by Brad Fraser
Poor Super Man opened and received great reviews, although an ultra-right-wing magazine published one of the most homophobic “reviews” I’d ever read, and I’d read a lot of homophobic reviews by this point. But this only increased the play’s visibility once the mainstream press picked up on the controversy, as they always did.
From long before I was recognized in any way, I had written responses to articles and reviews I disagreed with, or that I thought were particularly well-written and worthy of praise (rare). I felt it was better for criticism to lead to dialogue between artist and reviewer, and reacted accordingly, often with quickly typed, badly edited letters to the editors or to the reviewer themselves. I learned that a bad review, if responded to in the right way, could actually be a boon for the show, particularly if I could honestly call someone out for being homophobic or biased.
I learned quickly that despite the press’s lip service to balance and fairness, the predominantly slightly right-of-centre journalistic elite in Canada did not like being subjected to the same scrutiny and tone they themselves almost always used. Many of them were far more sensitive than the people they wrote about when treated the same way, and I delighted in exposing that.
I could tell my cockiness irked some of the journalists I was speaking to—and not just the straight ones—and they’d often bait me with questions like “Does it bother you that so many people dislike you?” or “Is the subtext of your work that gay people can’t make relationships work?” I learned to anticipate these questions and had a cutting response to each. (“Universal popularity has never been an objective of mine” and “It’s called conflict. You also don’t see a lot of plays about straight people in ‘working’ relationships.”)
But I was genuinely shocked one day when an Edmonton television personality asked me during an interview, “Okay, Brad, all of this gay stuff is fine. We get it. But when are you going to write something for straight people?”
I said, smiling, “Do you have any idea how offensive that is?”
He looked at me, confused. “What? Why?”
“If you were interviewing Spike Lee, would you ask him when he’s going to write something for white people?”
“Oh, that’s hardly the same thing. Gay isn’t a race—”
I cut him off, but not too angrily because that can be dangerous for queers. “No. But it is a historically persecuted minority that until very recently was systemically wiped from history, tortured and killed. Currently we’re in the middle of a plague the straight world is oblivious to.”
“But, Brad, do you have to be so angry about it all the time?”
“Yes. I do. It’s the only thing that keeps me going while everyone around me is dying.”
He laughed and nodded, dismissing the entire digression, which would be edited out of the interview, and we went on to other things. Decades later when he interviewed me for another play opening the same journalist said, “We baited you a lot in those days. You stood up to us, but it really wasn’t fair.”
The negative feedback wasn’t entirely from the right. There was a contingent of university grads redolent of developing identity politics who insisted the “sex and drugs/hard living/hard talking” world I depicted was not conducive to the creation of aspirational queer/feminist role models. When I explained that I wasn’t writing role models, I was writing characters for popular culture, I was denounced as callous to the minoritarian representatives I was writing about. I found it hysterical that people who could afford to go to university would lecture me about privilege. For me, there is no more fascistic an impulse than to try to limit anyone’s imagination, and I refuse any such attempt under any circumstances. My imagination has always been both an extension of my empathy and my greatest gift.
After opening Poor Super Man in Edmonton I flew back to Toronto, where I learned that Disney wanted one more meeting. I hopped a plane two days later and was back on the Disney lot in another room full of studio executives who listened to my pitch, which was much more polished than the first time. Their questions were much more penetrating, my responses much more specific. I could tell they were close to making a decision.
* * *
—
In Toronto I despaired because of my lack of a lover or life partner. I prayed for the right guy to come along who was ready to share the madness that was my life at that time. In truth I was in the worst possible condition for having a boyfriend. I was too full of myself. My inspirational bulletin board that I’d curated for so many years was no longer filled with ideas, images and articles for further inspiration for my work, but covered in articles about me and photos of me.
I worked out for at least ninety minutes four days a week religiously. I tried to limit my carbs and obsessed about my weight. I had a membership at a tanning salon. I flirted with the circuit party scene, but found that underneath the steroid-fuelled macho bravado and the “fuck you, we’re not fairies” attitude there was a dark nihilism—an attitude of “If I’m going I don’t care who I take with me” that creeped me out. It was a movement fuelled by drugs and dance music, and I found myself increasingly tired of both.
I was sleeping somewhere in somebody’s home, probably in Toronto, when the phone rang.
“They want it,” Shain said.
I said, “Who wants what?”
“Disney wants the screenplay for Beauty and they’re willing to go pay-or-play”—meaning I’d get paid a high rate regardless of how many drafts they wanted and regardless of whether the film was ever made.
Two days later it was all over the news that Brad Fraser, king of the rude, alternative theatre scene, had signed a deal with a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company to write a screenplay based on a successful novel. The Canadian media gave this a lot of play, as the juxtaposition of my aesthetic with the Disney style was fascinating to consider.
Disney offered Shain a three-year, three-picture contract if I would sign my entire back catalogue—literally everything I’d written prior to that moment—as well as anything I would write for the next three years over to them, across the universe in perpetuity. The money they were offering was more than I’d ever contemplated but wouldn’t take care of me for the rest of my life, so I politely declined, happy to adhere to the original one-movie deal we were discussing and retain the rights to my plays.
The final contract brought me the largest payday of my life up to that point. I decided it was time to do something no one in my family had ever done before: buy a house.
I struggled with where to buy. Toronto was in a downturn at the time and property was relatively cheap. I could’ve gotten a smart, compact downtown condo for my budget, but the same amount of money in Edmonton could get me a substantial house. I still distrusted Toronto. It was a great place to sort of live, but I feared a repeat of my early-eighties experience if I should commit. In the end, Edmonton won.
My new house had a spacious, modern layout on a nice-sized, undeveloped lot. There were three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the main floor, an attached double garage and a huge basement space just waiting to be developed. I approached an old friend from my early days at Flashback who was still living with his parents and struck a deal with him to live in the house and care for my cats when I wasn’t there.
While settling in I heard that I’d been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Canada’s version of the Oscars, then called the Genie Awards. Given the critical response to Love and Human Remains, I figured it was unlikely I would win, but since the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television would spring for my airfare and hotel for two nights in Toronto, I decided I’d go. David Gale consented to being my date. I wore an expensive pair of skin-tight tweed pants that would now be called leggings with a sumptuous high-collared Egyptian cotton shirt and a grey herringbone vest—very on trend at the time—with a heavy pair of black Harley boots, looking way more rock star than film writer. To my surprise, I
won.
I made my way to the stage with as much poise as I could summon, made some vulgar joke about the obscurity of Canadian celebrities and gave Denys and Roger my genuine and heartfelt thanks. It was lovely to win a statue, but the real reward was the $10,000 cheque.
When the news of my Genie win was announced, the New Democratic Party in Alberta, who were in opposition at the time, put forward a motion in the legislature to congratulate me on my win and the prestige it brought to Edmonton and the whole province. The Conservative party, which had ruled the province for thirty years at that point without a challenge, declined to support the honour because I was a well-known homosexual and therefore not someone Alberta could be proud of.
The outcry at the blatant homophobia was mild, but the press picked up on it and within a few days it was the subject matter of radio call-in shows and TV interviews with the religious element overrepresented, as it still is in the Canadian press, and a few progressives and gay-positive allies sprinkled in to maintain a scintilla of objectivity. When the news of this scandal finally filtered back to me in Toronto, I laughed it off. I’d been dealing with Alberta’s homophobic bullshit my entire life. I was proud of my accomplishments even if they weren’t.
During this period I watched five films a week for months, mostly contemporary but with classics thrown in here and there, as I worked to more completely understand how film scripts worked. Whenever I was hired to write a screenplay the producers would always go on about how hip and edgy I was and how they wanted a hip, edgy script. So I’d write a hip, edgy script and their reaction was invariably, “Holy fuck, this is way too hip and edgy. No one will ever buy this.” I’d dutifully integrate their notes in a new draft and they would inevitably respond with “It’s lost something…,” and I’d think, “Yeah. Originality, courage and surprise because your notes were stupid.” I learned what I could and cashed the cheques.
* * *
—
That summer I went to New York with my Trinidadian/Canadian friend Gordon, an executive at a large cosmetics company, for the 1994 Stonewall 25th Anniversary celebration, which included the Gay Games and a huge arts festival celebrating the gay community. People came from all over the world, and for a week New York was gayer than it had ever been—which was saying a lot.
Gordon had use of a company apartment at Columbus Circle with a pullout couch in the living room for me. We spent our days sightseeing and hanging out with his friends from the world of fashion and cosmetics. Our evenings were spent at the many dance parties at the Palladium, the Tunnel and Club USA and attending nostalgic concerts featuring stars of yesteryear.
We’d also taken advantage of a special deal on tickets for the Broadway production of Angels in America, both parts on consecutive nights. Although the play had been in development and limited production as early as 1993, I hadn’t heard a thing about it until we were opening Poor Super Man in Cincinnati. There were many plays about AIDS at the time, what did one more matter? In the case of Angels it mattered a lot, and, unfortunately for many gay artists dealing with similar material at the time, it would become the defining theatrical offering on the epidemic.
The night before the Gay Pride parade, Gordon and I did all the drugs and all the clubs until we ended up at the Sound Factory, which was the hottest club of the day. I kept running into guys I knew from Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto. I got sidetracked by some hot young thing and spent most of the night necking with him on the dance floor or in a dark corner. At what I assumed to be about around five or six in the morning I bade him goodnight and headed out to skulk home just before the sun rose.
I had seriously fucked up my timing. Wearing only ripped jean cut-offs, a jockstrap, army boots and the large wool socks that held my wallet and keys, I stumbled out onto West Twenty-Seventh Street to full-on sunlight and Sunday-morning traffic with pedestrians on their way to brunch and church. I walked down the street with my head held high despite the stares and got a cab as quickly as I could.
When I got up to the apartment Gordon was there, passed out. I stretched out to catch what sleep I could. Two hours later I was apologizing to Thomas Gibson on the phone. He had invited me to walk in the parade with a group of actors from Tales of the City and its author, Armistead Maupin, whom I greatly admired, but I was too fucking hungover. Thomas was disappointed but understanding. I would later regret not having taken the opportunity to meet one of my idols.
It was late afternoon before Gordon and I came to life, and the parade, which would last for hours as all Pride parades do, had begun its long walk up Fifth Avenue to Central Park. We could see the floats and the tops of flags a block away from where we had a hungover brunch, nursing Bloody Marys.
Gordon made a dismissive gesture with both hands and said in his soft Trinidadian accent, “I am done with the drugs.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Gordon watched carefully as I opened it up and revealed two very small purple pills. “These were in one of my socks this morning. I think it’s acid and I think I bought it last night.”
Gordon looked at me over his sunglasses, impressed, and said, “You are wild…”
Two hours later the drugs kicked in, after we’d fallen in step with the crowd who’d watched the parade and was now making its way to the park. The sun was getting low in the sky, we were surrounded by beautiful people blowing on whistles and screaming defiantly—it felt like being in a movie.
Every few blocks we’d pass an isolated crowd of six to ten badly dressed people, men, women and children, brandishing signs denouncing homosexuality, liberalism, sex, everything we were celebrating. Often they were screaming at us, their faces twisted with hate, spittle flying from their lips—but their contempt was always tempered by the fact they were so radically outnumbered. When we were all gathered together, these bigots were no threat.
We arrived in hordes on the Great Lawn, gay men, lesbians, trans people, bisexuals, our allies, of all colours, all religions and all races, luxuriating in the rare power we were feeling in all being together.
A moment of silence was called for to remember those we had lost. An electric wave of recognition ran through the crowd as the hush fell over the park and seemingly across the entire city. It wasn’t just a moment of silence—it was a moment of blankness, a moment of non-existence, of negative space where those who were lost had once existed. No other city on the planet knew this feeling as well as New York.
People wept without inhibition; strangers hugged one another. I put my arm around Gordon and pulled him close. The sounds of the city were muted. The shadows crept longer on the grass. Eventually the moment dissolved, but the energy afterwards was gentle, careful, like lovers after a particularly savage fight, like a parent finally realizing their punishing behaviour is only making their adolescent child’s issues worse, tender, open, wounded.
* * *
—
In August Bob O accompanied me on my second trip to Edinburgh (I’d gone the year before for a One Yellow Rabbit production of The Ugly Man), where Poor Super Man opened at the Traverse Theatre before transferring to the Hampstead in London. We arrived at the end of the festival so we could attend the opening in London. Ian Brown’s production there was solid, although some of his actors fell into the trap of editorializing their internal pain for the audience, making the experience too maudlin and sentimental for my taste.
I loved London. Like New York it was a place that had been mythologized in my mind through popular culture, and particularly the history of the theatre, for decades, and to be not only visiting but also opening a show there was amazing. In the days leading up to the opening I spoke to a lot of journalists. Britain’s tradition of a wide and varied array of newspapers and magazines provided many opportunities to plug the play and remind people of the success of Remains. Poor Super Man would also be a hit in London.
Early in the spring Derek Goldb
y’s production of Poor Super Man opened in Winnipeg to ecstatic reviews. The Manitoba Theatre Centre hadn’t invited me to the show, but I read about it in the papers. While it was running I met Randy in Montreal, where we saw the French production at Quat’Sous. It was brilliantly translated, directed, designed and acted. The Quebecois did not judge my characters according to the same questionable standards the university-educated “liberals” subjected my work to in English Canada. David was unapologetically gay and horny, and the women were unapologetically dedicated to and fucked over by the men in their lives. It was earthy, urgent and horny. The captions, projected across the back of the stage, were highly effective. After the show we ate with the cast and crew at a restaurant that served us late into the evening with delicious food and fine wine.
The Toronto opening a few months later was not so sweet. I arrived dressed to the nines and accompanied by one of the hottest men in town, whom I’d met a few weeks earlier. The audience was responding exactly as a playwright might hope, the actors were killing it, and Derek’s direction worked brilliantly against any hint of sentimentality in the script—but the captions were nowhere to be seen.
I was horrified. It was as if an integral character had been excised from the script without my consent. The audience had no idea what was missing and stood at the end as they almost always do at Toronto openings regardless of what they’ve seen. As the audience was filing out of the theatre I ran into Shain and asked through clenched teeth, “What the fuck happened to the captions?” Shain said, “I have no idea, but I’ll find out.”
As we all converged in the rehearsal hall for the post-opening party, I saw Derek. “What happened to the captions?” I hissed.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “The show’s a hit.” And then he scurried away.
