij-yearold boy from Vancouver who was staying with Mike and his girlfriend. Tall and slender, with a mass of dark curly hair; to me, he looked like a Greek god. On top of that he was witty and articulate. And he deigned to talk to me. That did it — I was madly in love. Glenn was my idol. I was obsessed with him. I asked a mutual girlfriend

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to find out if he would consider going out with me. I put it in a very selfdeprecating way, like "He probably wouldn't want to go out with me, would he?" I had a very bad body image. I had always been the fat little kid. I didn't think I was a very attractive homosexual, (Look at the "before and after" pictures of me. You can see that after coming out I lost weight and sported a more stylish haircut. I remember Sally asking, "What is it about turning gay that makes men suddenly turn attractive?" I didn't tell her this, but it's a necessity!) In those old photos I look very hot. But I had no idea! I thought Glenn was a perfect boy and I was an undeserving troll. Well, he did want to go out with me, and one thing led to another and we started an affair. I was in heaven. I remember thinking, "This is what love songs are all about." No, honestly, before Glenn, when I heard love songs on the radio, I tried to conjure up images of girls. But it didn't work. I couldn't understand why all the guys singing those love songs would go on and on about girls. It seemed kind of ridiculous. But when I realized the girls in those songs were Glenn, it all made sense. I wrote him hundreds of letters and he wrote back — I still have them. We wrote poems for each other. Mine were all about Glenn's beauty. Glenn's were about his ry-year-old life. His poems really were quite good. I think I was an early influence on his career — he went on to be a writer. (These days he publishes his gay stories under a pseudonym and lives with his long-term lover in Vancouver.) Somehow, I had found a guy with the same caustic, thoughtful, chatty view of the world, and he was only 17. But Glenn always said that he wasn't in love with me, although now and then he'd give me a hint that he was bluffing. And of course he didn't even live in Toronto. He was from Vancouver — and he was ready to set out on a trip to Europe! When he moved back to Vancouver I was very wounded. But I wrote furiously about him, about the hurt. He was my perfect boy, the one I came out of the closet for. Why couldn't he leave his parents in Vancouver, skip the trip to Europe, and move in with me? I wrote shelfloads of poems about Glenn. (One, "Mass in B-Flat," is in my book Digressions of a Naked Party Girl.) I also wrote a play about my feelings for Glenn, based on Frank O'Hara's poetry. I called it Lana Turner Has Collapsed! It was another collection of

poems and monologues, and again I did not credit myself as writer. Ostensibly it's the story of Frank O'Hara's life, but the play's narrative is broken up. One of its key elements is Frank's love for a boy he idolizes and who rejects him (the boy was based on Glenn, of course!). It starred Ken McDougall as Frank O'Hara, a role I wrote for him. With this Buddies production, two things changed. First, Cynthia suggested that I try to get a grant from Theatre Passe Muraille; I had a chat with Paul Thompson and they gave us $3,000 for "seed money." Secondly, this was my first "gay" production. By that I mean that this was my first production to have the word "gay" on the poster. It simply said "directed by Sky Gilbert with poetry by gay author Frank O'Hara." I thought it was very bold. We decided to be very trendy with Lana, and had a party to record witty, relevant chatter for background noise for one of the scenes in the play. We thought we were being very clever. It was my first big gay party. I had always fantasized about being popular, being a party person. But I wasn't really. Inside I was the nerd who'd been rejected by Glenn. But with Cynthia and Ken and the two musicians to support me, we went ahead and had a huge event at the fabulous Nylons flat on Spadina. We sent out invitations that said "Artparty." There was a required '6os American reading list, and certain '6os visual artists were suggested as topics for discussion. High on the list were Truman Capote, William DeKooning, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes. Straight writers like Faulkner and Hemingway were frowned upon as subjects. Mike and Steve went around with microphones and taped people's conversations. It was a great mix of people, gay and straight, all young and very arty. Punk was the thing; everyone was dressed punky. I was sporting a grey sports jacket, a colourful scarf (my gay accessory), and pointy cowboy boots. It was fun, rushing upstairs and down to fill people's drinks, and waiting to see who would climb up into the loft and end up fooling around. I don't remember much else — except that I wished Glenn was there. But strange things came out of that party. Someone attended who would have an incredible impact on my life — David Roche. Roche was a sparkling young fag about town and he also wrote for the Body Politic, Toronto's gay and lesbian liberation magazine. The Body Politic collective was a closed shop to me; they had all been out and political for years. I felt like a real outsider, an interloper, because I had come out so late.

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I envied David because he was right in the centre of the Body Politic group. We invited him to our little soiree, and I guess the party impressed him. Just think: people rolling around in the loft bed while others discussed Claude Levi-Strauss below — all of it being recorded by Mike and Steve for our play. It must have seemed pretty sexual and intellectual at the same time. After the party, David wrote an article about me in which he described the whole event. This article established, for me, a reputation that I've never quite been able to live up to. It suggested that I was doing a lot of drugs and that I was constantly surrounded by beautiful boys who desperately wanted to fuck me. Actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was just beginning to experiment with smoking dope, and I was too broken up about Glenn to seduce anyone. I know that David meant well. And the article certainly served the purpose of publicizing me and the play. But, probably because there were so few other openly gay artists in the city, I found myself, at 28, suddenly being rocketed into the position of role model for the gay and lesbian community. The truth? I was almost as ignorant about that community as a straight person. It made life awkward at times. While I was recovering from Glenn, I had a little fling with Charles Murdoch, another talented young director about town. I remember going to a party with him. Someone was doing coke. Charles was very shocked when he discovered that I didn't want any. I asked him why he would assume that I did drugs. "Oh, I just figured, after everything I'd read about you, that you would," he said. I think he was relieved to find out that my reputation was undeserved. Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing — in the gay department, or the sex department, or the drugs department. David should have known that, since I'd even awkwardly come on to him! (He refused me very nicely, of course.) Lana Turner Has Collapsed!, an homage to the New York City art scene of the '6os and to the charm and sadness in the poems of Frank O'Hara, proved to be a great success. Bill Zaget and Ken McDougall played different parts of Frank. Ken was his soul. At the end of the play he did a dance with a piece of paper. A piece of paper. It was very beautiful. I remember a wonderful moment in the play when Ken just climbed all over Micah Barnes — who was over six feet tall and a very handsome 19-year-old at the time. It was one of the amazing dancy things that Ken could do with his acting. I remember two other interesting things about the production. One was that Peter

Caldwell, a friend and sometime lover of Ken's, said to me, "You know, it's the first time I've ever gone to see a play and felt comfortable about holding my boyfriend's hand." That really meant a lot to me; it seemed to be what Buddies was all about. Also, Spalding Gray was at the Theatre Centre around that time. Before he became so famous for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, he was just another New York City performance artist, and Cynthia had seen him at the Performing Garage and snagged him for the Theatre Centre. Anyway, for some reason he came to see Lana, and seemed to enjoy it. One of my girlfriends at the time, Barbara Wright, really wanted to sleep with him. Somehow, through Cynthia, she wangled a date to come and see my show. I knew she was there with him, so the next day I called her to see if she had gotten lucky. "Oh yes," she said. "Your play made him feel very sexually insecure. He said that he was starting to question his sexuality. So I thought it was my job to reassure him that he was a real man. A real heterosexual." I thought that was very funny. My play was getting straights laid as well as gays. I made a little pact with Barbara: she could bring famous straight writers to my plays and then they would get insecure about their sexuality, and then she could fuck them so they could prove their manliness. I think we only tried it on one other straight writer, Christopher Dewdney, a couple of years later. I can't remember if it worked. After the play was over, I began obsessing about Glenn again. I used his disappearance as an excuse to discover bathhouses. I quickly became addicted. If you wonder how that could happen, think of what it must have been like for me to be in the closet for almost 30 years — only to suddenly win my heart's desire and then have him flee to Europe! Sometimes it was a very clear cause-and-effect thing. So, in order not to go crazy thinking about Glenn, I'd go to the baths. At first I couldn't believe that such places actually existed. They just didn't seem real. You walk in, get a towel, purchase a locker or room and after that it's just like a sexual grocery store. Bathhouses became such a habit that even today I have to control the urge to drop in every day. I feel happy there, even if I'm not getting laid. It's a totally gay environment. And totally sexual. It's a world where perverts hang out — by perverts I mean all those who are openly and proudly fascinated with sex. And bathhouse culture is a real society. The people who frequent them are not just neurotic closet cases. I have

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sex with the same people over and over again at the baths, sometimes as regularly as every couple of months. And old friends turn up there, so it's not just a sexual scene, but a social one, too. There are two myths about the baths. First, that only sleazy old men go there. This couldn't possibly be true, or else I would never go — my taste runs to the young and beautiful and restless! You will meet a lot of happy, sleazy men, however, both young and old. The second myth is that only the beautiful boys get laid. Wrong! Sex is very democratic. There's always something for everyone. I remember being very attracted to a dwarf once, overcoming my apprehensions, and having a wild time. (And he wasn't a troll. He was a very cute dwarf.?Actually, lots of short men have a thing for me because I'm big. I met a jockey once, when I was in drag, and we had an amazing time. Short guys are always trying to prove something, which makes them a lot of fun.) The main thing I've learned at the baths is this: tall, skinny men with receding chins always have gigantic pricks! I've learned a lot of other things, too. Over the years I've had many bathhouse adventures, two of which took place at The Romans, a lovely old bathhouse on Bay Street. (Condos now, too.) The Romans was famous for its campy and quaint pretensions. There was a palatial whirlpool on the second floor next to a white statue. The statue was pure kitsch. It recalled Michelangelo's David, only the boy was wearing a leather jacket and jeans. The Romans reminded me of American Model Guild porn movies of the '505 because the setting was so lush, but the activities were so, well, basic. The unspoken etiquette at the baths is that if you're lying in your room, you're supposed to indicate subtly whether you're interested in having sex, and how. If you lie on your front with your ass in the air, well, I think its pretty obvious what that means. If you stand up and wave your cock around, it means you want a blowjob. And if you sit on the bed and smile, like I try to do, it means you're just, well, up for a good time. Strangers come by your room and you can indicate interest in several ways. You can pull off your towel and reveal your goodies, you can smile, or even wave, or you can start jerking off. When you're not interested, you can show it discreetly: you can cover yourself up, or look away, or look down. One night a particularly unattractive guy cruised by my room (unattractive to me — he may very well have been somebody else's peachy apple).

Anyway, I tried to subtly let him know I wasn't interested, but it didn't work. I did everything. I covered myself, I looked down, I looked away, I even covered my eyes and shook my head "No." But he continued to lurk around my door. I found it very frustrating. While lying on the bed I could reach the door with my foot, so one time when he came around I stretched out my foot and slammed the door shut right in his face. Now, I never do that. I felt very ashamed afterwards. But he was being very pushy and not getting the subtle signals. Anyway, I waited for a good ten minutes and, finally, after I'd gotten over my guilt for rejecting him so brutally, I decided to open the door again. Unbelievably he was standing there, staring at me. And boy, was he mad. He said, "I'll get you for this. Don't you worry. I'll never forget this. Someday, I'll get you. You'll be standing in some bar having a drink, having a good time, and I'll get you. When you least expect it, I'll be there." And then he marched off. Jesus. I'll never forget the curse of that fat old guy in the towel. (I won't describe him in any more detail for fear that he'll read this and come after me.) The second thing that happened at The Romans was that I almost slept with Rudolph Nureyev. I know that sounds hard to believe, but it's true. One night I was lying in my room and this guy started cruising me. He wasn't really my type, which is young and slender. A short, Ukrainian-looking guy, he had lots of muscles, but other than that he looked just sort of ethnic. He kept coming by so I finally got a good look at him. I thought, "Oh my God, it's Rudolph Nureyev!" In my mind I put one of those Russian fur hats on his head and, sure enough, it looked just like him. For a minute or two, I fantasized about having sex with him. But the more I fantasized the more uncomfortable I became. I thought that if I had sex with him, all the time I'd be thinking, "Oh my God, I'm having sex with Rudolph Nureyev!" which for sure would make me lose my erection. So I did the subtle gesture to him that indicated 1 wasn't interested. To make sure that he wasn't just some run-of-the-mill ethnic-looking guy and not Nureyev, on my way out I asked the boy at the counter, "Am I going crazy, or was Rudolph Nureyev here tonight?" "Yes," the boy said, "he was." I've never forgiven myself for being such a chickenshit. Erection or no erection, I certainly could have managed. And think of the stories I could have told my grandchildren! Finally, I'll never forget one afternoon when I walked out of The

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Romans to find one of Toronto's most famous and caustic lesbian stand-up comics, Sheila Gostick, standing there. She asked, "Howya doin?" "Great," I said. "Did you have a nice time at the spa? she asked. It was just the way she said it. Very la-de-da, as if it were the most elegant place in the world. "The spaaaaa, "she said again. "Yes," I said. "I had a lovely time." "I'll bet you did." And then she rode off on her bike. I'm sure she was somewhat jealous. Lesbians are always saying that they wish they had bathhouses. I feel sorry for them (and straight people, too) that they don't. It's a lot harder to start a bathhouse for lesbians because women have very different issues around safety than men do, but I guarantee that if lesbian bathhouses were to catch on, they'd make a lot of money. Back then I didn't think of myself as promiscuous, or as a bathhouse "queen." I was just getting over Glenn, and the bathhouse was my crutch. At the time, it was fun. I used to go a couple of times a week. Later on, I would go a lot more. My bathhouse visits became obsessive and, I think, out of control. But we're not there yet. Around this time I also had my first S/M experience. At the "Artparty" I met a very strange person. I was having a discussion with Cynthia Grant when a weird guy suddenly grabbed hold of a hanging lamp in the kitchen and aimed it at our heads, back and forth, like a searchlight. It was very unnerving. He pretended that it was a TV interview and that swinging the light was part of accentuating the "performativity" of our talk. I remember thinking that the guy was an asshole and kind of scary. I asked Cynthia who he was, and she told me his name. "But who is he?" I asked. "Oh, he's a very talented musician," she said. I didn't think much of the incident. I figured I would be just as happy never to see the nutbar again. But I did. When Lana Turner Has Collapsed! had closed and I was working on another play (yet another piece about French surrealist poets called The Piano of Death), I was lonely and mooning over Glenn. So I decided to go to a University of Toronto gay gathering. I was very nervous about the whole

thing. Then I noticed a guy in a cornet nursing a beer and staring at me. I thought he was sort of cute and so I walked over and said, "Hi." It turned out to be the musician. I won't go into the details, but let's just say that we ended up at his apartment having what was my first experience of s/M sexual play. We didn't really have sex — whatever that means. But we fooled around a lot. I had the feeling it was an intellectual/sexual experience for him. He also made it very clear that he admired my work. The whole thing seemed to be about that admiration, if you can imagine. In a way, it was my first (and one of my few) sexual encounters with a "fan." I was very conflicted about what happened and kind of put it away somewhere in the back of my brain. I was excited by the stuff we did, but I also felt very guilty. I felt I was being bad and betraying Glenn by having so much fun. Also, it wasn't a "love" thing — it was just a sexual experiment. An experiment, strangely enough, with someone who was obsessed by my work. I think it was an experiment for the musician, too. As you can see, my life was changing radically. Everything happening at once. Suddenly I had a gay life. I was in love with someone (who wasn't there, but that was sort of typical, too). I had discovered the baths and S/M. And I was also experimenting with marijuana. My work was bursting onto the theatre scene. I'd become a minor celebrity. That was the weirdest part. It seemed that as soon as I lost all my friends (except for Sally) after coming out, I had suddenly conscripted a whole new bunch, mostly actors, writers, and directors. I was evolving. The review of Lana Turner Has Collapsed! \r\ the Globe and Mail was one of my first reviews in a major paper. The reviewer, Ray Conlogue, took the play seriously, but suggested that I needed a designer. That made sense, because I had designed the play myself, and I was just learning the importance of "the image." Perhaps I should take a moment here to talk about the critics. I've dreaded bringing them up. I won't say that I have a love/hate relationship with them because that would be a lie. I hate them. I suppose that over the years the hate has turned to passionate disregard.

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I don't read critics anymore — unless they rave. I know that's hypocritical. But why bother? Most of the time their opinion is just a matter of taste. But let me say this about critics — and you're going to think I'm just being nasty or sarcastic, but I'm not — most of them are not very attractive people. Most critics, if you get a close look at them (and they're careful not to give you that close look, if they can help it), are nerds. The kind of kids you used to make fun of at school. The kind of kids who have no fashion sense when they're teenagers. And most of all, the kind of adults who just can't seem to get laid. A lot of critics use their position to try and improve their pitiful sex lives, or, at the very least, their social lives. I've never understood that. I've always been very suspicious of anyone who I thought might be fucking me to get somewhere. I just don't find that a turn-on. From the very beginning of Buddies, I made a pact with myself never to sleep with any of the actors who worked for the company. And I've kept that promise. It wasn't hard. Maybe that's why the baths have always been tempting to me; since names are so rarely exchanged, I'm always sure that the person I'm having sex with isn't trying to get a job. But back to the critics. Generally they're sad, unattractive people. Occasionally they are smart. And, in the case of the mainstream critics I've had to deal with for almost 20 years, they're all straight. And almost all straight men. Think about it. The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star had enormous power over Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from the very beginning. Why so much? Because we were poor. It's all about economics, really. (Isn't everything?) We couldn't afford much advertising, and every time we got a review in the paper, we got a kind of visibility we could never buy. So the reviews were very important. During my zo-year career I had to deal with six major critics: Henry Mietkiewicz, Gina Mallet, Robert Crew, and Vit Wagner at the Toronto Star, and Ray Conlogue and Kate Taylor at the Globe and Mail. That's it. Those people, for the most part, decided whether anyone would hear about the plays at Buddies, and whether or not they would come. You can say that people are pretty independent and that they don't listen to critics, but I don't think that's entirely true. Especially when it comes to work that is not typical or mainstream. People have no idea what they're getting into, and they look to a critic to guide them. Sure, there may be a small hard-core group of fans for avant-garde work, but they don't pay the bills, even when you get grants.

How did the critics handle my plays and, later, the work of other queer artists at Buddies? In a very interesting, tactical way. And — call me a conspiracy theorist — in a way that made sure our work would never threaten the status quo. You see, when an artist writes from his or her "culture" — whether it's gay or straight, black or blue, Jewish or Arab — that position can have its advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when I was writing Luna Turner Has Collapsed! I got a lot of attention for my work (from people like David Roche and Ray Conlogue), at least partially because I was one of the only out gay theatre artists in Toronto. (There had only really been the courageous John Herbert, author of Fortune and Men's Byes before me. Actually, that's not completely true. Larry Fineberg and John Palmer are gay playwrights who had great success at Toronto Free Theatre and Factory Theatre in the 'yos. But the content of their work was not consistently gay, and the press rarely singled them out as queer. At the time, though, I'm sure it wasn't normal to see the word "gay" in the mainstream entertainment press.) Other gay writers say that they are writers first and queers second, that they don't feel the need for "labels." On the other hand, many people have accused me of positioning my work as "gay" in order to get attention. But I think that anyone who openly talks about writing from a minority position is doing a brave thing. The reason I'm willing to call myself a gay writer is that it's honest. I happen to be gay, and a writer. And it's honest in another sense; I'm interested in writing about gay subjects. People (critics, too) have spent a lot of time urging me to write about less controversial topics. When people used to ask Rachmaninoff why he was a composer, he would say, "Because I must. Because it's as natural as breathing." And I'd have to say the same thing about gay subjects. Not every gay or lesbian person has to write about gay or lesbian subjects to be a good writer or a good gay and lesbian person. But I do. I find it difficult and certainly not very rewarding to write about other topics. Unfortunately, the imagined glamour, the imagined advantage of writing from an openly gay position is simply that: a figment. What happened to me, and many other writers at Buddies, is that even though the work might get attention at first, the reviewers quickly, and very subtly, revealed their prejudices. Reviewers generally enjoyed showing off their tolerance and displaying their understanding of difficult, extreme subject matter. But as the romance

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of that tolerance wore off, they would get impatient. As Buddies became more successful, the mainstream critics became irritable. It's one thing for Ray Conlogue to discover a little play in some shithole performance space on Danforth Avenue in 1979 and parade his tolerance for gay work. It's quite another for Kate Taylor to take Moynan King's lesbian feminist play Bathory seriously when it's performed in a 35O-seat theatre with a history of government funding in 1995. Suddenly, tolerance turns to contempt. I think it corresponds completely to present-day impatience with affirmative action. It's all very nice to give black people jobs, isn't it, until they're in line for the managerial positions we want? But I'm getting ahead of myself again. Let's just say diat the early positive critical response to my work (and I did get raves) was always in a certain context. I was always praised condescendingly — critics complimented how I was, surprisingly, "rising above" my subject matter. How I was — for the first time, in their view — managing somehow to make homosexual subject matter watchable. So you can see why that might be both a compliment and a slap in the face. When I did venture out of the arena of gay playwrighting, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was not permissible for me to do so. When I adapted Anything Goes at the Shaw Festival, Robert Crew made it very clear in his scathing review that my campy, queer attitudes had no place at that venerable institution. When I wrote a play called Yankees at York (commissioned by Necessary Angel Theatre), Ray Conlogue said that when I wasn't writing about gay subject matter I had "the intellectual scope of a field mouse." On the odier hand, critics openly encouraged me to direct straight plays. When I directed Treatment, a British play about punks and violence, in the mid-'8os, Vit Wagner of the Star pondered why I didn't direct more of this type of wonderful, accessible fare instead of my own work. It was obvious to me that since I showed talent for theatre, the critics could not dismiss me. But they could try and guide that talent into a less gay area — directing, and not writing. Later, my relationship with the critics was also complicated by the fact that, as I became more known as a spokesperson about gay issues, I was asked to be a gay pundit on television and in print. And of course, today (after leaving Buddies), I often work as a journalist. In these situations, I have often revelled in the opportunity to criticize the critics. And let me tell you, though critics can be absolutely merciless in their own writing, they are

utterly thin-skinned when you criticize them. They will criticize your dick size or your flabby breasts onstage, but if you dare criticize them back, in print or on radio or TV, they get all weepy and sensitive. Once, on TV, I called Vit Wagner's review of my play Ban This Show stupid. He wrote me a very hurt letter and never forgave me. I once wrote an article suggesting that Kate Taylor had been cruel to my friend playwright Sally Clark; soon after that Taylor walked out of my play Garden Variations (which was nominated for three Doras), and trashed The Emotionalists (nominated for a Dora as best play). Critiquing the critics (it's lots of fun!) is not to be confused with the practice of writing letters to the editor about critics. Never do that. That's just playing their game. It means the critics are being read, and selling newspapers. If you're going to criticize critics, you have to do it in another forum, on ground that is their competition. My views on the critics would not be complete without mentioning Robert Wallace. Others have called him a critic, and he has worked for radio in that capacity. But Wallace is actually a playwright, academic, and cultural theorist who has written extensively about my work. He edited the first collection of my plays, This Unknown Flesh. In fact, Bob Wallace was one of the first people to acknowledge my writing. Before he published Capote at Yaddo (my play about Truman Capote) in the collection Making/Out (1992), I'd only seen one play into print: The Dressing Gown in 1989. (And I had to fight to get the Playwright's Union of Canada to publish that. For five years they rejected it, then, after I begged, pleaded, cajoled, and wrote nasty letters, they finally gave in. Why the resistance? I think it's because the work was both gay and sexual. I say that because PUC used to send my plays all over the country for opinions, and when I nagged them, they made the mistake of sending me the readers' reports. The reports said things like "I'm disgusted by this garbage.") No, Robert Wallace has been a true dramaturge for my work, and for many other artists at Buddies. He's brave enough to support queer art. His cogent analysis and encouragement behind the scenes has been a great support to myself, and others, during even the "baddest" of times. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him. But, because he doesn't regularly write for the papers, I refuse to call him a critic. Anyway, enough about critics. They just happen to be thin-skinned, sad, ugly — quite often stupid — and tolerantly intolerant, okay?

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After the Globe and Mail review, I decided to start working with a designer.hgert Again, I made the connection through Cynthia Grant. (Writing this, I realize how many early career opportunities I owe to her!) Patsy Lang, who had designed plays for Nightwood Theatre, became my best friend and theatrical collaborator. How can I describe Patsy? Well, her energy's precisely the opposite of mine. I'm excitable, passionate, impatient, and intense. Patsy's low-key (sometimes to the point of somnambulance) and has the patience of Job. At the time she dressed like a hippie chick. (This was 1980, when that was still somewhat in fashion.) In common, though, we had our artistic interests and a sense of humour. After Lana Turner Has Collapsed''Ken and I had one of our fights. We had become bitchy but affectionate fag sisters, and quite often we couldn't agree on anything theatrical. Ken was very irritated by my lack of attention to the technical details of theatre. It really irked him during Lana. The scenario went something like diis. We fought. I told him I knew exactly what I was doing — and that he should keep his nose out of my directing. Then, of course, I promptly took his advice and formed an alliance with a designer who could solve a lot of the technical details Ken had criticized me for ignoring. Which means I rejected Ken for criticizing me and then promptly went out and followed his admonitions to the letter. What can I say? Like anybody, I guess, I find it hard sometimes to hear the truth from my friends. Of course, Ken later went on to be a wonderful director; maybe this fight was part of him discovering his own voice as an artist. Our estrangement didn't last too long, when you look at the big picture — I knew Ken for almost 15 years; our fight lasted less than 12 months. Patsy temporarily replaced Ken as my artistic associate. Although she had no formal position at Buddies, she was effectively Buddies' designer in residence. Literally. You see, we moved in together in a flat on Robert Street just south of Harbord. I didn't want to live with Ken after our fight. But also, my life was becoming so gay that I didn't feel I needed the support of a gay household. I thought that instead I needed a little love and attention — which Patsy always gave me. I have a very clear image of going to buy bagels with Micah Barnes the

day we moved in. I remember being overjoyed that we could shop for bagels and real cream cheese so close by, at the Harbord Bakery. We lived right behind what was then Henry Morgentaler's abortion clinic. We used to have fun watching the strange monsters from Northern Ontario carrying signs and harassing the poor women going in for abortions. It was horrifying, really, because the anti-abortionists were like creatures from another planet. Watching them every day, it became clear that they were very sad people. Basically, the fundamentalists would ship in a new geek every week to stand in the alley behind the clinic. The men were dressed in suits, the women in flowered dresses and sweaters that only grandmas wear. But they were often young. Usually diey were clutching Bibles. The poor girls wanting abortions would try and sneak up the alley to the back entrance, but a "Christian" would soon accost them and try to engage them in an intense argument about morality. I watched the dumbshow from my bedroom window. When the girl had escaped into the clinic for her abortion, the religious freaks would continue praying and talking to themselves. The clinic was burned down eventually; I'm sure one of the fanatics did it. I've always been pro-choice and pro-feminism. I don't call myself a male feminist because I think that's another breed altogether. I'm not the type who apologizes for having a prick or being sexual. When I met Patsy, the only feminists I knew were from Nightwood Theatre. Most of them weren't really sexual (or at least, they didn't advertise that they were), so it was hard for me to be close to them. Patsy was pretty frank about her sex life, though, and we used to gossip like girlfriends. Which is, of course, essential. Through Patsy I met a whole new set of friends. Patsy was close to Micah Barnes, who was a young actor/singer at the time — so close that she used to sleep with him sometimes. And he was gay. She introduced him to Laurie Lynd, a very beautiful young man (who went on to be a major Canadian gay filmmaker), at one of her fabulous dinners at our flat, and Laurie and Micah had a brief, but serious, relationship. Patsy also knew a lot of native Canadians because she often designed productions for the Native Theatre School on Spadina. She was great friends with Tomson Highway and his brother Rene. They used to come over for dinner a lot. At the time, Tomson was a composer and Rene was a very beautiful dancer. We had a small kitchen in our old Georgian house. Our kitchen table was an unpainted door resting on a crate, so it was kind of rickety. Patsy, the

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handyman in our household, was always going to fix it, but she was a great procrastinator. (When we moved in together, the arrangement was that I would occupy the lovely front room while Patsy got the basement — for six months. Then we were supposed to switch. Of course we never did. "Are you okay down there, Patsy?" I would say. She'd shrug and say, "Oh, I'm fine. . . ." Looking back, it was terrifically selfish of me.) Our kitchen and Patsy were always a great mess when she cooked. But what delights she concocted! At dinner the requisite joint would be passed around, but Tomson was always very meticulous in his speech, and campy, too. He was a strange combination of flamboyant and articulate (rather like myself, I guess). Rene was very quiet, like a graceful, slender Buddha; when he did talk, it was to say something really sweet, He was so centred that he always made me feel completely ungrounded, Micah also met Rene at one of these dinners and they later became lovers. I remember being very jealous because they were both just too beautiful to live. And together they were just. . . well, a dream. The kind of wet dream you felt guilty for. Patsy's friendships with native men and women were typical of her nature: calm, accepting, and incredibly receptive to joy. I was always worrying, always impatient and scared, passionate, excited, and angry. But these friends of Patsy's just seemed to let life happen. I know it sounds very cliched, but I found native culture to be a breath of fresh air. I wanted to be as relaxed as those guys, and as relaxed as Patsy seemed to be. Tomson and I never became close friends, but we used to hang out in the same seedy gay places, and we'd often meet. Later, when he became a successful playwright, I was jealous of his artistic freedom. It seemed to me that the foul-mouthed native characters in his plays were accepted as a colourful aspect of native culture. On the other hand, when fags in my plays talked dirty it was usually labelled "gratuitous." I think most people know Tomson is gay, but he's not the type of guy who brings it up every in every interview. I am. Because, as Harvey Milk said (and I'm paraphrasing), every time somebody admits they're queer, people see that someone nice, familiar, someone they know, is gay or lesbian. And each time that happens people learn and find it easier to accept. I don't blame Tomson for not talking about it all the time, because he is native and has other issues. It's very difficult when you have to deal with both racism and homophobia. Muriel Miguel, a wonderful

native artist (who performed a one-person show at Buddies in the !8os), usedd to ask the question, "Am I a native or a lesbian first?" It's difficult to answer. Living with Patsy wasn't just a psychosocial tonic. It was also a passionate working relationship. The Theatre Centre soon moved to its new space at 666 King Street West, and Patsy designed my first play there — one of my first big successes, Cavafy, or The Veils of Desire. Five companies — Necessary Angel, Autumn Leaf, Buddies, Nightwood, and AKA Performance Art — moved into 666 King West. The street number would prove unfortunate, because a tragic accident later occurred in this space, when Thorn Solcoloski was directing a production for Theatre Autumn Leaf. An actor was impaled on a pole. Somehow, he survived the accident reasonably intact. The current tenants of the building (I think it's some sort of clothing design centre) have, perhaps out of superstition, given it another street number. But the building suited us just fine, and we didn't think twice about the number of the beast. Cynthia had discovered it, of course. It was a warehouse space at the corner of King and Bathurst, and there were some pillars dividing up the floor, but we thought we could direct around them (in fact, I often used them to good effect in my productions; they were great for crucifying people, for instance . . .). I remember staying up late one night to paint or plaster or scrape or something — the group effort really made me feel like a part of an artistic team. We hired an administrator named Wendy Dawson and she was a great help. We were able to put out posters advertising our season, and Wendy managed the rental issues. Cavafy, or The Veils of Desire was yet another poetic piece (I still had five more left to write in those early years!) inspired by Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. His poems were a revelation. Of course I wasn't so much interested in the ones about Greek or Egyptian history (like later, when I similarly ignored Pasolini's writings about fascism) — no, I was interested in the poems about boys. I suspected then (as I know now), that there is something inherently radical in gay images. Unabashed, unashamed scenes of queer boys kissing and being sexual are very political. They shake up the patriarchy more than even overtly political poetry. Cavafy was my "gayest" production yet. The poster, designed by one of Patsy's friends, was a drawing of two naked men kissing passionately.

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Patsy's design took the "veils of desire" in the title quite literally. She bought lots and lots of gorgeous fabric and hung it from the ceiling. There were parts of the play where the beautiful boys would just wrap themselves in it, reciting Cavafy's words. The fabric was either translucent or caught the light, which made it a play about lighting. Many of the poems concerned youth, aging, and the transitory nature of beauty. I was writing about those themes quite a lot, actually. I think it's because I came out of the closet so late in life that I thought of myself as being an old man. I was in love with one of the boys in the cast, Neil Cadger. I can't remem-.

ber how I met him. He was a young blond with thick, kissable lips, a wiry body, and an irrepressible energy. But he already had a boyfriend and he spurned my advances. It was very frustrating. Because Neil was talented and had theatrical aspirations, I thought that I had found the perfect substitute for Glenn. He inspired a gigantic, unpublished poem called "Neil: ATentrology," and a short musical called An Evening, which was performed (at Factory Theatre's Brave New Works Festival) after Cavafy closed. Looking back at Neil,Neil,l, I'm amazed that I could make so much angst out of so little experience. It's a testament to how tenuous I imagined my new queer existence to be. Because I thought myself such an ugly duckling, and because I'd spent so many years pretending to be straight, it seemed that my gay life might disappear at any moment. One evening with a beautiful, talented boy was enough to drive me to distraction — and I'd write three plays. Neil was infuriating — an unconscionable flirt — and very ambitious. I decided to do something I'd never done before and would never do again: cast a boy that I had fallen in love with. (I excused the decision by reminding myself that I hadn't slept with him, and wouldn't — at least until the play was over.) During the production Neil had an affair with one of the other actors in the play. It was agony. I tried to use my jealousy in my directing as I watched the guy caress Neil during their scenes and consequently imagined their horrifying post-show clinches. I found it very useful artistically. But I was very lonely and tortured. Amazing things started happening. The play opened, audiences loved it, and Glenn returned from Europe. And then, though the gorgeous, untouchable Neil was driving me nuts, Glenn turned up at the opening! The morning after, he was in my bed. I was in heaven again. Our affair lasted for the better part of a year. But

this time, although we were writing poems for each other, Glenn was even more emotionally unavailable. He quickly found another boyfriend and juggled the two of us — sometimes with comic results. I remember one poignant, funny evening he was trying desperately to come and couldn't. "What's the problem?" I asked. "Well," said Glenn, sweetly, "I masturbated twice this morning, and had sex with Ricky this afternoon, and now with you, there's nothing left." I guess it must have been Glenn's honesty and humour that kept me hooked, because I sure was jealous of his other boyfriend. And quite happily obsessed ("Tainted Love" was our favourite song). Many months into our romp, Glenn told me that he wouldn't have sex with me anymore. This occasioned another spate of poems and short plays (With You/Without You and Tonhsong) and more self-loathing. I don't think all of this was Glenn's fault. He was just a 19-year-old kid. And I was still in a state of disbelief that I was actually a practising homosexual. (Unfortunately, it seemed sometimes that I was still just practising!) I was sure that any joy, when it arrived, was only fleeting. How could it possibly ever last? The wound from my passionate reunion and consequent breakup with Glenn would last a very long time. Another actor who made his debut in Cavafy and then went on to some fame and fortune was Jim Millan. Later he started a company called Crow's Theatre, which did its first productions in the early '8os at Buddies' Rhubarb! Festivals (their first hit there was The Unspeakably Comic World Of Salvador Dali). Jim and I were friends. I remember taking steam at the gym with him and noticing that he was quite, shall we say, well-endowed. Well, I guess that, along with his charming manner, quick wit, and pretty face, explained why all the girls were after him. In one of my favourite scenes in the play, Neil played the good boy and Jim played the bad one. Bill Zaget, as Cavafy, had to decide which boy's room to enter. Neil was pretty and smiling. Jim was dark and demonic. Of course Cavafy went into the bad boy's room. Ray Conlogue gave me my second great review in the Globe, and one of his last unreserved raves of my work. I was very proud of the piece and we went on to remount it (with my friend Barbara Wright's help) at a theatre in an old courthouse on Adelaide Street (I think it's boarded up now). Two very important people saw that show. One of them did nothing. The other one made me an offer that changed my life.

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Barbara Wright invited Moses Znaimer to see the remount on Adelaide, and she managed to get me quite excited about the possibility of another remount. This was just after Richard Rose's incredibly successful Tamara had been picked up (by Moses, I think) for some sort of tour. Barbara thought that Cavafy was just as good a play as Tamara and that it would be great to tour it somewhere. I always think it's sweet when naive, non-homophobic straight people try and promote my work. But I just want to look at them kindly and say, "The rest of the world is homophobic, so give up. Don't even try — you'll be disappointed!" Barbara probably wouldn't have listened to me anyway. So, she very sweetly escorted Moses to the show and flirted with him. (Moses, I hear, likes the ladies.. ..) Of course it didn't work. When Barbara suggested he pick up my play for yet another remount, Moses said, "Well I guess it would have some appeal . . . but mainly for homosexuals." Years later, I punished Moses for that remark by not flirting with him. I was at some loft party, all dressed up in drag, and somebody pointed to a Mafioso-looking fellow in the corner surreptitiously sipping his drink. "That's Moses Znaimer," the person said. "He likes anything in a dress! You

should flirt with him." I didn't even try. I have no idea if this Moses gossip was true, and so I probably shouldn't repeat it. But who knows . . . if I had followed that friend's advice, maybe I could have had a second career as a Cityxv weather girl! The other important person who came to see Cavafy was the artistic director of the Shaw Festival, Christopher Newton. I remember the moment very clearly. It was near the end of the run and the show was doing very well. The play finished and Christopher Newton burst into the dressing room. He was enormously enthusiastic, saying that he thought the show was brilliant. Newton's praise meant a lot to me. At last, someone I could respect, someone with power and influence in the arts community, was responding to my work. As I have mentioned, one of the reasons I decided to start a theatre company was that no one in Toronto seemed interested in my plays. Before Buddies, I was so desperate that I submitted one of my scripts to a performance gallery. I took the script of City Nights to A Space. But they rejected it, too, saying: "This script is fiction. It's fake. We're concerned with reality. With truth." For the Toronto arts community, the subject matter of my work

was uninteresting because it wasn't contemporary, Canadian, or "real." Call me crazy, but I just don't think that art is essentially mimetic. By that, I mean I don't think it accurately holds a mirror up to life. Passe Muraille is famous for its farm shows — for venturing into rural communities and gathering documentary information, and then fashioning a play from the research. A Space is known for producing community art that reflects the multi-sexual and multi-racial city of Toronto. I think that both of these approaches to art are admirable, but neither approach is mine. I think it's sweet when artists try to imitate the reality that they see around them. And Canada certainly has a long tradition of documentary production, especially through the auspices of the NFB. But can artists really imitate life? Don't they just imitate what they imagine life to be? And isn't every artistic interpretation of life filtered through the artist's own consciousness, quirks, and prejudices? And isn't that ultimately what makes it interesting? I think what's fascinating about Tennessee Williams, for instance, is the way he perceives reality — which in A Streetcar Named Desire is very much filtered through the eyes of Blanche DuBois, because I think that Blanche is Tennessee Williams. About Tennessee Williams: I happen to know two boys he tried to pick up. One is an ex-boyfriend, Shaun, and the other is Daniel Allman, who performed in my play Pasolini/Pelosi. These two encounters inspired a play I wrote in the mid-'8os called My Night with Tennessee. Shaun was just a ij-year-old boy living in a Vancouver hotel with his mom back in 1979. Williams was staying there during a production of The Red Devil Battery Sign. He saw my lithe and lovely future boyfriend and slipped him his card, inviting Shaun to "come up and see him sometime." Shaun was too shy and didn't take him up on the request. He's cursed himself ever since. Daniel Allman was also propositioned by Tennessee in Vancouver. He invited the small, dark pretty boy to visit his hotel room and read poetry. There was one hitch — Daniel had to read in his underwear. Well, Daniel agreed. He said that Tennessee was pretty stoned and that nothing sexual happened. But think about it. If I just happen to know two boys who were propositioned by Tennessee Williams during a short stay in Vancouver, how many people do you think Tennessee approached in his lifetime? I'd say there must be a whole lot of boys with these stories and yellowing Tennessee Williams business cards to prove them. I mention Tennessee Williams because Christopher Newton and I both

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admired his work. A couple of years later, just after Williams died, Christopher and I were sitting in his kitchen, and I read the great writer's obituary out loud. "It says here he choked on an inhaler bottle cap," I said. "It was poppers," Christopher said authoritatively. "Are you sure?" I asked. "What else would it be?" he answered. Christopher and I shared an aesthetic — and it was something of little interest to most Toronto artists. I guess the closest way you could come to describing it is Christopher's phrase: we were both interested in creating (Cr* 3> fine art. Now, my work is not documentary, or truthful, or mimetic in the Canadian tradition. I think it's more in the American tradition of poetic/hopeful fantasy, or cheery musical comedy, or outrageous satire. Like all artists, I make a pathetic attempt to imitate reality. But I am painfully aware that it's only my reality, and it's my colouring that makes it interesting and unique. The degree of self-consciousness in my work about that colouring, that perspective, is baffling to some. That self-consciousness is called camp. My discouraging encounters with Canadian arts institutions early in my career, along with my extensive and somewhat torturous dramaturgical experience with Bill Glassco, convinced me that people just didn't understand where I was coming from. You see, before I started writing about gay subject matter, my work could only be described as "fine art." That is, I was interested in making beautiful images and writing beautiful scenes. I considered myself apolitical. In fact, I still don't consider myself to be, essentially, a political writer. I know that may seem like an odd thing for me to say, but it shouldn't sound too strange to anyone who knows the difference between theme and subject matter. Unfortunately,o. few people do. I compare myself with Brecht in this area. This is not to say that I compare my talent to Brechts, but I think we are similar writers in one way — we have chosen political subject matter for our work, and yet our work is not essentially political. Brechts plays were eventually very successful in capitalist countries and in America, but there was a curious consistency in the reluctance of communist countries to perform his work. Now you could say that this was because the USSR was not a true socialist Utopia. But I think there's another reason: Brecht's work is not good propaganda. The subject

matter is certainly left-wing, but Brecht's such a brilliant writer his plays are actually about human beings. Forget his theories about creating characters that will "alienate" the audience; in reality his characters are enthrallingly human. His plays are not about socialism, but about life. Socialism is, how ever, his subject matter. I would suggest that one of the reasons Brecht was a socialist was that he needed something to write about. If you set out to write about generalities then you write about nothing but your own boring sentiments and experiences. But a specific subject may reveal some universal truths. The same thing is true about acting. Actors need blocking, props, things to do. Sometimes opening a box of crackers while someone else is talking says volumes more than telling the actor to "act uninterested." Similarly, I think that I'm a good enough writer that my plays are not about homosexuality. However, issues and historical figures from gay history, or from contemporary gay life, are often the subject matter of my work. I think that most people are unable to make this distinction. Sometimes even artistic directors confuse subject matter with theme. And this is one reason why my plays are not often performed. They sometimes offend straight people with their subject matter. But they also offend gay people. I am similar to Brecht in this particular way: my plays don't make good gay propaganda because my gay characters are flawed and human. When I met Christopher Newton I knew intuitively that he understood all this. Because Christopher was reasonably open about being gay and quite comfortable about his sexuality, he did not let the subject matter of my work overwhelm him. And his affection for the whimsy of Edwardian theatre suggested to me that he didn't expect aft to mirror reality. I think he took the gay subject for granted and was enthralled with the beauty I was attempting to put onstage. So Christopher hired me to work at the Shaw Festival. I think many people thought this was ironic, that I was selling out. Why would a gay writer like me want to work at a place that Christopher Newton openly called a "fine art" theatre? Because, essentially, I think my goal has always been to produce fine art. The subject of my work just happens to be the politically contentious issue of gay life. So, when Christopher Newton walked into that dressing room, I was flabbergasted, overwhelmed, excited, surprised, and elated. He was about 45 years old — approximately 17 years my senior. He seemed very much like a father (or uncle) figure. He was an educated Brit; not many people know

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this, but before Christopher became an actor at the Stratford Festival in the '6os, he used to teach at universities in the U.S. Anyone who has met him will tell you that he's a handsome, eloquent, charming person. And for me to have the artistic director of a Canadian institution like the Shaw Festival compliment my work — well, I was overwhelmed. For years I had yearned for a mentor. I looked for one in Bill Glassco and was disappointed. In Christopher I found it all: a teacher, a mentor, and, ultimately, a lover. Christopher asked me if I would like to assistant direct two shows for the Shaw's 1982 season: The Secret Life of Albert Nobbs and Cyrano De Bergerac. Iace t would assist Christopher on Nobbs and Derek Goldby on Cyrano. It was very exciting. All of a sudden, I wasn't doing my work alone. There was someone to support me, emotionally and artistically. Before I left for the Shaw, I did one show in Toronto that was a complete flop: Marilyn Monroe Is Alive and Well and Living in Joe's Brain. It was based on the writings of Joe Brainard, a little-known post-beat gay poet. He was the boyfriend of Kenward Elmslie, an American novelist and librettist. Anyway, I love Brainard's faux-naive poetry: "When in doubt, sprinkle with cheese and bake." His most famous poem is "I Remember," a touching, funny, nostalgic take on childhood in which every line begins "I remember . . ." I've always been interested in the faux-naive: J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is my favourite book, and Andy Warhol is one of my favourite personalities. I think that deep down I feel very childish and innocent. Marilyn was my faux-naive show. It was supposed to be about Brainard and Andy Warhol. In the end, Joe Brainard the poet meets Marilyn Monroe in heaven. I asked renowned Toronto clown Dean Gilmour to play Joe. Our collaboration was not a success. Dean is a contemplative actor who trained at LeCoq in Paris, and he's capable of some very funny, touching work. But our rhythms are different. Dean works very precisely and scientifically. That's what clowns do. My humour is instinctive; I'm impatient and imprecise. The production was a mess — nobody seemed to like the play, and nobody came. I'll admit that I tried to follow a Warholian philosophical maxim: I told the actors that the play was supposed to be boring, like his movies — Empire and Sleep. I was very hurt when nobody liked it, but I was on my way to the Shaw Festival, so nothing else seemed to matter. I enjoyed working with Christopher on The Secret Life of Albert Nobbs. Nobbs

is based on the true story of a woman in 19th-century England who lived and worked as a man. Nora McLellan played Albert, and Mary Vingoe from Nightwood Theatre played the lesbian who wooed her. It was fascinating watching Christopher work. He was a very traditional director in some ways — no theatre games. Up until that point I had always felt that I had to do improvs with actors, or make them run around and act like animals or something at least once during rehearsal. But after working with Christopher I felt free to simply direct. Christopher's method was to work through scenes in order, occasionally stopping to dwell on important moments. He'd talk about those moments, explore them, ask questions of the actors. Often we wouldn't move on until we had discovered a particular truth about a certain section of the play. That was it. After working with Christopher I started relaxing as a director. I stopped forcing things and showing off— and I began to trust my instincts. What's my method? Well, I'd say that the most important lesson a director can learn is to cast well. Many lousy directors are praised for a job well done simply because they typecast. In that sense, I suppose I'm a lazy director. I'd rather not start from scratch and teach an actor all about the character. I prefer to hire actors who have a very wide range, or who can immediately identify with the part. The key isn't just casting by looks — you must pinpoint the principal aspects of each character. This usually has to do with speed, weight, and power. Is the character light and tense? Or heavy, dominant, and slow? Must the character be likeable? If you cast an unlikeable actor (or even one who just looks menacing), you could be in trouble. If your actor's personality, energy, or temperament is somewhat near to the character's, or if the actor is brilliant and can act anything (not all actors can — even the great ones), then you're okay. Unfortunately, many directors think their job ends with casting, that they needn't direct at all — except to order the actors about and make them paranoid, of course. ("Could you turn slightly to the left when you pick up the cup, please — no, not just before, not after, but exactly when you pick up the cup?" Or, "That line should be said angrily, but at the end it should come up, like a question. Like this. . . .") Now, there is a time for precision (especially when directing comedy), but my experience as an actor has helped me understand how difficult and pressured the job can be. The most important thing is that actors feel they can trust their director — most actors don't. This

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means that the director must create an open, supportive environment where spontaneity can happen — and where the director can admit his/her mistakes. And it means that the director must have a vision. The trick to not impose that vision on the actors, but rather lead them to it, organically, using their own talents, temperaments, and quirks. This means my rehearsals are fun and relaxed, that the actors feel they can say pretty well anything to me. I try not to be an authority figure (which is tough because I'm so big and mean-looking!). I set up a joking, informal relationship with my actors. If I don't like an idea, I can comfortably say, "Umm... no, sorry, that's not it." And they won't be hurt. But it works both ways. If the actors don't fancy my suggestions they can say so. I think the biggest mistake some directors make is to imagine that art must be painful. So many directors put their casts through agonies. But I don't think creation necessarily evolves from suffering. Life is full of suffering. It's everywhere we look. Shouldn't our art — our work — be stimulating, relaxed, and fun? My rehearsals are short (most people need to stop after four hours) and to the point. I never make actors wait around unless it s absolutely necessary. The truth is, I love directing. When I trust my instincts, it comes easily. It's more challenging when some of the images have to be created from scratch, as in non-scripted theatre, or theatre of image, when the stage pic-

tures are only vaguely implied in the text and must be created from square one in rehearsal. It's hard work, but it, too, can be fun. Communication is probably the director's most difficult, and important, task. Words mean different things to different people, angry, to some, means enraged, and to others it means irritated. I always try to be exact, to speak the language of the actor. Some actors are completely intellectual — I spend a lot of time discussing Ideas with them. Others are completely intuitive — they want images or emotional correlatives. Some want blocking that is very specific; others want to find it all themselves. Sometimes I have a vision of die rhythm and feel of a scene that may be difficult to express, but is very clear in my imagination. I try to help the actors find that rhythm, that tone, that feel, without forcing matters. My personal approach is probably more intuitive than intellectual, but I understand that every actor works differently. I usually start off every rehearsal by talking about the sex I had the night before, or the lousy play I just saw, or by letting the actors beef about their TTC ride, their hangover, their latest audition — whatever's bugging them.

That's why I often work with queers, or with actors who are gay positive. People who are nice. I find it very difficult to work in an atmosphere where I can't be myself, where I can't, for instance, use a frank sexual discussion to illustrate a point. So, as you might expect, despite all I learned about directing from Christopher, I found the rest of the Shaw Festival experience somewhat alienating. I missed my friends in Toronto (though Patsy came to visit me), and I was very bored in Niagara-on-the-Lake. There is one major difference between Christopher and me: he is truly a man of the theatre. He is a brilliant actor and director, and has only occasionally tried his hand at writing. I, on the other hand, consider myself primarily a writer who happens to have worked in the theatre. I've always been a little suspicious of theatre people. One thing that illustrates our differences is my play Theatrelife, which I produced five years later at Buddies. In it, I criticized the falsity, the lies of the theatre world. Obsequious, fawning actors are lampooned, and the director, though a kind man, is somewhat pompous. I based the character of the director in the play very loosely on Christopher. After he saw Theatrelife I asked Christopher if he liked it. I was relieved that he wasn't at all offended by my representation. Instead, he said, "That play makes me uncomfortable." I asked him why. "Because audiences might think theatre people are really like that." Christopher's loyalty to the theatre world and actors is quite admirable. That's what makes us different. I really don't trust many actors as people now, although back then I was more gullible. I have very few friends who are actors. Certainly there are many alternative actors who are more concerned with the "art," and less concerned with their careers. But most mainstream TV and film actors are, I think, overly ambitious and false. That's a lesson that's taken me a long time to learn. Most of Christopher's friends are actors; some of them are very nice, but ultimately not my cup of tea. Perhaps it's because when I was at the Shaw Festival, they were sucking up to Christopher and not me: I was a very small fish in a very big pond. But I also think it's because I'm insecure enough to demand absolute sincerity from people on a one-to-one basis. When I was at the Shaw, I was enthralled with all those theatrical people gushing with warmth and personality; I suddenly seemed to have a host of new friends. I trusted them, but they also made me a bit uncomfortable with all that air-kissing.

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Time would tell. I spent many evenings at Christopher's house. Often we'd stay up late and have a drink and socialize with the actors. Christopher treated me like his brilliant protege, which, I have to admit, was extremely nice. Then, finally, one night we slept together. The first night we had sex all I could think about was, "Oh my God, I'm having sex with Christopher Newton!" I realized right away that I was in love with him. For me it was like being in heaven, having a handsome older man be my friend and talk to me about my ideas and about sex and love — having someone who could understand. Christopher told me a lot about his past in Vancouver and his favourite bars there. He told me so much that I almost felt like I'd been at the Shaggy Horse, a seedy hangout for prostitutes and criminals. Christopher loved that place. And he loved drag queens. He said, "I could never do it myself. .. but they're absolutely beautiful!" I think we had this love of "the lowlife" in common. It was a side of gay culture that I was just beginning to discover at the bathhouses in Toronto. How could I fall in love with Christopher, an older man, when I've already said that my type was slender boys? Well, Christopher actually was a slender boy — only grown-up. He was far more attractive, even at 45, than I would ever be. And of course we clicked the way Glenn and I had clicked — creatively — only more so. The affair lasted the summer and we had lots of fun. Working on Cyrano De Bergeracwith Derek Goldby was quite an adventure. I think Derek is a marvellous director, although his methods are nothing like Christopher's. Newton survives on charm. Everybody loves him so much that he can just charm the actors into being brilliant. Goldby, at least then, thrived on terror. He very clearly had his favourites, and he could go off into a screaming fit at any moment. Still, people put up with him because he really knows what he's doing. Derek's claim to fame is that he directed the first production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which went on to international renown. Derek was obsessed with pace and rhythm — two things very important in Stoppard's work. Heath Lamberts was Goldby's Cyrano, and he was the star of the Shaw at the time. I'll never forget having to prompt him. It was a nightmare. Heath

would come to rehearsal without knowing his lines, and insist on learning them there. Which is fine, lots of actors do it. But he would also insist on being "off book." So there I would be, waiting with the script, and Heath would be trying to remember his lines — except he couldn't. And God help you if you prompted him before he called for a line. But he never actually knew them. So he'd say, "Umm . .. what is that line? No, don't tell me, I know it. I know it. Let me think, ummm . . . what's the context. . . I'm, umm . . . let me think. . . . Oh god, I know this line, I know it. . . . Oh, what is it? Wait — I'm getting it, wait. I know this. Oh, God. Fuck. What is it?"whayis it;' At which point I would tentatively offer the line, unsure whether he actually wanted it. And Heath would yell, "Oh fuck! Jesus. I knew that. . . . Why couldn't I get it? Shit. Why? Fuck." And then we would go on to the next terrifying line. It just seemed to me that Heath was stalling. That he didn't want to rehearse with the other actors. Headi is a brilliant performer, but back then he had a tendency to act more for the audience than with the other actors. I also remember rehearsing an elaborate curtain call for the show. It lasted for about 15 minutes. Talk about overconfidence! Thank God Cyrano was a hit. Anyway, Derek brought in Veronica Tennant to choreograph the curtain call, which involved approximately 30 actors actually dancing the bows. I remember one point in the tedious process when actor/director Susan Cox turned to me and whispered, "This is the last time you'll see Susan Cox playing 'Second Nun!'" And, feeling just as irritated, I whispered back, "This is the last time you'll see Sky Gilbert 'assistant direct!'" My main job was to be in charge of the apprentices — all the cute young men in the show. Derek and Christopher often hired extremely attractive young men to be "spear carriers." Not all of them were talented. Christopher liked to look at them, but he also wanted to give them an acting break. Derek had a much more ambiguous relationship with these kids. He liked very much to look at them, too, but he also seemed to want to terrorize them. I would work with the kids endlessly on their one or two lines. And then each would go before Derek and do his litde speech. It was very suspenseful trying to figure out which apprentice Derek would end up hating the most. When he found his bete noir he would go at him tooth and tongs. It was scary, and I felt sorry for them. I wasn't sure whether or not Derek liked me. First of all, he didn't like

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the idea of gay theatre, even though he was very gay himself. He was one of those fags who believe we should just keep it all in the closet. Derek's views were typical of some members of the Shaw. Christopher was different. He was about the same age as Derek, but he called Derek and his ilk "old-style fags." People often think that because there are so many gay men in the theatre I have an easy time of it as an out writer and director. Nothing could be further from the truth. I find that I only get along with those who are completely comfortable with their sexuality, whether they're gay or straight. But there are a huge number of both gay and straight men who are completely embarrassed and uncomfortable about homosexuality. My open existence is terrifying and disgusting to them. Closet cases and "nice" homosexuals hate me because I talk openly about gay sex and culture. Several years after my first Shaw Festival experience, for instance, I appeared at the Dora Awards in a dress. I got an irate phone call from an old British sometimeShaw actor who shall remain nameless because he's a closet case. He berated me. "I saw you arid Tomson Highway at die Doras, camping around," he said. "There's really no need for that sort of behaviour. In my day, we kept our camping to ourselves." Derek Goldby never said this to me, but I had a feeling he shared the attitude. I realized I was right about this when Christopher told me that he had had to defend me to Derek. "About what?" I said, really worried that Derek thought I was an inept assistant director. "It's about your headbands and your short shorts," said Christopher wryly. I was almost 30 and probably far too old to wear a stylish kerchief around my forehead — but, well, I guess I was still living out my lost gay youth. Thinking back, I probably looked ridiculous, and certainly frighteningly gay. "Derek asked me to tell you to stop wearing headbands and to wear longer shorts. He says it's undignified for an assistant director at the Shaw Festival to dress like that." Oh no, I thought, afraid Christopher was going to chew me out. "I told him to buzz, off," said Christopher, who thought Derek's concerns were ridiculous. That was a dream summer. Sometime after the opening of Cyrano, Christopher told me about his plans for the following year. He had been producing little operettas at the Royal George Theatre for many years. When I was there in 1981, they remounted Romberg's Desert Song. It was designed by Mary Kerr, and I was in love with the production. And in the Festival Theatre he directed the breathtaking Camille by Robert David MacDonald, the

avant-garde Scottish writer. I think, in fact, that the productions that Christopher directed my first year at Shaw are my favourite of all his works. Both of these productions were "camp." Not visibly camp enough to alienate conservative straights, but certainly camp enough to please anyone with a gay sensibility. What is camp? Ever since Susan Sontag coined the term in the '6os people often equate the term "camp" with the word "gay." They aren't the same thing. Camp is essentially gay postmodern ism. In both camp and postmodernism, the artist sits outside and inside the work at the same time. These techniques allow modern artists to incorporate romance. It all started with the Dadaists at the turn of the century, who viewed the 19th-century Romantic movement as corrupt. After Duchamp put a urinal on display as art, it was never again possible to be a serious romantic artist. But of course people are essentially romantic; they want to be able to feel dreadfully sorry for themselves and revel in love, disgrace, and yearning. Camp and postmodernism allow artists to present romantic visions of life while at the same time standing outside the romantic conventions, being critical of them, and sometimes even making fun of them. I don't think it's chance that some of the greatest postmodern theorists, such as Roland Barthes, were gay. Queers stand outside of much mainstream culture anyway, since they hardly ever see images of themselves in art or on TV. We can

never totally identify with heterosexual stories of masculine heroes saving weak feminine women, since our fantasies are same-sex ones. Robert David MacDonald's Camille, for instance, stands outside the romantic play and the opera, and juxtaposes their formality with what MacDonald sees as the real story — the death of a foul-mouthed whore. Christopher revelled in dais orgy of camp. In MacDonald's play, we're given both pristine operatic duets and Camille swearing vociferously at her puerile young lover. Similarly, in Desert Song Christopher mixed his love for a piece of swashbuckling trash with a sense of humour. He held the perfect balance between camp and emotion. In my view, the operetta was a completely gay piece. And, in private at least, Christopher agreed with me. There were so many camp numbers. Beth Ann Cole sang a hilarious song addressed to her lover's "sword," for instance. And Christopher was particularly pleased with the bassos exit line in the second act: "I'm off to the baths!" But at the same time Desert Song truly moved me with its romantic sentiments and its hummable tunes.

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That summer Christopher asked me if I'd like to co-write the libretto for the next year's operetta. It would be based on the famous novel Tom Jones. I was thrilled because I had loved Desert Song. That winter I would go to his little house in Niagara-on-the-Lake and we would work on the libretto. Christopher made me read die massive book. "I'm not going to read it," he said. "That's your job." I did. We worked well together and it was all very romantic. I have pictures of myself perched at my typewriter by the fireplace in his living room, looking happy as a clam. In Toronto that fall, Buddies staged two new plays. One was my second play about Patti Smith, MurderLover. The other was a work about Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini called Pasolini/Pelosi, which I wrote during my first summer at Shaw. MurderLover starred Mary Hawkins again, this time as die spirit of Patti Smith. Kirn Renders depicted Patti's real, physical self with supreme intensity. The play was inspired by the love affair between Smith and Sam Shepard, and by the play they wrote together, Cowboy Mouth. It was an attempt to explore violence and sexual attraction in a heterosexual context. But MurderLover is also pretty wacky; at one point Patti Smith turns into a duck. Patty designed a great duck suit in which Kim sang a silly litde duck song. For Pasolini/Pelosi, Patsy designed a series of translucent sand-colouredaourd panels. They were unpretentious and worked as palettes for the lights. That was the wonderful thing about Patsy: unlike most designers, who draw attention to their own work with their flash, her sets for my shows were, like her personality, low-key. But they were also crafty and highly effective. Another great thing was that I'd hooked up with Ken McDougall again. He choreographed die dances. Pasolini/Pelosi was one of my biggest hits, and I look back on it very fondly, especially the second act, which included a ritualistic re-enactment of the murder of Pasolini. The night Tomson and Rene Highway and their nephew Billy Merasty came to see the show with Micah Barnes, Rene turned to me and said, very seriously, "The spirit of Pasolini was here tonight. We saw him." I was very flattered and excited, and I believed him. Openly gay reviewer Jay Scott of the Globe and Mail wrote one of the first reviews of my work that didn't seem to be reviewing homosexuality instead of the play. The Stars Gina Mallet, however, refused to attend the

performance because the publicity featured a photo of a nude teenage boy. (It was an old photograph by R Holland Day, who is little known outside gay circles, but whose turn-of-the-century photos of boys are hypnotizing. They're vague and fuzzy — you usually can't see the genitals — but often the boys look Christlike.) Buddies continued its annual Rhubarb! Festival at 666 King Street West. An interesting historical fact about Rhubarb! that often goes misreported is that there were, in fact, two Rhubarb! Festivals produced by Buddies alone before Nightwood produced five festivals in cooperation with Buddies. I think it's very important to note that Rhubarb! was a Buddies invention. But, on the other hand, I think it's also important not to underestimate the influence of Nightwood, and specifically Cynthia, Kim Renders, and Maureen White. Cynthia especially was a big influence on my work, and on Rhubarb! The original concept for the festival was that it would be a workshop presentation of new scripts. The only thing radical about Rhubarb!, really, in the beginning, was that it wasn't a fringe festival; we didn't pick plays by lottery. Instead, the plays were carefully chosen, many for their avant-garde nature. On the other hand, there was no interference in the form of dramaturgy. From my early days working with Bill Glassco, I had become suspicious of the dramaturgical process. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that directors and artistic directors can use their power to intimidate writers into changing their scripts. Even to this day, people like Urjo Kareda scoff at what they see as my paranoid view of an imagined power structure. Kareda is a critic who became an artistic director during the '8os; he's been running the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto for more than a decade. He's a very powerful man, and he's smart, but I disagree with his aesthetic — it's a shame that young writers fall prey to his often severe and dogmatic ideas about theatre. Many times over the years I've had to rescue a young queer playwright from depression after receiving one of Urjo's angry rejection letters. He's been known to tell talented and serious young artists that they can't write, or that they'll never be a writer — to, in effect, stop writing. As you'll see later, my differences with people like Kareda and Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of Factory Theatre, over Rhubarb! led to some nasty scenes offstage. Because I started off my career as a powerless writer who was very much at the mercy of big artistic directors like Bill Glassco, I was, naturally, leery of young writers being forced into similar power relationships widi

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me or with other artistic directors. I didn't want to set myself up as Daddy overseeing scripts. People have accused Rhubarb! of offering shoddy, underdeveloped work for public scrutiny. Of course, at times, that's happened. That's the risk. But at other times, artists of particular note were being allowed to develop in an environment that was free from power play and domination. In those early years of Rhubarb! Nightwood's great influence was in taking the accent off scripted work. They brought in performance artists and people who were trying interesting — but not necessarily script-oriented — experiments in theatre. Daniel Brooks, for instance, was an early "Rhubarb!-ie." Cynthia brought him into the loop after meeting him at the uc Playhouse. Kim Renders and Maureen White used to perform a wonderful comedy piece called Soft-Boiled. They wore curly purple clown wigs, ate whole soft-boiled eggs and then coughed them up unbroken. (That kind of comic sleight-ofhand was Kim Renders' speciality — she can also open a beer bottle with her eyebrow!) With their androgynous deadpan faces, it was an unforgettable, surrealistic hoot. Cynthia also introduced dancers like Alan Risdill to Rhubarb! The list of others who did early explorations at Rhubarb! includes Ann-Marie MacDonald, David Roche, Sally Clark, Bryden MacDonald, Hillar Liitoja, Ian Wallace (Nion), Jim Warren, Kate Lushington, and, later, people like Daniel Maclvor and Edward Roy. It was also at Rhubarb! that I introduced Ken McDougall and Robin Fulford. Soon they were collaborating, and, many years later, went on to develop the hit play (about gay-bashing) Steel Kiss. In 1984 Buddies stopped producing the festival in collaboration with Nightwood. The split occurred for two reasons: Nightwood wanted to change the time limit of each piece to 15 minutes (from half an hour), and they wanted to edit some of the more pornographic gay work (I think Doug Durand's 1982 Persona Non Grata was at issue). We parted amicably. Starting in 1985, Buddies began producing Rhubarb! on its own once more. I've just slipped over the name of someone who was both a very important influence on my professional life and a part of the theatrical connection between myself and Christopher Newton. That person is Hillar Liitoja. Christopher and I discovered Hillar while we were working on Tom Jones together. It was in the spring, and Patsy and I were living in our house on Robert Street. Christopher had come to visit. Patsy and Christopher always had fun

together, and she made us fabulous meals. I remember Christopher having to go somewhere that required a tux and, feeling very wifely, I fixed his tie. I also remember that the landlord of our flat had been having trouble with the garden out front — nothing would grow there. He had tried a new plant with the rather repulsive name of "spurge." As we walked past, I pointed out the spurge to Christopher. An avid gardener, he was very funny about it. "Do you think it will work as ground cover?" I asked. "No," he frowned, crinkling up his nose, "it won't work." "Why?" I asked. "Spurge never works," he said. I don't know why, but at the time what he said was unbearably funny. I guess it was love. love,. Anyway, we were off to see a weird play in some hole-in-the-wall on Queen Street directed by someone with an unpronounceable name. It may very well have been Christopher's idea. He was always wanting to go see avant-garde stuff. He said, wisely, "Performance art is a great place to steal ideas." Performance artists take enormous risks and aren't bound by conventional notions of narrative. Usually we were looking for visual stuff: images, techniques, lighting, sound, and set ideas we wouldn't normally think of in a theatre environment. We didn't want to be bound by the rules of the theatre, at least not in our deepest imaginings, our fantasies of what might possibly be. Hillar's play was staged in the back of a bar. I don't remember much about it, except a beautiful, half-naked woman in a hammock (Rosalba Martini), and some half-naked men. The performance was very sexual, beautiful and moving and frightening and funny. And surprising. I think that's what we were both so happy about — being surprised by a performance for a change. We were both astounded, overjoyed. It was so much fun walking back along Queen Street with him on that spring night. First of all we had to get over the sheer excitement of our discovery. "Hillar Liitoja is a genius!" we said. We were ecstatic. Christopher had Hillar down to the Shaw later to do a couple of performances. In fact, Christopher and I discovered many Toronto performers he later invited to Shaw. Patsy Lang, became a lighting designer (and assistant to Jeffrey Dallas). Later, Ken McDougall and Edward Roy would also work there. That spring we mounted Tom Jones. I was the assistant director. The production was a flop — I don't know why, I can't be objective. I know, ultimately, that it lacked the enthralling camp of Desert Song. Christopher was always fond of our production, however, and still thinks that the critics were unfair. He believes we did a service by bringing attention to the music

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of Edward German. The truth is, it was almost impossible to transform the novel into a musical. And Christopher and I may have been far too delighted with each other and with the project to produce anything of real value. I mean, were we really capable of being objective about each other's work when we were in love? Christopher's big production that season was Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Boy, did that play make me hate George Bernard Shaw. Christopher had such a terrible time making those endless political arguments theatrical. I know Hillar inspired him to use a "picture-frame" for the set, to view the whole thing as a painting, and Shaw designer Cameron Porteous was very responsive to his experimental ideas. I also remember that on one of his trips back to seedy Vancouver and the Shaggy Horse, he discovered a beautiful young Asian boy. I was jealous. Christopher wasn't having sex with the guy, but he was obviously attracted to him. The boy's name was Leonard Chow. Christopher had visited some sleazy strip joint where Leonard was dancing on a table, and, as Christopher put it, "It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. People were writing on this boy's body!" Christopher was so delighted by Leonard that he gave him a supporting role in Caesar and Cleopatra. Christopher used to have these theme parties for the gay men at Shaw late in the summer, and the theme that summer was "wear something small and decorative." Straight actors used to come to these parties, too, just to suck up (I don't mean that literally!) to the important gay men. Most people wore earrings or other jewellery to the party to fit the theme, but one of the straight boys came "wearing" Leonard Chow on his shoulders. Christopher thought it was very funny. After Caeser, Christopher wanted me to stay at Shaw and be his "assistant artistic director" or something. I think the idea was that I would run "The Academy," a workshop and training program he was developing. But something happened that summer: I began to get disenchanted with the whole Shaw experience. At the time I used to hang out a lot with the actor Camille Mitchell (she was a pal of my other friend, Sally Clark). I loved Camille because she was sexy, smart, and irreverent, and she could also be a traditional gay man's "beard." Not that I needed one. But when we stepped out of her sports car and strolled into a restaurant, people would assume I was dating (or at least an intimate of)

this glamorous, petite girl. I have to admit that I was also sort of excited that her father was an ex-minor movie star named Cameron Mitchell (who once acted with Marilyn Monroe). Her Hungarian mother used to know Elizabeth Taylor. "She's older than she says she is," said Camille's mother. Anyway, Camille and I talked a lot about my conflicted feelings about the Shaw Festival. I think the main thing was that I was finding it hard enough to be the artistic director of Buddies without having to organize workshops and classes at Shaw. I know it would have been good for my "career" to stay. But even then I considered myself to be primarily a writer, not an artistic director. Or even a "theatre person." I knew that I was involved with theatre primarily because I wanted to see my writing onstage. I still didn't feel brave enough to act like a real writer — to write a book, or even to put my name on posters as the writer of my plays. But I knew, deep down, that writing was my passion. And that organizing workshops was not. I think Christopher was disappointed by my decision. He had imagined that I was primarily a director and theatre artist like him. But he got Duncan Macintosh to do the job ! was supposed to do; he was the perfect person to be Christopher's assistant. I left the Shaw early that summer, and my defection meant that Christopher and I stopped being physical lovers. That was