by Brad Fraser
Mr. Haugen’s positive influence was countered by my father’s growing strangeness. My penis was growing, and I’d discovered it was one thing that could give me some pleasure in a life often bereft of it. But our living situations did not allow any privacy for a kid becoming an adult. The bathroom was my sole refuge, and I’d often rub one out while sitting on the shitter or taking a bath. But Wes, for whatever inscrutable reason, had decided it would be hilariously funny if he pulled the door open when I was bathing—there was no lock—to throw a glass of cold water on me while the rest of the family stood behind him and watched, laughing. This happened a number of times and each time it was humiliating. But it was presented as just a joke, as Wes’s abuse and manipulations often were.
It was also at the farm that I got my first exposure to queer lit, which I suppose makes an ironic sense as it was also the place where I first learned to suck cock. The bookcase in the living room contained maybe thirty or forty books, and I’d perused them all looking for parts I could wank to—I was already an expert at skimming until I found the dirty bits—but three of them had tangible effects on me.
They were: Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Thomas Hal Phillips’s The Bitterweed Path and James Kirkwood’s Good Times/Bad Times. Each of these books is now recognized as a queer classic. Each of them forced me to look beyond the dirty bits and consider the entire story. It was revelatory. Although I still didn’t have a name for what I might be—I certainly didn’t feel like a fag or a sissy—I saw myself in these books where same-sex love was never stated but the themes were clear. Where had these books come from? The only committed reader in the family besides me was Wes. Were these his books? Had he read them?
Most of what he read was soft-core porn, and each of these books was marketed using their promise of taboo sexual content as a hook. Though I only realized they were queer classics over a decade later, it’s interesting to consider the possibility that Wes was reading these books at the same moment his eldest son was discovering his own sexuality.
One day I was hanging out with school friends on the beach at Seba, the summer town two miles from the farm, when I met a girl from Edmonton. When we were introduced she asked me, “Are you related to Lorrie Fraser?” I nodded eagerly—“She’s my cousin”—and gave her a quick update on my search for Aunt Janet. On her next trip to Seba she gave me Lorrie’s address, and when I returned home I triumphantly told my mother what I’d done. Sharon made me swear not to tell anyone. Janet had disappeared for a reason and mom was sure she didn’t want any Frasers finding her.
The next opportunity she had, my mother loaded us into the car and drove into Edmonton, where we were happily reunited with our lost cousins. I think Aunt Janet was less than pleased, but she welcomed us in and we all caught up on the intervening years. As we left, everyone promised they wouldn’t betray her whereabouts.
Around the same time my father had to take a couple of sudden trips to B.C. that were not explained and usually lasted the entire weekend. Because we had no phone, he’d deliver the news of his absence in a call to our neighbours, who then conveyed the message to us. Sharon knew he was seeing the Amazon again, and her seething resentment was like a toxic gas.
One Friday morning, just as Wes was leaving for work he announced he wouldn’t be home until Sunday night. Sharon said nothing, but I could tell from the way her eyes contracted that something profound was going to happen. He didn’t look at us when his ride arrived and he walked out the door.
The second he was gone Sharon told us all to throw some clothes into paper bags because we were leaving. We kids didn’t protest; we didn’t beg to stay. Sharon got us into the car, and with Janet’s help we had an apartment and emergency supplies within a few days. We’d had to give up our dogs. Happily, though, an elderly couple at the SPCA, on seeing the family’s distress, adopted them immediately.
* * *
—
Going to school in the big city was intimidating. Kids there were a lot more aggressive than kids where I’d lived. Also, the student body was more diverse. I constantly felt self-conscious and inferior, but as my hair grew out and I got some bell-bottom pants, I began to feel like less of a freak.
I’d been at junior high for three weeks when I came home one day and saw Wes’s canary-yellow Acadian parked in front of our apartment building. My sisters and brother were gathered at the open car door. Wes had his arms around them. I walked past slowly. Our eyes met. He didn’t hold a hand out to me or in any way invite me into the tableau.
Sharon was at the sink doing dishes. I asked how he’d found us. She told me he’d hired a private investigator. I said, “You’re taking him back.”
She didn’t look at me, just nodded.
I walked into the bedroom I shared with my brother and closed the door.
At first Sharon and Wes’s reconciliation was a lot of fun. They bought a ton of seventies furniture on credit from Woolco and swore to dedicate themselves to their family. Wes even took me to a couple of movie matinees—no conversation, of course. But within a few months they were feuding again.
That’s when the beatings started.
The first time, he and Sharon were fighting in the living room after we kids had gone to bed, and I went out to make sure she was okay. Wes said, “Get back in your room.”
I said, “No.”
Wes had rarely hit us. His emotional manipulation and intimidation were enough to keep his family in line. He had never hit my mom.
He hit me instead.
And he enjoyed it. I could feel it as the energy of that pleasure in his hand became the pain in my face. It was a hard, open-palmed slap he knew wouldn’t leave a mark. I felt like my jaw had separated from my skull. Sharon screamed for him to stop. Wes said, “Go back in your room.”
I said, “No.”
He hit me in the face from the other side, same meaty, open palm. He called me a faggot. My eyes lost focus. I fell against the wall. I knew if I tried to defend myself it would just be worse. He pushed me into my bedroom and I fell onto the bed, helplessly listening to their resumed shrill conflict, feeling like the most terrible child in the world.
Later he came in, sat on the edge of the bed, put his hand on my shoulder and told me he hadn’t wanted to do that but I had to behave. He hugged me and, oddly, through my bruises, I felt closer to him than I’d ever been.
The beatings weren’t about my behaviour; they were about keeping me in line and subservient to his will. And I was having none of it anymore. I refused to behave the way he wanted me to. I didn’t swear at him or talk back, I just continued to say no when he would order me to do something he could easily do himself. It took a lot of courage-summoning for me to do it. I’d spend hours telling myself it was only pain. Pain always went away eventually.
When he beat me a third time my mother threatened to hit him over the head with a frying pan. This just increased the abuse. When she called the cops, two of them showed up and I watched as my father gaslighted us all as he became that other, easygoing person he performed in public. He convinced the cops it was just a minor domestic disturbance and he was disciplining his son. They assured him he had every right to do what he was doing, and left.
Wes and I were alone in the apartment the next time we got into it. At one point he picked me up, threw me down on the tile-on-cement floor and kicked me a few times. I wasn’t unconscious, but I couldn’t move or see right. After a moment he stopped and stood staring down at me. Then he helped me to my feet, took me out to the car and drove to the nearest hospital, where I was diagnosed with a concussion.
My father sat on the one chair in the ER. I sat on the examination table. The doctor stood in the doorway and asked, “How did this happen?”
I looked at my father expectantly. He smiled at the doctor. “He fell down the stairs.”
The doctor looked from me to Wes. They shared a look.
The doctor nodded and left the room. I loathed them both.
Even after that there was one more beating. This time when he slapped me I laughed at him.
He slapped me again.
I laughed and said: “You’re beating up a kid. Your son. You’re nothing but a fucking bully. You’re pathetic.”
He hit me again but his eyes were shiny and wet.
I’d stopped laughing. Now I spoke casually. “You can beat me until I’m dead. I don’t care. You’re a mean asshole and a terrible father and I never want to be like you in any way. I never will.” Then I laughed again, feeling a kind of power I’d never known in my life.
Wes looked stunned, and then he kind of reached for me as if for a hug. I sneered at him and went to the bathroom to wash my bleeding lip.
These beatings did not figure into Sharon’s decision to finally leave Wes a few months later. It was over for good after a night out with a group of people from the apartment building, when Wes hit on one of her single-mother friends.
We moved into a city-subsidized housing development in Beverly, on Edmonton’s outmost eastern edge. The townhouse had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a galley kitchen with an eating area, and an unfinished basement with modern laundry machines. We even had a patch of lawn out front.
Sharon worked a series of jobs—factory shift worker, store clerk, cocktail waitress—all of which she quit the second she got bored. Between jobs we lived on welfare. She made it clear she would no longer be cleaning up, cooking meals or washing clothes for us but neglected to teach any of us how to do those things ourselves. She made little effort to get us to school on time or take part in parent/teacher meetings. She didn’t look at any of my report cards after I completed grade nine. She discovered the singles scene and spent much of the week sewing new outfits to wear to events where she met many men.
Meanwhile, I worked a variety of part-time jobs in the evenings in order to keep myself in stylish clothes, smokes, records and comic books.
In Beverly I made friends. If I wasn’t exactly popular, I wasn’t exactly unpopular either and was pleased to be invited to parties and to hang out with the various groups of people I intersected with. I wasn’t a jock, I wasn’t a nerd, I wasn’t a drama kid, but I knew people from each of these groups and circulated among them with as much comfort as one can feel at that age. I went out with girls and obtained a number of furtive hand jobs while necking in basement rec rooms or the back seats of cars at drive-in theatres. However, much as I liked these girls, I secretly knew I was more sexually interested in boys. As I got older there were drunken experiences with other guys, also mostly furtive hand jobs, which would never be spoken of afterwards.
As a student at Eastglen High I was mostly indifferent. The one thing all of my teachers could agree on was that I was imaginative and had a facility for expressing myself through writing that was beyond my years.
I had developed a sharp tongue and a dark sense of humour that could be merciless. I had an unerring talent for finding someone’s most vulnerable point and attacking it if I had to in order to protect myself, which I was far too quick to do. Like all kids that age I was fucked up but not nearly as fucked up as I should’ve been considering my upbringing. Somehow in all of that conflict I’d learned to parent myself, to look out for my own best interests and, most impossibly of all, to maintain some degree of self-esteem.
Why was I so different from my family? Was I not my father’s son? Was it the queerness? It made me feel like a freak, but there was a kernel underneath making me feel strength in my differences. That kernel of whateverness somehow kept me from the precipice of despair I sometimes teetered at in those days.
I had lost any fear of adults and if I respected one it was because they had earned it. I had a quick mind and a great vocabulary and I enjoyed pointing out the flaws in their arguments or their biases. I didn’t speak to them like a mouthy teenager; I spoke to them as another adult. Among my peers I was known as the guy who wasn’t afraid to tell the group something could be wrong even if they all believed it to be right.
* * *
—
By the end of the eleventh grade I was in deep academic trouble, having spent most of my time hanging out in the smoking pit with my friends or at home watching afternoon movies in the empty house.
Paradoxically, I wanted desperately to graduate from high school. Very few people in my extended family had done so, and no one in my immediate family. It was important to me because I didn’t want a life anything like the life I’d come from. The problem, though, was most of my classes were so damn boring. I’d read all the assigned material, but the teachers’ summations of it put me to sleep or caused endless, compulsive doodling. To their credit, a number of my teachers recognized the problem and would help me out with one-on-one tutoring or more challenging assignments, but to little effect. Still, I knew that if I wanted to avoid the trap of my background and class, I would have to make some dramatic changes to my life.
Like most gay people of my generation, my true character, narrative and life did not emerge until I left my upbringing and my family behind, which was not as profoundly difficult for me as it was for others, since my family had already been shattered.
I knew that my upbringing had instilled a tremendous anger within me and that if I didn’t find a way to channel that anger constructively it would end up directed at those around me or myself. I also knew it would trap me in the world I came from. Creative activities had always been the best way for me to channel my negative emotions and I knew my salvation would be with them. I also knew what I’d been taught was love didn’t seem like love at all, and I had developed some serious questions and ideas about the many meanings, often negative, that word can have.
Thankfully, something was about to happen that would facilitate the change I craved. Something that my life to that point had made me uniquely qualified for.
ACT ONE
PART ONE
TWO PARIAH AT A BUS STOP IN A LARGE CITY LATE AT NIGHT
MY NASCENT ADULT playwright/activist/artist self was born the moment the house lights went down in a small theatre at Victoria Composite High School in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1976. I was seventeen.
The show was Philemon, a little-known musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, who had also written one of off-Broadway’s longest-running twentieth-century shows, The Fantasticks. It starred a friend from junior high school who persuaded me to attend. Its highly theatrical, suggestively minimalistic production style, coupled with the haunting, sometimes infectious score, transported me in a way I’d never been transported before. By the time the lights came up at the end and we had all burst into rapturous applause, the trajectory of my life had been irrevocably changed. Within a week I decided to leave Eastglen High and transfer to Vic Comp to attend their Performing Arts program.
Switching high schools would take me away from Beverly and the close friends I’d made there. A few were supportive, but there was a sense of betrayal, that I was becoming snooty and artistic. We came from a world of shop stewards, shift workers at the nearby industrial plants and oil refineries, bus drivers and rail workers, waitresses and store clerks, alcoholic fathers and bitter passive-aggressive mothers; a world of quiet emotional and sexual abuse numbed by the joys of suburban alcoholism, bullies, gangs, cliques and bar fights. I wanted a world of glamour and excitement.
When I registered at Vic I did something I’d always wanted to do but had never quite found the courage for at any other school I’d attended: I registered as Brad (rather than Bradley) Fraser. I was determined to become someone else, and becoming Brad was the first step in my transformation. It upset Sharon when I refused the name she’d given me but I stuck to my guns. Brad wasn’t her best friend.
My first-year class convened in a large rehearsal room with gleaming (for two days) black floors and huge windows set high up on the wall. We had two teachers, Billy Bob
Brumbalow, a flamboyant Texan who was cagey about his sexuality, as teachers had to be in those days, and Don Pimm, a Burl Ives lookalike who assaulted many young women throughout his career as a teacher with impunity, as they did in those days. The class itself was two-thirds female. We were the usual assortment of oddballs, freaks and beautiful people that drama schools attract. We were “drama kids,” smart, talented, glib, needy and highly annoying.
Mornings were devoted to academic credits in such classes as English and History of Theatre, and afternoons were spent in the rehearsal room or stage area, learning stagecraft. We studied Laban movement—plenty of walking through Jell-O and allowing your body to be a pulsating beat—breathing exercises, rudimentary Alexander Technique, a bit of fencing, stage movement, articulation, period technique, acting, makeup and scene study. The program was a lot harder than I’d expected, and swanning around in tights made me self-consciously aware of how graceful and coordinated I was not. I often struggled to learn lines for scenes and would get in trouble for paraphrasing in performance. Over the first three months of the program nearly half of the students would drop out.
The year before, I’d started working part-time at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in downtown Edmonton as a telephone salesman. The studio was about as tawdry faux-glamorous as anything in seventies Edmonton could be. It also had a dodgy rep. A year earlier, a crusading radio reporter by the name of Eddie Keen—heard daily on 630 CHED, the most popular local teeny-bopper station—had exposed a viper’s nest of corruption and fraud that involved many sad, lonely people signing contracts for expensive lifetime dance lessons without really knowing what they were getting into. I remember something slightly homophobic about these reports even before I knew what homophobia was. The suggestion that the male dancers involved were all gigolos or “worse” (code for gay) and the women were all prostitutes seemed rather unfair.