All the Rage

by Brad Fraser

  At this point in my life “homosexuality” was a clinical word that was only just beginning to be bandied about publicly. It was usually depicted as something perverted and insane.

  It’s erroneous to say there were no gay role models or icons at the time. Such well-known personalities as David Bowie, Elton John, Charles Nelson Reilly, Paul Lynde and Liberace were widely assumed to be gay without ever copping to it, and much-loved regardless.

  But it was the people who dared to identify themselves as gay who fascinated me. I remember reading about Tennessee Williams’s notorious coming-out interview with Dick Cavett and thought it was incredibly brave. When football player Dave Kopay came out in a controversial and bestselling autobiography in 1977, all of the stereotypes started to fall apart in my mind. If a football player could be gay, then anyone could be gay.

  There was also the Anita Bryant controversy around that time. The former beauty queen turned orange juice shill spoke out against one of the earliest gay-rights bills, and when she was pied in the face on national TV, it was my first exposure to that level of public hatred and gay defiance. I already knew that many people still considered being gay a mental illness, despite its having been dropped from the foremost guide to mental disorders a few years earlier, but I was shocked to learn there were still many places where it was illegal to be gay, or to try to meet other men in the streets and invite them for sex.

  * * *

  —

  As a student in the Performing Arts, or PA, program I was often offered free tickets to preview live shows at the few theatres in town, most of them new. I went to each of them eagerly, as I wouldn’t’ve been able to afford it otherwise. The shows I remember most vividly from that time were the few that were set in Canada, because there was something very novel then—and now—about seeing Canadian culture being offered to Canadians.

  The most profound theatre experience I had was at the Citadel Theatre, during its inaugural season in the new brutalist space that squats over a formerly seedy part of downtown, sitting five rows away from the stage for a dress rehearsal of a play called Equus, by Peter Schaffer. This play about a conflicted psychiatrist trying to find out why a teen boy would gouge out the eyes of six horses, and its imaginative and theatrical staging, would influence me deeply. The image of the six muscular men in skin-tight costumes, stylized horse heads and platform hooves was disturbing and erotic, as was the nudity in the show. The acting of the entire company was exceptional. I was transported beyond myself into a kind of eternal present tense that I have pursued ever since.

  Later in the year, we prepared for the Edmonton Kiwanis Music Festival, a province-wide celebration and competition of not only music but the best performers and debaters from Alberta high schools. I chose a monologue from Equus in which Alan Strang—the boy who blinded the horses—tries to explain where his fascination with horses might have come from. The piece is loaded with horny horse/man imagery, and for the first time I didn’t struggle to learn the lines. On the day of the presentation I spent the last half-hour before my entrance circling the dressing room, speaking my lines over and over again, faster and faster, until they became thoughts that came without effort. When I was called to the stage I was hot with a kind of simmering power that filled me to bursting when I started the scene.

  Three minutes later I finished and bowed my head. When I looked up, the other students were staring at me, dumbfounded. I knew I’d nailed it. I could feel it in my heart. I’d been confident in a way I hadn’t ever felt before, in control, but also involved. Not self-conscious the way I’d felt in all of my earlier acting exercises and scenes. The students applauded long and hard and I knew they meant it. If you know how snatchy theatre students can be, you’ll know what an accomplishment that was.

  I went into the competition confident, cocky and ready to show the world just how special I was and left with the much-coveted best actor citation for my monologue.

  We broke for the summer. Most of my fellow students would vanish from my life for good. After the Fred Astaire Dance Studio ultimately closed, I got a job at the Roxy Theatre on 124th Street. I was an usher who wore a wilted yellow polyester blazer. I took tickets and policed the theatre for drinkers, smokers, talkers and people who put their feet on the seats.

  In my spare time I wrote scenes, short one-acts, silly vignettes—I was fucking around with language, exploring ideas, trying to reproduce characters I saw on the bus or at work, banging at my portable Smith-Corona late into the night and chain-smoking. Most of the short plays I wrote were based on works we’d explored in school, absurdist moments modelled after Pirandello, poetic, melodramatic moments after O’Neill, florid, horny moments after Williams. This was where writing as a habit started for me.

  The start of the second year of the PA program was not as momentous as the first, but I did make a new friend. Hilda Jurgens arrived in Edmonton from Ottawa via Montreal after a nightmare divorce between her parents. Her mother, along with her mom’s new live-in boyfriend, packed up her three high-school-age kids and dragged them across the country for a new start in Edmonton.

  Hilda was a hefty girl, sharp and smart, with a mass of carrot-orange hair that made her stand out in any situation. She, like me, had a love of pop culture, a gift for language and a delight in laughing and making others laugh. She took an instant shine to me, and even though I could tell she was nursing a crush that wasn’t reciprocated, we started hanging out. A few months later I would get her a job at the Roxy, ensuring we’d spend even more time together.

  A large part of my day was spent on public transit, where reading was the only thing that passed the time. I knew the chances of my actually going to university were slim, so I was always researching what university students were reading in their literature classes and then finding books from the syllabus in the Wee Book Inn, a used bookstore next to the Roxy.

  My discovery of plays had happened a few years earlier with a late-night television viewing of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Black-and-white, claustrophobic and using dialogue with a rhythm and drive I’d never encountered in film, this movie was somehow different from the ones I knew. Shortly after watching and being absolutely devastated by it, I discovered the Katharine Hepburn/Ralph Richardson version of Long Day’s Journey into Night. After making the connection between these films and the plays they were based on, I realized that plays were like movies, just with a lot more talking. This was the beginning of my exploration of both mediums that would fascinate me for the rest of my life.

  I started work on a one-act play. It was called Two Pariah at a Bus Stop in a Large City Late at Night and was a complete rip-off of Albee’s Zoo Story. A precocious, perhaps brain-damaged teen encounters a middle-aged man one night in a park and they have a mutually revealing, vaguely intimate encounter that affects them both. Derivative indeed, but there was an authenticity to both characters’ voices that saved the piece when Phil—my straight best friend at Vic—and I presented it as my final project. The class was appreciative, and Billy Bob and Don urged me to keep writing.

  I’d entered the play in the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition, which was one of a number of new cultural programs the provincial government was sponsoring. While I waited for a response, my time in high school was wrapping up. I walked away with most of the awards at the Kiwanis festival again, was awarded the Eva O. Howard Award for top drama student at Vic Comp, won another award with a group of three or four other people for being the top arts students in the city and then, a few days before my graduation, I won in the student category of the provincial playwriting competition.

  This sudden smattering of honours made me a minor celebrity for a few weeks. A reporter from the Edmonton Journal interviewed me. They even sent a photographer to the school to take pictures of me in the one-acts we were doing at the time.

  Mom responded to all this with her usual indifference. When I hinted that I might like to go to my
graduation and awards night if I had a bit of money for the clothes, she snapped, “Don’t expect anything from me.” In the end I worked instead and never heard any of the kind and supportive words that were spoken of me that night by my teachers and fellow students.

  One of the rewards of winning the playwriting competition was four weeks at the legendary Banff School of Fine Arts as the student member of the Playwrights Colony. All expenses were covered and there was a weekly stipend to keep things interesting. I couldn’t wait to go. I hoped this trip would change my life.

  * * *

  —

  The Banff Centre is an artists’ colony and corporate retreat in the Rocky Mountains. Artists in disciplines ranging from the dramatic to the conceptual met over the summer months for intensive training and exploratory sessions in one of the most beautiful settings on earth. The Playwrights Colony was a program designed to encourage the writing of new Canadian plays for all the new theatres springing up across the country. I found most of the people in the colony stuffy. They were an earnest, academic crowd writing talky plays about coal mine strikes and incest on prairie farms and self-conscious, unfunny Toronto comedies.

  It was here I heard of the Stratford Festival for the first time as well as new-work pioneers in Toronto like the Tarragon, Factory and Theatre Passe Muraille. I also learned about two playwrights who were hot on the international scene that year: Tom Stoppard, whose Travesties was making the rounds in theatres, and Joe Orton, thanks to an excerpt from an upcoming biography I read in a big-time magazine. The story of his death at the hands of his male lover a decade earlier fascinated me.

  Thankfully there were two people in the colony who kept me from feeling like the only David Bowie among a coterie of Gordon Lightfoots.

  Paul Reynolds was the first out gay person I ever knew. He was a stage manager at the time, trying to work his way to being a director, which was his role in the colony. He was dryly witty and candidly raunchy, but also intelligent and kind (to me if not everybody else).

  Jack Piper was in the acting company, while also appearing in a sappy two-person musical he performed in an improvised ballroom/theatre at the beautiful Banff Springs Hotel. He had a swarthy Middle Eastern look I found irresistible. He also had a quick wit and, although he was engaged to a woman, seemed very comfortable in the company of men. Sometimes, while he was reading someone’s play, his eyes would lock on mine across the table and he would smile conspiratorially as if to say, “We both know how boring this is.” That intimate sparkle in his eyes would give me an instant erection that took ages to subside.

  One solitary evening, out of boredom I ended up in the school’s bar shortly after it opened. A small black-and-white TV propped on a side stand announced the Canadian television premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, adapted from the novel by Mordecai Richler. Two and a half hours and four beers later, I was genuinely moved by the film and feeling vulnerable when Paul Reynolds turned up, looking as stricken as I felt.

  He looked relieved to see me, replenished my Labatt’s Blue, bought himself a Dubonnet and joined me at my table.

  I asked, “How are you?”

  He pursed his lips and gave me a dry, one-sagging-eyelid look. “Bad night.”

  “What happened?”

  He rolled his eyes upward “Jack Piper’s fiancée arrived.”

  “So?”

  Paul leaned in and whispered, “Darling, I’ve been sleeping with Jack since we got here.”

  I tried to look sympathetic but I was jealous as fuck. I wanted it to be me who was involved with Jack Piper. “And now?”

  “Now I am once again replaced by a woman. It’s an old story. Ignore me.”

  I laughed.

  Paul squinted at me and said, “And what about you, young man? I still really have no idea if you’re gay or not.”

  I picked at the label on my beer bottle and looked away. This was the first time someone had asked me this point blank. “Pretty sure I’m gay,” I said, “but I’ve done some stuff with girls too.”

  We had more drinks. We talked. He was the first person I’d ever met who could talk about being gay openly and honestly. When I mentioned my squeamishness about the idea of anal sex, he laughed and explained that most North American men are raised to be tight-assed and afraid of the anus, but, if you knew how to keep yourself clean, it could be just as sensitive and important as any other sex organ. These were seismic things to learn in a world that offered no sexual education at all to queer kids.

  After we’d closed the bar and stumbled back to my room as we both seemed to know we would, after we’d kissed clumsily and stripped, his soft body up tight to my lean, hunched one, after he’d gone down on me while apologizing for not being able to get it up himself, after he’d made my cock feel better than it had ever felt before and slurped back every drop of my jizz, I knew I’d had my first truly gay encounter. Everything I learned in Banff that summer was secondary to my experience with Paul Reynolds.

  PART TWO

  WITH LOVE FROM YOUR SON

  ON MY RETURN TO EDMONTON I soon found a job as a directory assistance operator. It was shift work, and I could trade shifts, allowing me time to write and audition.

  The Walterdale Playhouse was Edmonton’s first live theatre and today is one of the oldest amateur theatre groups in the country. It was founded by a group of culture-hungry academics and frustrated artists in 1959. They generally did the imperialistic American/British fare that dominated the elitist idea of what should be produced in theatres at the time: plenty of Coward, Simon and Shaw—and, to their credit, the occasional latest play of controversy, with varying degrees of success. They held open auditions for every show and anyone was welcome.

  I was frustrated that there were few parts for a young man of my age and type in most of the work they did, but I made a point of showing up to read for anything that might vaguely fit. I got to know people around the theatre and before long I was helping out backstage, being invited to the occasional party and becoming a member of the club.

  Some months later at a show, a children’s trifle a friend was acting in, I was pulled from my bored theatre stupor when three men dressed as rats danced onto the stage. As they started singing some off-key nonsense about how badass they were, the entire audience straightened up, tittering. The reaction had nothing to do with their performance and everything to do with the fact they were wearing light-coloured tights without the appropriate undergarments, making their bouncing genitalia visible to everyone.

  In the coming months one of these rats became a very important person in my life, and another became the first man I seduced.

  The man I seduced, Patrick, was the eldest of the rats, a “mature” fellow in his early thirties, short and cute with a beard and a sweet smile. During the obligatory phone call to a friend in the cast to thank her for the invite to the show, I managed to wheedle his number out of her by claiming I was doing a report on children’s theatre for some paper or other.

  Nanoseconds after hanging up I was on the phone to the actor, complimenting him on the brilliance of his performance. Seconds after that I’d scheduled an appointment to interview him in his apartment a few days later.

  Patrick was an excellent host. Whether he bought my story or whether he was humouring me I have no idea to this day. He was making dinner while we talked and I pretended to take notes, then at some point I ran out of questions, he ran out of answers, and we ended up naked in his bed.

  An hour later I was stumbling out of his apartment a little light-headed but grateful. We’d see one another again over the next few months, and although he taught me some really important things about sex, our chemistry was rooted in friendship more than lust, and we were both fine with that.

  Meanwhile my mother emancipated herself and announced she was getting her own apartment with my youngest sister. At eighteen it was time for me to move on. I
was resentful and argued that I needed another year at home to decide whether I would go to university or not. Sharon was unmoved.

  A few months later Phil, my best friend from PA, and I found a two-bedroom apartment on the seedy edge of downtown and furnished it with what we’d had in our bedrooms and donations from family and friends.

  By then I was working on another play that would be called With Love from Your Son. It was something I’d been pecking away at since Banff. Late at night, sometimes in the morning before I’d go to work, weekend afternoons when nothing was happening, I’d be rattling my new electric typewriter, bought with my prize money from the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition, churning out the story of a troubled young man who sells his cock to a mother-obsessed gay dude in order to buy medicine for the troubled guy’s sick father. It was a cliché-ridden potboiler only a young man with a strong sexuality and little experience could think was original. I finally typed a cleanish draft and sent it off to the playwriting competition, this time in the adult category. It would be months before the results were announced.

  A friend from PA had recently started in the Technical Theatre course at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton. I’d met a number of her fellow students at a party and liked them a lot. A handsome guy named Cam and I had hit it off, taunting one another with our version of witty banter. Cam had moved from Vancouver a year earlier looking for the promise Alberta offered to so much of the rest of the country at that time. We all wanted to be actors but were settling for this technical theatre thing until we could figure out a way to get famous. That night had ended in a drunken blackout and I hadn’t seen him since.

  Desperate to be part of something again, I signed up to join the class in January, for the second semester. I went to part-time status at the phone company when school started, which allowed me to handle rent and expenses, just.