All the Rage

by Brad Fraser

  Copyright © 2021 Brad Fraser

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: All the rage / Brad Fraser.

  Names: Fraser, Brad, 1959- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021013206X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210132205 | ISBN 9780385696371 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385696388 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fraser, Brad, 1959- | LCSH: Gay dramatists—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Gay liberation movement—Canada. | LCSH: Gays—Canada—History. | LCSH: Gays—Canada—Social conditions. | CSH: Dramatists, Canadian (English)—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC PS8561.R294 Z46 2021 | DDC C812/.54—dc23

  Cover design: Talia Abramson

  Cover photograph: Raoul Josset

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Braham Murray, Iris Turcott, Kate Newby, Spencer Schunk and everyone who lost someone to AIDS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  PROLOGUE: Bastard Born

  ACT ONE: LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

  PART ONE: Two Pariah at a Bus Stop in a Large City Late at Night

  PART TWO: With Love from Your Son

  PART THREE: Mutants

  PART FOUR: Wolfboy

  PART FIVE: Rude Noises (for a Blank Generation)

  PART SIX: Wolfboy Redux

  PART SEVEN: Chainsaw Love

  PART EIGHT: Young Art

  PART NINE: Remains: Genesis

  PART TEN: Remains: Calgary

  ACT TWO: FIN DE SIÈCLE

  PART ONE: Remains: Edmonton/Toronto/Montreal

  PART TWO: Remains: Chicago/New York

  PART THREE: The Ugly Man

  PART FOUR: Poor Super Man: Cincinnati

  PART FIVE: Poor Super Man: Edmonton/Montreal/Toronto

  PART SIX: The “Bigger Than Jesus” Moment

  PART SEVEN: Martin Yesterday

  PART EIGHT: Threnody

  EPILOGUE: Disappearing the Queer

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Credits and Details

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF MEMORY. It has been acquitted to the best of my recollection, which is freakishly good.

  Names have been changed in certain cases to forestall possible social or legal repercussions.

  Many people who have played profound roles in my life are not mentioned herein. Some might be offended, some might be relieved. Either way, we know what we shared, and perhaps those stories will be told another day.

  This memoir was written with the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  PROLOGUE: BASTARD BORN

  MY MOTHER HAD BEEN SIXTEEN for three weeks when I was born in 1959. My father was eighteen. They’d met at a dance less than a year earlier. They were two sides of the same coin. Wes was the loud, manipulative bully; Sharon was the quiet, passive-aggressive controller. Neither was what the other needed but they were both what the other wanted. Both had quit school before completing the ninth grade.

  Wes Fraser was born and raised in Gainford, Alberta, sixty miles west of Edmonton on the way to Jasper. His father, Fred, was a farmer whom the census listed as a half-breed (Scottish and Cree). Fred’s mother was a Metis woman who lived in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. She was the last in a long line of Metis women married to Frasers who came to the new country as trappers. Wes’s mother, Margaret, the first white woman in the Canadian arm of the Fraser line, was of English descent.

  Together Fred and Margaret homesteaded in northern Alberta and had four surviving children. Fred would later replace their sod-roofed dwelling with the four-sided sun-blackened pine-board house that was the closest thing I knew to a home in my childhood, as we often stayed there or lived in the one room shack constructed behind the house. My paternal grandparents doted on me as a child and I loved them both, but particularly Grandpa, who called me Monkey Face and would often take me with him in the truck when he had to run errands. Grandpa collected and sold scrap metal—the yard and fields were littered with dead vehicles and farming equipment he would haul away from other farms. When I was very young there were horses, cows, pigs and chickens, but later he got rid of everything but the horses, which were used to take tourists from the nearby town of Seba Beach on trail rides during the summers.

  The house was without running water and electricity until 1970 and was just far enough off the road not to have a phone. (Grandpa considered the extra fee for a connection exorbitant.) They cooked on a wood stove and churned their own butter. Water was hand-pumped into buckets and hauled to the house, heat came from a pot-bellied coal heater, and light was provided by coal-oil lamps and candles. There was a smell of animals, outhouses, fresh-baked bread, newly mowed hay and overturned earth. Children ran wild and screamed as loud as they wanted, as did adults, although usually for other reasons. Some of the best and the worst memories of my early life are contained in that house and the acres of bush, fields and sloughs around it.

  My mom, Sharon Briscoe, came from the comparatively cosmopolitan city of Edmonton, Alberta’s capital. She was the fifth child in a family that grew over two decades to eleven. Sharon’s father, Ernie, was a carpenter and then an administrator in the Alberta carpenters’ union for most of his career. His own father had deserted his Jewish wife and children after relocating to Alberta. Sharon’s mother, Mary, was from southern Alberta. She was in her teens when her family moved on a horse-drawn wagon to Edmonton, where she was quickly married off to my grandfather.

  By the time I was born Sharon’s parents resided in the Bonnie Doon neighbourhood. Six of their kids were by then married with kids of their own, and only my two slightly older uncles lived with them. Compared with the Frasers’ farm, the Briscoe home—a bungalow like any other in a working-class neighbourhood—was palatial. And it had running water and an indoor bathroom.

  I did not feel the same love from these grandparents as I did from my father’s side. The Frasers were emotionally volatile, physically tender or violent, and predatorily loving. The Briscoes were self-contained and emotionally distant. Fraser gatherings always ended in physical or emotional violence. Briscoe gatherings ended with relief and no contact. Adding to the requisite teenage drama of an unwanted pregnancy, my father’s family despised my mother and my mother’s family despised my father.

  Before long they were dating and Wes was taking her out to the farm on weekends. Given the ignorance and fear of sex that permeated both families, it’s no surprise that Sharon was quickly knocked up.

  Contrary to the custom of the day, my father, for reasons known only to him, did not immediately marry my pregnant mother. Instead she was shipped off to one of those institutions that existed in the fifties to help young women deal with the stigma and challenges of an unwanted pregnancy. Wes would bring up doubts about my paternity a few times in my later life, planting an always-nagging seed of uncertainty in my mind. However, if he’d truly believed I wasn�
�t his son, then why did he marry Sharon and legally adopt me a few months after I was born? They were joined together at Edmonton City Hall and spent their wedding night in sleeping bags on the floor of Sharon’s parents’ unfinished basement. I slept in a makeshift cradle, probably a milk crate or cardboard box, beside them.

  I think Mom was deeply affected by her time in that home for unwed mothers. Any unpleasantness that had happened in her earlier family life, and in her encounters with other boys and Wes, she hoped would be alleviated through me. I believe even in the womb she meant me to be her saviour. From birth she expected me to be the agent of her growth and liberation. I was showered with love and affection. I was told I was special. I was also a male she could finally control.

  * * *

  —

  I remember being in the living room of our grandparents’ farmhouse. It was just me and an older male cousin—someone my siblings and I were often left with while the adults were out drinking. His pants were open, his hard, pink cock sticking out. “Bradley, come here and suck on this.” Always an accommodating child, I did what he asked. It was a fun game, though he said that I could never tell anyone about it. Sometimes, when we were staying at the farm, he’d slip into bed with me late at night and do things I was too tired to remember. After being protected for decades by his family, who loved nothing more than blaming us children for his victimization, this cousin was finally sent to jail for raping an infant. I was molested by other babysitters throughout my childhood. Not all of them were men.

  Even if my parents or other adults had suspected any of this, I wouldn’t have been able to communicate properly what was happening; they gave me no vocabulary to discuss such things. My parents were not communicators. There was no teaching from them. They had no ability to think critically and were driven only by emotion and instinct. I’d learned it was horrible to be yelled at or smacked, but it was even worse to be subjected to the cold, silent treatment they both resorted to for whatever transgression I’d unwittingly committed. Throughout my life people have remarked on how perceptive I can be, sometimes bordering on psychic. This is the result of having parents who demand you read their jumbled minds even as a toddler. I would eventually become most adept at it with all kinds of people.

  Other than the farm and the shack, our lives were lived in an endless succession of rental properties. My father found the cheapest place he could, my mother cleaned it thoroughly, and we resided there for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before we were inevitably evicted for non-payment of rent.

  My mother gave birth to three other children—I have two sisters and a brother, all of us just barely two years apart. The experiences of my childhood are not necessarily those of my siblings, and their stories are not mine to tell.

  Wes worked a variety of menial jobs in the early years, and we moved back and forth between Gainford and Edmonton. Then one day when I was five I fell asleep in Edmonton and woke to find myself in the main-floor suite of a rundown three-storey house, my mother scrubbing the floors and my father off drinking with his buddies. We were now living in Calgary. There my parents established the pattern for the rest of their marriage: Wes worked out of town from Monday through Friday and came home on weekends.

  I was playing on the front porch one summer day when I heard a sound I’d never heard before: a kind of scream that didn’t sound human but didn’t quite sound mechanical either. I looked over the banister. A car with three people in the front seat had sped around the corner and had slammed on the brakes before they hit an elderly native woman who was crossing the street. I can vividly remember the look of horror on their faces when the car collided with the woman and she rolled up the hood into the windshield before rolling back into the street with a dull thud.

  I ran into the house. My parents were drinking in the kitchen with the couple who lived upstairs. I screamed, “Mommy! Daddy! Mommy!”

  I breathlessly described what I’d seen. They looked at me skeptically. My father said, “You better not be making this up.”

  I pointed at the front door and begged them to go look. All four adults moved to the door and saw the woman lying in the street. With exclamations of shock they all rushed out to the street. I was completely forgotten. I know the elderly woman lived because my father showed me the article in the paper the next day, but no one expressed the slightest concern about how I might’ve been affected by what I’d witnessed. Tellingly, as I grew up, I had little interest in learning how to drive.

  A short time after this I woke up in a small white two-bedroom house back in Edmonton; another decaying neighbourhood, another couple of days working the street to make friends, something I’d become handy at by this point.

  We had a Christmas tree of our own that year—until then we’d always spent Christmas with grandparents and enjoyed their tree. I got a bike it took me months to learn to ride. (I was not then what you’d call physically gifted and was said to be a whiny child.)

  One of the few things my father did with me was take me to movies. My siblings were all too young, so on the occasional Saturday afternoon he’d tell Sharon he was taking me to a matinee and we’d drive to the nearby Avenue Theatre to see whatever was playing. I remember most of these movies quite vividly and used to parse them for some clue to anything Wes might have been trying to communicate to me at the time, but, in the end, they were just whatever was playing.

  This was me and my father being together in the way he was most comfortable with. Silent. Focused on something else. I could feel his hulking presence beside me, hear his breathing, and smell his odour of cigarettes and a pleasing hint of BO. This was probably the only place I ever felt comfortable with him. When we were with the family or other people he was never shy about telling me what to do or criticizing me but the second we were alone together he would shut down. I always felt this was because I was doing something wrong.

  Later that summer my father made a momentous announcement. We were moving, and this time it wasn’t one of those go-to-sleep-in-one-place-and-wake-up-in-another moves. This one was planned and announced well in advance. My father had landed a permanent job with a road construction company and we were moving to B.C. For an extended family who had never been more than a couple of hundred miles from where they were born, this was big news. Since my dad’s brother, Don, had also gotten a job with the same company, we wouldn’t be leaving alone. Sharon and Don’s wife, Janet, were close, and their three kids were our closest cousins. My father’s sister Margaurite (fondly known as Aunt Pug for her upturned nose) and her family would join us a few months later.

  We would spend the next five years living mostly on the side of what later became known as the Highway of Tears—Highway 16, running from Prince George to Prince Rupert—as my dad helped to build the final stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. Wes mostly worked in remote areas and would usually spend Monday to Friday at a man camp. Sharon hated this schedule, as it left her responsible for the kids for the entire work week, and she’d insist we live close enough to wherever his current camp was for him to be able to return home whenever possible. Consequently we moved even more frequently than we had in Alberta.

  I couldn’t wait to start school. In the past couple of years I’d become aware that older people could do this thing called reading, which was what happened when you understood those black marks all over everything. I knew there was a whole other world of stories and information out there that came with being able to read and I was impatient to discover it. And I learned fast. When I was told books were actually written by people, I was gobsmacked. The idea that people made their livings telling stories fascinated me, and I decided then that’s what I would do.

  * * *

  —

  The first few months in B.C., while we were living in Vanderhoof, went well, but over the next two years I would attend five different schools in four different mining towns. By the second grade I was starting to have meltdow
ns in class because every school seemed to be teaching something new.

  We were visiting Aunt Pug and Uncle Harvey in Endako when my parents mentioned we would soon be moving back to Vanderhoof from Lake Kathlyn. Aunt Pug said, “I will not allow you to make that boy switch schools again. What kind of education do you expect him to get?”

  My parents shrugged. Neither of them had much regard for education.

  Aunt Pug said, “Bradley, do you want to finish school here?”

  I nodded, but not quickly enough to offend my parents. I knew if I offended them they’d say no on principle.

  And so it was decided I would finish grade two in the two-room school house that served grades one to six in Endako while living with Aunt Pug and Uncle Harvey. I slept on the couch in the living room where their mean little chihuahua would curl up between my legs and snarl and bare his tiny needle teeth every time I moved, waking me up. My aunt and uncle’s long-term rental house was old and small, but it felt like a real home rather than a temporary motel room in a journey to nowhere. They didn’t drink much, they rarely left their children alone, and they weren’t constantly fighting. For the first time I realized there were other ways to live than the one I’d come to think of as normal. My trips to see my family on the weekend made me even more aware of the differences.

  While other kids had neighbourhoods made up of streets and houses, my neighbourhood was created by pop culture. My favourite TV shows and the popular songs on the radio did not vanish when we switched towns; nor did the spinning comic racks in every corner store featuring my best friends, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. My father refused to let me bring my comics along whenever we moved. This was long before the idea of collecting comics was heard of, and the only reason I wanted them was because I would read them until they eventually fell apart. But he’d say “no room” and toss them into the trash.