by Brad Fraser
Tad and I began to run. The hoods were hot on our heels. The only place open at that time of night was the Mac’s store up the block. We sprinted toward its bright lights.
We flew into the store and straight to the counter where Tad asked the clerk, a gay guy we slightly knew from the bars, to call the cops just as our pursuers entered. The store was moderately busy, mostly with gay guys we’d just seen an hour earlier at the club. As soon as it became obvious what was going down, they all cleared out.
I shared a look with Tad. He nodded and turned, grabbing the guy who was right behind him and pushing him to the back of the store. The guy and his friends were so surprised they didn’t know what to do as Tad shoved their buddy into a tall Coke display that toppled, exploding sticky soda all over the floor. Tad’s target slipped and fell.
I grabbed the guy next to me and ran him to the door, smashing him into it so hard it opened. I’d meant to throw him out, but his buddy came up from behind and pushed me out the door as well. Tad and the third guy followed us and it became a free-for-all of hurled insults, punches and kicks. We were holding our own, but trying to fend four off was getting difficult.
The likely bloodbath in which I’d be crippled for life was curtailed by the appearance of the diminutive store clerk brandishing a baseball bat with a couple of nails in the end screaming at the bashers to get the hell out of there because the cops were on the way. The sound of a siren convinced them, and they took off.
Tad came to me and we sagged into one another’s arms. All of the adrenaline vanished and we could barely stand. We leaned against the building, pulled out cigarettes and sucked on them desperately, thanking the clerk as a cop car with flashing lights pulled up.
Tad had a split lip and a bruise on his cheek. I had no idea what I looked like but I could feel the blood running from my nose over my lips and chin before splashing onto the front of my coat. We finished our smokes and the cops put us in the back of the squad car where we recounted everything that had taken place after leaving the restaurant. They were a male and female cop, early thirties I’d guess. The male cop said, “Where were you before the restaurant?”
Tad and I shared a look. This is the point every queer person had to deal with when reporting a bashing, the point where the cops will either turn out to be assholes (usual) or allies (rare). After all, these were the people who hung around in the shadows of the Flashback parking lot targeting and busting gays in a way they never would at a straight club.
I said, “Flashback.”
The look they exchanged let us know these two would not be allies.
The female cop said, “So you got into a fight.”
I said, “There were four of them.”
The male cop said, “Who won?”
I couldn’t help but sneer at his shit attitude as I said, “Apparently you did.”
Tad snickered, but the cops didn’t get it.
The male cop asked us if we wanted a ride home. In my mind I said, “No, we want to walk just in case those assholes are still hanging around waiting for us again, you patronizing breeder fuck!” Instead I just nodded and gave them the address and they drove us there silently.
In my apartment we were suddenly terrified and paranoid. The basement suite didn’t have blinds on all the windows, so we hung towels over them.
We examined our wounds in the bathroom mirror. In addition to my traumatized nose I had a shiner under one eye, an abrasion on my forehead and a couple of large bruises on my torso from body blows I hadn’t even been aware of taking. Tad with his split lip and bruised cheek was in slightly better shape. We drank a few beers, smoked more cigarettes and relived the entire experience moment by moment, unable to let it go.
Eventually we slipped into my bed. Neither of us wanted to sleep alone that night. He curled his back against my chest, snuggling his ass against my crotch, and even though the energy was slipping out of us I got a hard-on. He whispered, “Go ahead.” I did. It seemed appropriate.
On my way to work the next day, having used Kate’s makeup to conceal the worst of my wounds, I passed the alley where we’d encountered our bashers. My heart was pounding in my ears. I couldn’t seem to get a breath. I glanced around, panicked, sure they were waiting for me.
I would feel this way every time I passed that alley for the next few weeks. This feeling gradually lessened, but it never really disappeared. Eventually the attack became an amusing anecdote to relate at parties. After all, what was a minor gay bashing compared to the horror show of disease and death that was going on around me?
* * *
—
The gay community was in a state of barely controlled hysteria. A test had been developed that could tell if people were infected with HIV. We were told that having the virus didn’t necessarily mean you had AIDS. There were still a lot of questions to be answered, but we were assured that condoms were the best defence. For many queer people this felt like a direct attempt to continue the heterosexual obsession with controlling our desires and sex lives.
We lived all of this while the rest of the world looked away, in some cases with disgust, but in most cases with indifference. The press loved to report, with obvious disapproval, salacious details of our sexual acts. That demented neo-con cunt Ronald Reagan, who started his presidential term by demonizing people of colour, the poor, the mentally ill and anyone else who didn’t fit into the straight white Christian paradigm, was president for nearly five years before he even uttered the word AIDS. Canada’s Conservative government and their border agents responded by making all mentions of anal sex illegal, making it that much more difficult to educate the community about the spread of the disease.
Thankfully the community mobilized at the grassroots level. The gay press printed everything they could about AIDS and about the benefits of using condoms and restricting anal sex. While dying patients were being abandoned in hospital rooms by medical staff too frightened to care for them, gay men, lesbians and straight women, and likely a few straight men, everywhere were working to alleviate the suffering as best they could.
Of course not everyone in the community was a paragon of virtue. Anyone growing up in a society that overwhelmingly rejects and judges you, that actively hates you and calls you sick, is inevitably going to absorb a certain amount of self-hatred. I don’t know a single queer person of any generation who hasn’t struggled with feelings of worthlessness because of their differences. I have often marvelled that any of us are able to lead productive lives, and yet we do. Lives that are often made better for the adversity we’ve learned to face. The AIDS crisis galvanized and changed queer communities worldwide.
Walden’s had recently offered their employees a dental plan. I met a dentist who was sympathetic to my many problems and he devised an overlay denture that fit over my real teeth while making them more conventionally even. I still had the overbite but at least I wasn’t constantly trying to pull my upper lip down whenever I laughed or smiled in order to hide my teeth. Thus started a dental journey that has lasted to this day.
* * *
—
Despite my resolve to stay away from the theatre, I’d been tinkering with Chainsaw Love and decided to send it to Gerry Potter, whose Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre had developed an audience in town.
Gerry called me and we met at the theatre offices in the beautiful late-deco McLeod Building across from the Westin Hotel. It was clear from Gerry’s reaction that he didn’t quite know what to make of Chainsaw Love. It certainly wasn’t the kind of show his theatre usually did. As we threw around ideas for possible ways to workshop the show, he asked me if I’d like to direct it for the Fringe. The Edmonton Fringe Festival, based on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, had started two years before and was presented in the nearly deserted Old Strathcona area on the south side.
I didn’t hesitate for a second—of course I wanted to direct it for
the Fringe. Doing the show for free while working full-time would be challenging, but I had unending energy at the time and made the commitment.
I cast Kate as Donna the Dead, the brain-damaged daughter who was a bit of a send-up of Judith Thompson’s Theresa in The Crackwalker, as well as my go-to mystical character along with a mixed bag of performers with varying degrees of experience. We rehearsed in one of the vacant offices at the McLeod Building, and people from nearby offices would knock on the door to complain when the screaming got too loud.
My direction at that time consisted of blocking the show, discussing motivation with the actors and then running them through it physically until the rhythm of the text and the drive of the production took hold on a deeper level. As soon as they started talking and moving, I started taking notes for every moment that didn’t work. After a few rehearsals of this sort Kate broke from character, walked over to me, snatched my notebook out of my hand and said, “Don’t write. Just watch what the fuck we’re doing.”
I put my pen down and did just that. I stopped being so detail-obsessed and talked to the actors about the films that had influenced what we were doing. Everyone got better after that.
Sadly, the play did not. Chainsaw Love was a great idea, it had some amazing conceits, but in the end my ambition exceeded my skills by more than a bit.
Randy had come up with the title a few years earlier. We’d been afternoon drinking in one of Edmonton’s coozier bars, the Drake or maybe the York, and I’d given him a rundown on an early version of the script. I wanted to merge Tennessee Williams, George Romero and Tobe Hooper into a play. As I spoke, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was playing over the sound system. Randy said, “Call it Chainsaw Love.”
The first act was great fun. Donna the Dead is one of the best characters I’ve ever written, and the others in the play had great potential. The vampire/cannibal/zombie themes—second nature to me—were fresh meat in the theatre. The incest storyline was played for comedy and a send-up of all of the revelatory “I was abused as a child” theatre going on at the time.
The end of act one, when Donna thinks she has escaped the clutches of her evil father and the muscle guy in the leather mask bursts through a door and jams a meat hook into the base of her spine, is one of my favourite writer/director moments ever. Donna screams for him to take it out because it’s too big as he lifts her off her feet and drags her into the darkened basement. Her screams were broadcast through the holding area for the audience (there was no lobby) during intermission. It was both hilarious and horrifying—just as I’d intended.
The second act had little of the charm or anarchy of the first. It became a series of dialogues and monologues explaining the play’s themes and deconstructing horror-movie tropes in a way I once thought would seduce Urjo into producing the show. I couldn’t find a way to make the promise of the concept support the weight of a full-length narrative, though that was hardly a fatal issue for a Fringe show.
Things picked up in the final scenes, with its disco zombie apocalypse in which the muscle guy has his guts spilled on the stage (prosthetic stomach cover with the contents of a full can of Alphagetti behind it) and the father has his brains bashed out with a hammer (blood bag explodes on contact with soft hammer). There were many other low-rent Grand Guignol effects that made the show a Fringe must-see, even if criticism of the script was fierce.
For better or worse, I was back in the theatre.
PART EIGHT
YOUNG ART
YOUNG ART WAS SOMETHING I’d started chipping away at during my summer of poverty in Toronto. I’d always loved the Arthurian legends and had read Malory, White, Renaud and many other versions of the story. But I wanted to play with it in a contemporary fashion, so I decided I would pattern it after video games—which I’d become obsessed with, as they were a great way to while away time in a bar while waiting for the beer to kick in—with the quick set-up, the chase for particular goals, the twist and the resolution. I wanted to write something that reflected the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle without reproducing it. It was full of diverse, time-travelling characters, magic effects, a dragon, a devil and a mind switch that led to some gender/sex role-playing that was subversive and hilarious.
When I sent the play out, people had no idea what to make of it, as it was so different from Mutants and Wolfboy, which was totally my intention. I had done the gritty, reality-based script twice and both plays were highly derivative of other theatrical works. With Young Art I took a necessary step away from theatre influences and let my background of comic books, fantasy and video games inform what I was writing. The fact that each of the young leads spoke in an argot particular to their time made reading the play more difficult than people were accustomed to with my scripts. Some people felt it was a children’s play; someone else thought it would work better as a musical. Urjo was not impressed.
When I returned to Edmonton I entered it in the 1985 Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition, and when it failed to win even second or third place, I was devastated for a day, as I always was. But I took all of the notes and kept rewriting, eventually streamlining it into a much sleeker play. When I sent this to Paul Thompson, he took it to Clarke at Passe Muraille because he wanted to direct it. To our surprise Clarke said yes. The show would rehearse over November/December and open in January as the inaugural show of 1986.
After obtaining a leave of absence from Walden’s, I flew back to Toronto for the first time since my humiliating retreat. The theatre had found me a basement suite in a local agent’s Victorian house. Paul Thompson had assembled an exciting cast, and an amazing design team had created an enormous cave with multiple entrances and fabulous effects.
Having learned from experience, I’d decided on a balance between being in rehearsals and giving feedback and staying away to allow director and cast to work without having to consider the playwright. During these away-from-rehearsal periods I reacquainted myself with “two years later” Toronto.
In the time I’d been gone, the AIDS crisis had made itself apparent. While none of my immediate friends seemed to be infected, they all knew people who were sick or dying. Nevertheless, the clubs were busier than ever. Most of the bathhouses had been closed—although, unlike in most American cities, this would prove temporary.
I also noticed a new openness (for Toronto) at the bars. People were more approachable, a little more human, a little less hostile—but there was also an edge of hysteria to a lot of the partying, an end-of-the-world freedom that some people gave themselves over to entirely. Instead of being barred, drag queens were now a mainstay in all the clubs, often hosting AIDS fundraisers. Safe-sex pamphlets, condoms and directories of community services were everywhere, even if a lot of people just ignored them.
Young Art opened on a cold January night to a full house. I watched the first ten minutes of the show from the second floor seating area, then slipped out to the Epicure Café for a drink. Linda Griffiths was there and motioned for me to join her, even though we’d only met once or twice casually. She was there for moral support for Paul and had seen the preview the night before. I ordered a beer. She saw my hand shake when I took it from the waiter, but instead of asking me if I was nervous she started talking about something completely unrelated that took my mind off my show. We spent the rest of the evening talking. I was so engrossed by her charm that I completely lost track of time, and it was Linda who pointed out the show had come down.
We raced back to the theatre just as it was getting out and headed upstairs to the bar. Many people had hung around after, which was always a good sign, and the responses I got were far more genuine than anything anyone had said to me after the Wolfboy opening.
The reviews for Young Art were more positive than they’d been for Wolfboy. Most of them carped that the “environmental concerns” that preoccupy the sixties drug-addicted character’s narrative were dated. That was the eighties corporate press for
you. Even while pollution was growing exponentially, they all found concerns about it dated.
I loved the show. I felt Paul had really stretched himself beyond the collective template and acquitted himself nicely. The cast, design, everything really, was superb. There had been quite a lot of press. But the show didn’t make any money. Toronto was hit with one of its biggest-ever blizzards at the time, but whatever people said I knew that wasn’t the real issue. The real issue was this play was directed at young people—not children—young people in their late teens and early twenties—and they hadn’t found it.
That would be the last time I worked with Paul Thompson. However, he has continued to be a source of inspiration and support to me. He is a brilliant man, and I owe him a great deal for his belief in me when many had none.
* * *
—
When I got home to Edmonton, Tad and I decided we would get tested for AIDS. The test had been around for a while, but we were hesitant to take it, as were many men we knew. Almost everyone in our circle who had been tested came back positive. We had watched them spiral into depression and blind panic and we had asked ourselves if we wanted to know. We both assumed we were positive. Many of our lovers had already been told they were, and we’d both had sex with them long before condoms were ever a consideration. Since there was no known treatment for the disease, there was limited advantage in knowing our status. Eventually, when we found out people stood a better chance if treated earlier, we changed our minds, and went to our respective gay doctors and got the test.
We had to wait an agonizing three weeks for our results. Every possible scenario went through my head. What would I do when I found out I was positive? How would I react? How would my friends and family react? How long would I live?
We’d all watched Rock Hudson die horribly and publicly the year before. Even this rich, once beautiful movie star—the male sex symbol of my parents’ generation—couldn’t defeat the scourge. He was the first major celebrity to go, and even the straight world was stunned for a moment. If Rock Hudson could be stricken, what chance did any of us have? Why prolong the painful, humiliating, horrifying end?
