by Brad Fraser
One night she screened Persona, and while it didn’t necessarily make us respect her more, it did give us some context for her accomplishments. During the next session, just as things were reaching their usual impasse, I said, “Hey, Ulla, why don’t you teach us about editing?” She and everyone else in the class were dazzled by my brilliance.
Ulla arranged for an old-style Steenbeck film-editing machine and actual takes from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to be brought in. We watched all the takes, she took us through her editing decisions, then she cut the film with a razor, spliced it together with tape, hung the excess film on the rack beside the Steenbeck and moved on to the next cut. I think we all developed a new respect for Ulla when we saw her doing something she actually knew how to do.
It was all elementary but I found something in film editing similar to what I’d been exploring in my writing with Remains: the idea of creating material as the first part of the process, and cutting and reassembling that material as the next part of the process. I learned quite a few important things during that program despite its being a very rocky experience at times. My fascination with film editing started there and would inform my work for the rest of my life.
Also, I fell in love. More importantly, someone fell in love with me.
Participants in the program were separated into producer/director/writer teams for a number of projects. For one of these I was put together with the program’s other bad-boy director, David Wellington (who went on to direct I Love a Man in Uniform and other notable film and TV projects). For that assignment I’d written a short scene about a gay male couple waiting for something with great trepidation that turned out to be the HIV results for one of them, which were expected with the morning mail. Two actors were hired for the scene. I’m afraid I have no memory of who the other actor was because Peter Stockton was performing opposite him.
Pete was on the compact side, with a solid body and a face that was the best of Brad Davis in Midnight Express and the young Bill Murray. He was sympathetic to the material and listened eagerly to everything I had to say. There was an immediate connection between us, not exactly sexual but somehow physical. We joked around between takes as if we were friends already. Later on, when I was editing the material together, I’d linger over his takes, filled with the most complex set of desires I’d experienced. I had to see him again.
So, for our next assignment, I wrote a scene that required an actor a lot like Pete, requested him specifically and directed the scene myself. We spent a full day in a men’s room, where the scene was set, with a small cast and crew. I learned he was also a writer and had had a hit at the Fringe the previous summer. By the end of the day we’d exchanged numbers and made plans to get together.
After a couple of long telephone conversations filled with laughter and a genuine interest in one another, we had some drinks and exchanged scripts—I gave him the most recent draft of Remains, he gave me his Fringe script—and we made plans to get together again soon.
I loved his script, and he loved Remains. We drank and talked about our lives. He told me about the girlfriend he’d recently broken up with. I listened sympathetically and said, “You know I’m gay, right?” He nodded, smiling. That was that. We talked more and drank more. Eventually it got too late for him to leave and we slept together, spooning in the hotel bed. There was no sex but there was a connection we both craved, even if we couldn’t understand it.
When the program ended and we had to say goodbye, we both acknowledged to the other that we shared something special. We hugged for a long time before I pulled myself away and caught the bus back to Calgary.
While I was gone, Kerrie and Stephen had found a three-bedroom house that was cheaper for us to share than the apartment had been. They’d moved in while I was gone and stuffed all my shit into my bedroom. I sorted through it, set myself up quickly and returned to Chianti while continuing my association with ATP.
CBC Radio had recently sponsored a contest for Alberta writers in which two winners would write a topical comedy sketch to be broadcast live each morning at one of the Olympic venues. The series was called “Hip Check Harry’s” and featured the hoariest of Canadian clichés—lumberjacks, a native guy, hockey players and a tomboyish female who was completely incidental to everything. Never being one to overlook an opportunity, however questionable, I’d gamely dashed off a comic scene based on recent headlines, as the entry rules had stipulated, and sent it off without much thought.
A couple of weeks after returning to Calgary and settling into the house, Pete phoned me. Though we’d spoken nearly every night since my return, I could tell there was something different about his voice this time. He told me there was this CBC Radio writing contest he’d entered that was to take place during the Olympics and he’d won. My heart sank, but I congratulated him heartily. Then he said, “There was a second winner as well.” My heart skipped a beat. I asked, “Did they say who it was?” He whooped: “You!”
It was official. Pete and I were going to be employed by the CBC for the duration of the Olympic Games. The competition prize had been the contract, but there was nothing in Pete’s winnings to cover housing. We decided he’d stay with me. I had only one bed, but he assured me he was fine with it. Of course this led to sex.
The morning after the first time it happened I looked at him across the table as we ate our breakfast and said, “Do you still want to stay here?”
He met my eyes over his toast. “Why wouldn’t I?”
His response was so opposite to what I’d expected that I was confused. “Well, usually when this happens with straight guys—they run away.”
He smiled. “I’m not like those straight guys,” he said, and we shared my bed quite comfortably from that point on.
Pete made me want to be a better person. I’d been actively working to be less of an asshole since my walk of shame from Toronto back to Edmonton. I’d learned that, while I was very talented, I wasn’t nearly as good as I’d once believed, and this extended into my personal life. I was always honest with Pete about how I was feeling, and he reciprocated.
In the mornings we’d get up early, after always having drunk too much beer the night before, read and discuss the morning’s headlines in the Calgary Herald, and then take a cab across the river to the CBC building, where we’d meet with the producers, discuss the ideas for the sketch and then retire to a room to write.
Pete would sit across the desk from me and I’d type while we talked because I was the faster typist. The director and producer would read the sketch, make comments, and we’d retire back to our featureless writers’ room to polish it. That afternoon it would be taped before a live audience in the lobby of a downtown office building. It gave us a steady and healthy paycheque for a month and a privilege pass into the arts segment of the Olympic celebrations.
* * *
—
The playRites Festival produced a number of interesting plays that year, but the talk of the community was the reading of Remains that happened in the lobby of the Martha Cohen Theatre one afternoon for a rather large group of people who had no idea what they were getting into.
The reading was galvanizing for both participants and audience. The actors had never read anything quite like it and the audience had never heard anything quite like it. Allen MacInnis, who directed, refused to judge the material, treating it as he would any other play, which gave the actors a much-needed stability.
Pete and I listened in wonder, both agreeing that it was far funnier onstage than it was on the page, which is what I’d hoped for. Audience feedback forms proved people were shocked, some offended, but many were intrigued. Word around the theatre was mixed. Some liked the play and some said they found it gratuitously shocking. Artistic director Michael Dobbin was still hedging on whether it would be programmed for the 1989 festival. Allen MacInnis was clear in his support for the play opening at the festival. I reso
lved to rewrite it yet again.
Pete and I got to know a great many Canadian theatre artists at that time, particularly Blake Brooker, Denise Clarke, Michael Green, Andy Curtis and the other members of the One Yellow Rabbit troupe that were doing such amazing work on the stage.
Ronnie Burkett, who’d already won an Emmy for his amazing puppet work, was very much on the scene, as he was also trying to get work as an actor in those days. Michael Dobbin hired him for a number of the ancillary events at the festival. Ronnie and I shared a cynical, dry humour that started a friendship that has grown immensely and complexly over the decades.
Daniel MacIvor also came through town with his bravura one-man show House. Pete and I loved the show, and arrangements had been made for the three of us to meet at a nearby bar after seeing it. Years later Daniel would say, “That image of you and Pete walking into the bar was so beautiful I wanted to know you both.” He, Ronnie and I would form a sort of queer triumvirate of our generation that would lead to all sorts of comparisons, collaborations and rivalries. To this day they remain my brothers in envelope-pushing and artisan excellence.
The night of the closing ceremonies of the Games, people gathered in immense crowds all over the city, many of them heading to Olympic Plaza directly in front of the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts. Above us fireworks exploded in a glassy sky as Pete and I slipped our arms around one another, smiling.
* * *
—
Immediately after the Games ended the city was plunged into a period of dark depression. The influx of so much money and so much attention ended so abruptly, it was like the worst coke crash ever. As citizens recovered and opportunists counted their money and beat it out of town, a pall fell over the city—most of which I was spared because the second portion of the DramaLab program kicked in and I flew off to Montreal to write a short episode of a series being made for the National Film Board of Canada.
I was put up in the elegant but then crumbling Queen Elizabeth Hotel, which had a modernist exterior and a dated late-fifties interior. I’d heard great things about Montreal gay life over the years, and on a sleety January weeknight I set out to find the Gay Village dressed the same way I would have for a commensurate temperature in Edmonton or Calgary. This meant I wore a winter coat and runners, because on the prairies winters are generally dry enough that insulated footwear is optional. After two blocks of trudging through ankle-deep slush I was chilled to the bone and shaking so much I could barely register the garish sights of Ste-Catherine Street.
I can’t remember the details of my NFB episode, but I do remember endless meetings with the producer and director about whatever it was I’d written—which always required endless rewrites based on notes they’d given me, most of which indicated they hadn’t actually read what I’d written at all. It was not a happy time. I spent a lot of money commiserating with Pete on the phone.
When we were apart he was dating women and I’d sometimes see other men. We’d talked about this early in our relationship. We both felt monogamy was an unrealistic expectation for most people and, given our divergent sexual tastes, found it made little sense to swear to fuck only one another. We were both candid with one another about these encounters and swore that if any of these experiences threatened our relationship we would share that with the other immediately. Although we would have our codependency/jealousy issues, they would never be sexual.
It was a relief to finally fly back to Calgary. Pete was doing a school tour with a children’s theatre troupe in Edmonton, and I had decided it was time to find new living arrangements. Living with Stephen and Kerrie was like living with two rowdy teenagers, and as a mature man of twenty-eight, I’d had my fill.
Doug, a friend I’d made in Edmonton the previous year, was a straight guy who loved poetry and working with his hands, a hard-living/drinking/loving former frat boy with an amazing design sense and a dreamy manner. When he told me about an apartment next to his above a corner store, I jumped at the chance to check it out. The apartment was a long, narrow boxcar-style suite. Doug had renovated his own suite so there was a spacious living area in the front, a kitchen and bathroom in the centre, and a work area at the back. The one I was looking at, though, had been a flophouse for years and was a nightmare of wood panelling, greasy cupboards and liquefied foodstuffs in the filthy fridge. But the rent was unbelievably low, and Doug assured me the owner of the building would pay for all the materials for a reno and give me a cut in the rent while it was happening. What’s more, Doug would walk me through everything that needed to be done. I took the place and we started the renovation.
* * *
—
Tomoko Sato was a precocious and talented Calgary high school student who had submitted her play to the ATP student playwriting unit, and everyone had been impressed by it. Josh’s Plane was about a high school jock who gets AIDS from a blood transfusion. While it showed the writer’s inexperience, it still packed a punch, and Dobbin decided it should be produced at Tomoko’s school. The school board agreed, and I was asked to direct, which, given my affinity for the subject matter, I was more than happy to do.
This was my first time directing students, and I was an authoritarian control freak. But I allowed the large cast to share their voices and ideas, and the AIDS education that accompanied the show was profound for everyone involved. The play ran to capacity houses and created quite a stir in Calgary, although most of the potential controversy was neutralized by the fact the only mention of anything homosexual in the play was the straight main character’s passing concern that others would think he was gay.
Later that spring I flew back to Montreal for the last phase of the DramaLab program, which was the final realization of our short films for the NFB. I spent hours in my hotel room desperately rewriting scenes for some pointless project I no longer remember for anything other than the consternation it caused me. In fact, this was where my indifference to film and television took root. Eventually I just said “Fuck it,” signed off emotionally and wrote whatever the director or producers asked me to, even though I knew it was complete bullshit.
One night, after a particularly stressful day, I was standing at the window gazing out at the Montreal skyline that sparkled with skyscraper windows lit by fluorescents, when suddenly the city disappeared. This was the great Montreal blackout of 1988.
I was trapped on the eighteenth floor. Thankfully the phones were still working, and I had at least four beers in the minibar that now had to be drunk, so I spent the next couple of hours talking to Pete on the phone.
Word of our relationship had started to get out. Pete’s friends were particularly baffled, as they’d only known him as not only resolutely heterosexual but a bit of a hound as well. My friends, who were all well aware of my wide-ranging tastes and inconsistent sexual history, were less confused. By the end of the conversation we decided Pete should come to Montreal.
He arrived a few days later. We fell into one another’s arms and moved onto the bed. He stretched his smaller frame out on top of my larger one. We breathed together until our hearts were in sync. He curled his face into the side of my neck. We both admitted nothing felt as right as our being together.
While swilling beer and snorting coke one evening, we decided it was time to move in together. We would be a domestic team as well as a writing team.
Reactions to us going public with our relationship were mixed. Sexual ambiguity and experimentation is hardly rare in the arts, with one encountering “alternative” relationships more frequently than in the non-arts disciplines. As the old joke goes, there is straight and then there is actor straight. Given that an actor’s job is to understand and convey the experiences of other people, at their best they tend to be people who aren’t afraid of new experiences. On the other hand, homophobia, sexism and racism are hardly unknown in any of the arts.
* * *
—
Micha
el Dobbin called. He and Allen MacInnis wanted to see me at the theatre. My anus was clenched. I needed this production. Wolfboy was four years in my past, Young Art two. If I had any hope of a credible career in the theatre, it had to happen with this play.
Dobbin still wasn’t sure whether to put the show into the playRites Festival. He had no idea how the audience or the sponsors, most of them oil corporations, would respond. Allen reminded him that the festival had been created to take risks. Dobbin conceded. Remains would be done.
It wasn’t all good news. They informed me that Allen would soon leave Alberta Theatre Projects to move on to his new role as AD of Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. Allen would be replaced by Bob White, the former AD at Factory Theatre in Toronto who, along with Passe Muraille and the Tarragon, had been one of the earliest producers of exclusively new Canadian work. Allen had been my first choice for director.
When I received my contract for Remains I read it thoroughly, then asked for a meeting with the general manager at ATP. I told him the only clause I had an issue with was the one stating that the theatre would get a certain percentage of my royalties for a period of time. This was a common clause then, and may still be now. Producers have always bilked creators for an inordinate share of their usually limited profits. If they had commissioned the script, I might have considered the clause for a limited time after production——but considering this was a festival with a limited number of performances and limited possibilities for financial remuneration, the clause struck me as very one-sided, and I would not sign off on it.
The general manager, who had already given his notice to leave the company for another job, said, “You’re right. We’ve never had a show go on to a second production anyway, so just strike that paragraph out of the contract and initial it.”
