Gay Canadian Writer Sky Gilbert

he aging enfant terrible of Toronto avant-garde theater Sky [né Schuyler] Gilbert engagingly begins his memoir, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory, originally published in 2000, by expressing trepidation about who would be interested in reading it: "What is there about Sky Gilbert's lie that's going to hold anyone's interest through a whole book? I certainly don't think my personal history is particularly fascinating to anyone but a dear friend." In this, I think he is somewhat wrong in that what he writes about his personal life is interesting. Not all the accounts of infighting in his professional life are, though some of the general forces he analyzes are.

Gilbert tentatively suggests that "if this book has any value, it will be because of the important period of time onto which my life has trespassed. This memoir spans the 18 years, from 1979 to 1997, when I was Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto." He sees those years as the ebbing of risk-taking avant-garde theater in Toronto, as well as years of backing off from the sexual revolution, not least by respectability-craving gay conservatives.

BTW, the title contrasts the frothy, money-making, comfort-inducing theatrical productions (of the "charm factory") with the unsettling, in-your-face ejaculations.

The book makes me sorry to have missed seeing the mountings of plays by Buddies (I also missed a chance to see one that traveled to San Francisco with Gilbert playing one of the "Drag Queens in Outer Space"). Before writing about the memoir, I wanted at least to read some of his plays (which led to the six in This Unknown Flesh, discussed below). That, in turn made me wish for another collection including "Cavafy, or the Veils of Desire", "The Dressing Gown", "Radiguet", "Lacey, or Tropicsnow", and "Ban This Show"(about Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith).

Gilbert is caustically funny about critics, particularly those with internalized homophobia (that is closeted gay critics mincing around the blunt sexuality of many of the Buddies plays: "My open existence is terrifying and disgusting to them: closet cases and 'nice' homosexuals hate me because I talk about gay sex and culture"), and chronicles the wear and tear of large egos in The Theatre (not that his own was/is small), public arts funding agencies, and within the sexual revolution in ways that provide enlightenment rather than just settling local scores on the Toronto scene(s).

What he writes about his own loves and losses is interesting to someone who knows/knew none of them and nothing about them other than what Gilbert wrote. (I don't think he needed to have worried on that score. He should have believed his own analysis in the following: "I suppose that most 'normal' people think sexual details are too private. But sexual people, people who are as relaxed about having sex as they are about eating dinner, don't think that.")

What he writes about other playwrights is invariably discerning (Brecht and Williams at the greatest length), and the pictures are interesting and helpful, but what I like best is the very clear statements of the anti-assimilationist perspective. As the venerable Toronto gay activist Jim Eigo puts it, "What's the use of being gay if you can't be different?"

There are several extended critiques of respectability-craving lesbians and gay men. Here is a briefer one about the Metropolitan Community Church that provides the flavor of his animus:

"It's difficult for me to understand why gays and lesbians would choose to ally themselves with Christianity, because it's so repressive. For the stay-at-home dykes and fags who like to pretend they're just "normal" people, going to church provides a lot of comfort. The gay/lesbian church, from what I've seen of it, has all the prerequisites of most Christian denominations: it's boring and unsexual and everyone stands around drinking bad coffee and talking about God in a way that doesn't really affect their daily life."

A Joe Orton-like disdain, eh? Gilbert the memoirist and analyst of gay life and culture is at his best when he let's fly. In writing about those who disappointed him on the Buddies board and boards, he seems to me to pull some of his punches. . . but, as in Hawthorne, skipping on worked for me. Not skipping over, because I thought that a number of supporting characters (many of them non-supportive) are vivid in his memoir and many of the battles were over celebrating/marginalizing gender and sexual variance(s). As an insider account of a queer institution.

Some of the Plays by Gilbert

"Drag Queens from Outer Space" was staged in Toronto when I lived there during the late 1970s, but I missed seeing it. There is a prominent drag queen role in only one of the six plays (and the least of the six) staged between 1983 and 1994 that are collected in The Unknown Flesh. The other four feature famous gay writers. One portrays the aging and alcoholic playwright Tennessee Williams casting a polite Florida adolescent boy as an angel. Williams asks the boy to read a poem by Rupert Brooke and makes no attempt to touch him Although suffused with sadness, "My Night With Tennessee" could reasonably be characterized as "sweet," not least in the boy's nonjudgmental tenderness for the wounded elder.

"Sweet" is not an adjective that would occur to anyone seeing or reading the two plays about the Italian film-director/writer Pier Paolo Pasolini and the boy who killed him, Angelo Pedari, though Gilbert also has Pasolini seeing the boy as an angel, albeit an angel of death. The first, "Pasolini/Pelosi or The God in Unknown Flesh: A Theatrical Enquiry into the Murder of Filmmaker Pier Paulo Pasolini" focuses more on the death wish Gilbert attributes to Pasolini. Despite its title, the second, "In Which Pier Paulo Pasolini Sees His Own Death in the Face of a Boy: A Defacement in the Form of a Play" is more concerned with the society of repression and homophobia (specifically, male fear of being penetrated and liking it).

Both of these plays ignore the possibility (and widespread assumption) that Pasolini's murder was planned by his enemies (and/or the many whom he had outraged in his openly pederastic lifestyle and in his obscene last film "Salo") rather than a spontaneous attack by a trick gone bad. I am quite aware that Gilbert was not attempting reportage documenting the murder. Indeed, the more hallucinatory first Pasolini play has Pasolini cradling the dying trick at the end ("When he suffers, I want to hold him" though "he is not someone I would like to know well.... He is what you last want to see."

In the second Pasolini play, it is that the open homosexual wants to penetrate the straight-identified hustler that sets off a murderous rage. Gilbert's Pasolini character says that "it is not so much because I long for death," but never articulates what it is instead that excites him about boys he knows are dangerous and in whose eyes he sees his own death. (There is also a parallel drama in which Gracious provokes Goodness to murder him.)

"Hester" is a very short (six-page) scene in the dressing room of a drag queen responding to knocks on the door, about which I have nothing to say/write. Hester" seems to me to just be an acting exercise

"Theatrelife" is an elaborate play about a contemporary theater company mounting a Victorian melodrama. Sexual politics (heterosexual and homosexual) are central and the artificiality of theater heightened by the mounting of a very old-fashioned play, Reading it, it seems that it would be very entertaining on stage. It is hard to gauge the theatrical effects that Gilbert strives for in all these plays from reading them. Robert Wallace's introduction asserts (and elaborates considerably upon) that "the primary effect of Sky Gilbert's work for the theatre is the transformation of the audience from isolated consumers of theatrical entertainment to collective participants in oppositional art." This is attained not only with multiple layers on the stage but by moving the actors into the audience on a number of occasions.

The final play in the collection, "More Divine: A Performance for Roland Barthes" shows two internationally renowned social/literary theorists from the College de France, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (both of whom died during the 1980s), competing for an attractive male student, Olivier, circa 1980. The diffident aesthete Barthes is thwarted and jealous as Olivier is captivated (or captured) by the more aggressively sexual Foucault (who, like Gilbert's characters Tennessee Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Geoffrey, the ringmaster of "Theatrelife," see young men as angels to be cherished). Skipping over another set of characters in the usual second narrative, Barthes goes to North Africa and finds solace with Arab youth. Foucault arrives and chides his colleague for "emotional domination" and "classism." They go on to discuss shame and coming out and then Barthes has a scene of bitter recriminations aimed at an astounded Olivier. The play ends back in Paris with the audience joining in something akin to the procession at the end of Fellini's "8 1/2." How it works in a theater filled with Torontonians (whom I found to be very cold-blooded when I lived there a few years earlier), I don't know. Even on the page, however, "More Divine" is an interesting and highly theatrical experience. (It also fits with what I know of Barthes and Foucault.)

There is frequent provocation for thought about sex and death in these plays along with characters who fit in my June gay here and there, now and then blitz. Having read them, I'd especially like to see "More Divine" and "Theatrelife" staged. For reading, "My Night with Tennessee" and "More Divine" are the most outstanding of the plays collected herein. The volume is enhanced by inclusion of photos from Buddies productions and by Robert Wallace's introduction.

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My June gay here and there, now and then AC blitz visited Toronto (and my alma mater, the University of Toronto) before in reviewing a biography of Michael Lynch. I have also written about (straight) Toronto writer Michael Ondatje,. and my own memoir of Michel Foucault.