by Brad Fraser
Late that winter Saturday Night magazine, which was quite huge at the time as Canada’s slightly arty-literary/pop-culture magazine, contacted Shain to ask me to be on the cover of their May issue. I was elated. This was big-time. The only thing better would’ve been being asked to be on the long-running Canadian panel game show Front Page Challenge. Sadly, that never happened.
I flew back and forth between Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal so much I began to feel like I was living in all three cities. On one of those trips to Montreal I had arranged to finally meet Pierre Bernard, the AD of Quat’Sous, and Maryse Warda, the brilliant dramaturge I’d been corresponding with for a couple of years by then. I loved the theatre and its people immediately and was always tremendously proud of my association with them. Pierre promised to read The Ugly Man and get back to me about a possible production.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, my generation of gay men, and members of minority groups all over the planet, were dying in droves.
Sam, the hairdresser who’d given me such good advice about being nicer and working out more, had died. His ex, Russ, whom I’d known since I first came out, was sick as fuck and being cared for by his bewildered family. Every time I went to the bar someone would give me the bad news about someone we both knew.
And always there was someone in the bar who was manifesting visible symptoms of the disease: skin lesions, extreme weight loss, palsied limbs. These people stayed in the darker corners with the friends who’d brought them, both visible and ignored within a social structure that was almost entirely based on health and beauty.
One night at the Roost, the hairy Greek bartender who’d been unsuccessfully cruising me for twelve years handed me my change for a beer and whispered, “You hear about Benny?”
I shook my head.
“About a week ago. His lover died last night.”
I tipped him too much and walked away, pushing my grief and fear and pain into the compartment I’d made for them over the last few years. It felt like pieces of my life were disappearing.
A few months later John Moffat called to tell me his lover Larry Lillo had died. The theatre community across the country mourned collectively. People like Larry and John were the first generation of out queer theatre-makers in this country. Sadly, as is the case in times of plague or war, the best and bravest died first, and far too often the less brave remained behind to run things. I often wonder what the Canadian theatre would be like today if all of those astounding queer artists we lost had survived.
I never went to funerals. People would say, “Oh you should, for closure.” But I didn’t want fucking closure. I wanted the rest of the world to know what we were going through. I wanted the disease and death to stop. I was tired of being afraid. I didn’t want to mourn, I wanted to fight.
Straight friends and family seemed to think I lived some kind of charmed existence filled with fame and fun. Every attempt I made to talk to them about AIDS and what was happening in my life, in the gay community, was invariably greeted by a glassy indifference, as if I’d just started speaking to them in a foreign language. They smiled and nodded and pretended to understand. Their indifference had a profound effect on my opinion of straight people. It made me angry. It made me bitter.
* * *
—
I was invited to an Italian translation of Remains being presented in Milan. I accepted happily. Tad knew someone who was working the flight and had me upgraded to first class for free. I just had to be sure to wear dress pants and not jeans.
I was met at the airport by representatives of the theatre and driven to my charming neighbourhood boutique hotel, which took nearly two hours—a nightmare after my first, sleepless transatlantic flight. They said they would pick me up around six for dinner before some event I was expected to attend. I stumbled up to my room and did the worst thing I could have—I fell asleep. I woke just before six feeling like a sack of jet-lagged shit.
This pretty much set the tone for my first trip to Europe. No one had any time to do anything other than take me to where I needed to be, where I was interviewed through a translator, photographed and then taken to the next appointment. Otherwise I was left entirely to my own devices in a city where I didn’t speak the language. To make matters worse, my always problematic circadian cycle was completely fucked up. I couldn’t sleep at night and could barely stay awake during the day, stumbling blearily through the various sights Milan had to offer.
After a few days Tad showed up just in time to see the show with me, and it was fucking amazing. Unlike anything I’d ever seen. The acting was broad, simple and very loud. The direction was fearless, expansive, with sound and video woven throughout and set pieces that rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling. The choral work I’d written for the play was interpreted as music, almost like backup vocals. And yet the play, the characters, the dialogue, the action were all still mine. The audience’s response was very positive. I was ecstatic and thanked the cast and both directors enthusiastically.
* * *
—
When we got back to Canada I stayed with Tad in Toronto for a few extra days. While cities across the United States had closed their sex hookup places, Canadian clubs had chosen to keep their doors open and offer comprehensive and constant educational information about how best to avoid spreading HIV. Tourists from all over America would fly in to take advantage of the weak Canadian dollar and the strong Canadian commitment to sexual freedom.
Pete was also in Toronto, on business, and we had dinner and caught up. He and the girlfriend he’d met, supposedly shortly after our breakup, had recently moved in together, but he was clearly enjoying his time away. I got him high on E and took him to the Barn, which had taken over the entire building on Granby Street. There was now a dark room and maze on the third floor, with the usual dancing and cruising on the second. By ironic happenstance, a number of gay guys we knew from Edmonton and Toronto were there, and it was like old times as we did some blow and drank too much. It got even more like old times when we ended up crashing on Tad’s hide-a-bed, and indulging in some light oral before passing out.
Before we parted, Pete gave me a moist lingering kiss unlike any he’d given me when we’d been together and an intense hug. I whirled away with my imaginary skirt of happiness spinning madly about me to be confronted by Tad, arms folded, regarding me skeptically.
“What?” I said in a voice that was two octaves too high.
Tad said, “We’ve seen this movie and we know how it ends.”
“We were too high, he needed someplace to crash.”
“I heard.” Tad moved into the Mary Tyler Moore kitchen and put the coffee maker on.
I stripped the fold-out bed and put it away. “He’s with a woman now.”
“And you’re famous now.”
“Pete’s not like that and you know it.”
Tad smirked. I packed.
A day later I was back in Edmonton, paying off a cat-sitting friend and catching up on all the mail that had collected while I was gone. The mail was very important in those days. It controlled my future as I waited for cheques to arrive from my agent after the commission had been deducted. If someone defaulted on a contracted payment, as was the case with a new theatre in London, Ontario, which had been brought down by internal financial malfeasance before I was paid, it could throw my financial situation off balance for months. A postal strike or slowdown could cripple me fiscally. I turned to Randy, offering him 10 percent of whatever I earned if he’d handle the money and keep me informed of what was coming up.
That May the cover story in Saturday Night came out; Scot Morison, an Edmonton writer, had been given the assignment, and I was open and honest with him about my background and about the abuse in my past. The story was fair and controversial. That they would feature a fag on the cover was unheard of; that that fag would speak candi
dly and eloquently about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse that had happened in his childhood was even more surprising. My immediate family had issues with the story, but I stood my ground. Members of my extended family would express their disapproval of what I’d said, but none of them would refute my narrative’s veracity.
A few weeks later Randy and I flew to L.A., at the urging of Shain. Since it had been announced that Denys Arcand was shooting my first screenplay, I’d become a hot commodity and people wanted to meet me. This first, three-day trip was to interview agents. Once I had American co-representation, Shain wanted me to meet the development people at all the studios. I paid Randy’s way, as I needed someone who could drive and provide moral support. I felt like things were suddenly way out of my league.
We both agreed that L.A. was unlike any other city we’d been to. It was flat and sprawling, an endless network of freeways and roads through a maze of low-slung buildings and palm trees.
The agents were all polished and pleasant to a fault. I became painfully aware just how beautiful people were in this industry and felt second-rate. This was not helped when the agent I finally signed with, who was at MCA, turned out to be perhaps the most handsome man I’d ever seen in my life. That was not why I chose him. He was a good agent and made it clear he knew my strengths and where they would be best utilized. He was just incidentally intimidatingly handsome.
In the evenings we saw the sights and hung out at landmarks like the Viper Room, House of Blues and the Comedy Store, and hit the clubs. I found the tiny run of gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard rather ghettoized and varied in levels of the attractiveness of the clientele. In Hollywood the beautiful and ambitious often don’t want to be seen in gay bars. Many in the business were in the closet and did their socializing primarily at private parties and functions.
George Boyd, my stage manager friend from New York, was living in L.A. and stage managing a show called Distant Fires at the Coast Playhouse. He was pitching the theatre a production of Remains he wanted to direct, so he invited us to the show. Afterwards George introduced us to all of the actors, whom we’d loved, including D. B. Sweeney and Samuel L. Jackson just a couple of years before Pulp Fiction made him a household name. Both actors mentioned they’d heard of my play and were looking forward to seeing it in L.A.
I returned to Alberta with a new agent and a bit of a tan. I also returned to an absolute shit storm in the press.
* * *
—
Originally I had publicly insisted that the Remains film should be shot in Edmonton, and Denys Arcand and Roger Frappier had reluctantly consented. A continent-wide casting tour to audition actors had been going on for months. Denys and Roger had been to Edmonton a couple of times to scope locations. Some kind of agreement had been made concerning funding from Alberta as well as Quebec and Ontario to complete the film, but while I was gone, the Conservative Alberta, government, many of whose members resented my success because they hated gay people, had decided against the funding. Denys and Roger basically said, “Fine, we can’t afford to shoot it in Alberta then,” and moved the setting to Montreal. This created a great outcry from many progressive Albertans. Once again I was the subject of controversy.
Denys and Roger started filming the movie—now dubbed Love and Human Remains—in the fall. Partway through the shoot they brought me to Montreal to see what was going on. Denys and the entire team had been more than respectful with the screenplay, even having an assistant call me at home a couple of times to okay a change in the dialogue an actor had requested. The production company got me a good room in a good hotel and I was driven to the set with the actors each morning. On my first day, the first assistant director made a lovely speech about the impact of the play on Montreal and how honoured they were to be working on it. It was a beautiful, gracious moment and I could only stammer a clumsy “Thank you, merci.”
Watching take after take, shot after shot, I began to grow concerned. Denys was giving the actors very little psychological direction, and I felt everyone was getting away with their first, safest choice. David and Candy, as portrayed by Thomas Gibson and Ruth Marshall, were making all of the mistakes theatre actors made in their first reading of the play. They see David and Candy as best friends, star-crossed but ill-matched lovers when in fact, if one looks just beyond the obvious, they are far more angry and hurtful with one another than might be immediately apparent. The pacing was wrong. The actors didn’t seem to be listening to each other. The scene lacked the tension and therefore the humour of the stage show.
When I asked Denys about this on a break, he explained that I wasn’t seeing what the camera was seeing. What I was talking about would be found in the editing. “Even the energy and pacing?” I asked. He nodded, “Of course.” I was skeptical. Ulla Ryghe had taught me that the only thing that couldn’t be fixed in the editing was the energy of the performance, but who was I to question Denys Arcand?
Pete was in the same part of the country at the time, and I’d offered to host him on the set if he came out, which he did. As fate would have it they were filming the restaurant scene where David and Kane encounter one another for the first time, something that reflected our own relationship. Pete met Denys and the cast at dinner and we both drank quite a lot before we ended up back at the hotel, passing out fused to one another in sleep as we had been when we’d first fallen in love.
I woke long before the sun had risen and immediately knew he was also awake.
He said, “So—what?”
“Not sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Should we have done this?”
“You’re the one with the girlfriend you’re cheating on.”
“This isn’t cheating.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a man.”
I rolled onto my back, carrying him with me so he ended up on my chest in our old life-raft configuration. He nuzzled his chin into my neck and whispered, “I don’t know what it is. I love women. But you and me. There’s this thing. We’ll always be connected.”
A spark in my heart went out. I pushed him off me gently and sat up.
We’ll always be connected—those words reverberated through my consciousness and some primal survival thing that lives deep inside of me said very decisively, No.
I didn’t want what he was offering. I’d been fuck buddy on the side to a couple of attached guys in my life but not with someone I’d already lived with. I also knew how seductive it would be to settle for this, to stay with something comfortable right when I knew I should be exploring things that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t say anything, though, as we still had one more show to do together.
For the Workshop West production of The Ugly Man we only had two weeks in the rehearsal hall before moving into the theatre to open five days later. It was a gruelling schedule. I gathered the strongest actors I had available to me. I had worked with most of them before and knew I could rely on them. They understood what I wanted and knew we had no time to fuck around.
I’d asked David Skelton to design something with rooms and windows; he came back and suggested a tall wooden post, a giant boulder and a small wood-enclosed pond downstage. As usual, David had used his design choices to push me beyond my usual mode of direction, and my half-formed, slightly naturalistic ideas were rendered moot as I was forced to re-evaluate everything. I said to David, “I’ll work with that.”
David’s design forced me to look at the violence in the play in a new light. Everything was suggested. Nothing was literal. When the maid had her throat slit, no blood came from the actor, but a huge gush of it from the downstage fountain made her onstage death even more grotesque as she gurgled and writhed on the floor. When Veronica was shot in the head, a bucket of blood hidden near the fly gallery was dumped over her, soaking her entirely. I expanded the production throughout the space, with characters appearing at the doors into the thea
tre and in the aisles, playing scenes with actors on both sides of the intimate theatre.
The press response was surprisingly positive, although all remarked on the lack of sympathetic characters, which was my point. It also sold well.
A few days before opening, Pete had finally confronted me about my rather cool demeanour since we’d started rehearsal, and I told him about my epiphany in Montreal and that I’d come to the conclusion that the relationship we had wasn’t healthy for me and the only way I could deal with it constructively was not to see him at all anymore.
He was hurt. He was angry. I felt terrible, but I also knew I was making the right choice.
In the final dress rehearsal Pete gave a brilliant performance as the damaged but essentially decent Leslie, who is transformed by the evil of others around him. It was a performance that resonated emotionally with what had happened between us, and in our final note sessions I praised his work unconditionally. I knew he hated me, but I also knew he was strengthened by my acknowledgement of his work.
At the opening-night party he ghosted early with his girlfriend, saving us both a brittle goodbye. Whatever resentments we might’ve harboured at the end, I still think of him as one of the bravest people I’ve ever met for following his heart with me, rather than caving to what society told him he should do. Our entire relationship was a mostly wonderful experiment.
