All the Rage

by Brad Fraser

  Another guy joined the class at the same time. His name was Randy Sandowski and he was one of the three well-hung rats from the kid’s show. Randy had met the class at earlier social functions and seemed to know most of them much better than I did. Neither of us was particularly friendly toward the other, even though we were often paired together on projects, being the new kids. I found him a little too John Travolta in manner and dress, which was very eighteen months ago at the time. He would later say he found me patronizing.

  Most members of the class were also involved with the Walterdale Playhouse, either helping out technically or hoping to win a part and get onstage. There were auditions for The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare, and everyone had decided to go and watch even if we weren’t auditioning. I arrived late and quietly took a seat in a row right behind Randy, Cam and Dee—a beautiful dark-haired woman from class with a gravelly voice and a raucous laugh.

  Someone was reading onstage so there was not time for me to make my presence known. When the reader finished, Dee leaned into Randy, oblivious to me right behind them. “So, what do you think of the class?” she asked.

  Randy said, “It’s great. I like almost everyone.”

  She smiled conspiratorially. I could tell they’d probably fucked. “Who don’t you like?”

  Randy said, “Brad.”

  Before Dee could respond or he could elaborate I leaned forward and loudly cleared my throat. They both looked back at me, turned white and swallowed guiltily.

  Luckily, the next reader then took the stage, so they had an excuse to turn away before any of us could say anything. I watched the backs of their necks turn red and was thankful they couldn’t see the look in my eyes. Not because I was mad, but because I was hurt.

  A couple of days later Randy and I were teamed in an electronics class to learn how to solder wire when the instructor approached and took the soldering iron out of my hand to illustrate a point, saying, “Whenever you’re soldering, make it a habit to—”

  I cut him off. “If soldering ever becomes habitual with me, I’ll kill myself.”

  The instructor gave me a dirty look and departed. Randy doubled over with laughter; hand over his nose to hide the snot he just blew out of one nostril.

  Cam and Randy were close, but Cam and I had also developed a friendship, so it was natural the three of us would end up hanging out together. One night they dropped by the apartment after cruising around for something to do and coming up short. We were having a hammered discussion about sex, as we often did, while I sketched Randy posing for me in his underwear and leather jacket, wearing my straw fedora. Cam watched over my shoulder.

  The talk this time was about the morality of getting head. Did the sex of the other person matter if all you were going to do was come in their mouth? Did letting a guy suck your cock make you gay? Randy was surprisingly democratic in an old-world way. “Who cares who it is as long as someone’s sucking your cock?” Cam didn’t care. I told them about my blow job from Paul Reynolds in Banff. Neither was sure how to react.

  The three of us would skip classes to go and drink beer at the Saxony Hotel all afternoon or do poppers while watching two showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show back to back. Our partying was getting out of control, and the first thing to suffer was school. Lectures on lighting gels and costume history were increasingly less seductive. We’d missed so many classes that on our way to the bar one afternoon, Cam finally said, “If we miss this class we can never go back.” We shared a concerned look and then went to the bar anyway. That was the end of our time in the Technical Theatre course.

  Also, there was something happening between Randy and Cam, a palpable curtness. They were like a couple who’re really getting to know one another once the glamour has worn off. We were each a year apart, Cam at twenty, me in the middle at nineteen, and Randy at eighteen. We were all about the same height and had similar builds, although Randy, who’d been working out with weights since high school, had a beefy, muscular chest and shoulders we both envied. Cam was more willowy and lighter in tone. I was the skinny one with the dark hair and pale skin.

  One afternoon Cam and I were at Edmonton City Centre shopping for clothes at Big Steel or Black Sheep, and he brought up the conversation we’d had about blow jobs. He told me he often sucked cock, usually guys he met by hitchhiking around the city when he was drunk late at night.

  I was a bit agog, not that Cam was a cocksucker, which I’d surmised ages ago, but that he was telling me so unabashedly. He was dating a girl at the time, although I only remember her dimly. He’d admitted they’d had some good sex. “So you’re bi,” I said. He looked at me intensely without smiling and said, “Maybe. You?” I shrugged. We both laughed. Nervously bisexual.

  Then Cam and Randy had a falling-out that proved permanent. The details are unknown to me, but I do remember that the climactic event in the demise of their friendship was Cam coming home one night to find Randy fucking Dee in his bed. Apparently he’d given Randy keys to his coffin-sized basement bachelor suite for nights when Randy was too drunk to drive. After that Randy just stopped showing up. Cam was heartbroken but also spiteful.

  This was also when Cam and I went to Flashback for the first time.

  By the time I was in Vic Comp I had heard about Flashback, a gay bar then on the western end of Jasper Avenue underneath the Hot Box Restaurant. I was dying to go, but it was a private members’ club, so even when I turned eighteen I couldn’t get in without a member—members being gay people. I didn’t know any gay people, so it was a Catch-22.

  It was Cam who finally came through, after he landed a stylist apprenticeship at Hair by Michael. The titular Michael, who was a straight guy with a family and a very successful shop, naturally employed a number of gay men, and one of them was to leave Cam’s name, plus a guest’s, at the door.

  We fretted all week about our outfits. I’d found an amazing pair of high-heeled pointy-toed disco shoes that looked great with my high-waisted pants and button-down white shirt, my hair carefully blown into a nearly-over-one-eye Bryan Ferry bang. Cam’s hair had a certain Morgan Fairchild thing going on and his pants were tighter than mine.

  The club had moved to an alley just off 104th Street and 103rd Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from my place. We climbed the loading dock stairs that led to the entrance, but just as I reached to open the door, Cam put his hand on mine and said, “Let’s not go in?”

  I looked at him in shock. “What? Why not?”

  He said, “What if we’re gay?”

  I said, “Oh Cam, don’t be stupid.”

  We laughed and went through the door.

  We were nervous and excited, taking in every detail of the place: the antique signs over the rustic wooden bar, the pinball and rudimentary video games flashing against one wall, in the next room a recessed lounge with a bar-level backgammon table and matching stools, the main room with its bi-level dance floor and tacky Christmas lights on a patio-lattice ceiling.

  A fragrance permeated the place, so much so that for a few months afterwards I wondered if gay men had a sac of something in their butts that was broken the first time they were fucked and made them smell this way for the rest of their lives. Then I discovered it was Aramis cologne, as integral to a gay man’s identity at the time as opening that extra button on your shirt.

  Cam said, “Wanna dance?” I smiled and said, “Sure!” There was something thrilling about walking up those three steps to the dance floor without people even noticing. I was dancing with another guy, feeling self-conscious but free too, safe in a way I’d never imagined during my teen years.

  Cam smiled at me. I smiled at him.

  We were totally gay.

  That night, after the best time of our lives to that point, Cam left with a silver-haired gentleman who often appeared in high-end underwear advertisements, and I went home with a smiley shorter guy who was incredibly hot
.

  He shared an apartment in a high-rise on the river valley hill on the south side of downtown with a big girlfriend who also hung out at the bar. I was nervous and clumsy. We kissed and sucked each other’s cocks for a while, but when he wanted me to fuck his ass my dick wilted and I made a hasty retreat, ashamed that, despite all my related reading, I had no idea how to fuck another guy. All my experience so far had been frottage and oral.

  As I would learn the next day over excited glasses of Coke in my kitchen, Cam got royally fucked by the silver daddy and wasn’t at all self-conscious about his enjoyment of it. I confessed my failure with my guy and my qualms about butt-related complications. Cam shrugged and laughed his snatchy laugh. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “I just wash up really well and relax when he’s sticking it in.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at me across the table. “I could show you if you want.”

  We went to my bedroom and stripped down, stretched out on the single bed I’d brought from the townhouse and kissed passionately until our cocks were rock hard. His cock was uncut, which was new to me. He said, “Got any lube?” I only had Vaseline. He was okay with that but mentioned K-Y worked better. I smeared some over my cock while he put some on his ass and his dick, then guided me in.

  I said, “You’re good at this.”

  He said, “Yeah.” This was the first of the many times I would fuck Cam over the next decade or so. While he had a crush on me in those early days, I never felt romantically about him, but we would end up being fuck buddies in the truest sense of the term.

  Cam and I went to Flashback every weekend. We tried going during the week a few times, but it was dead. We shopped on our lunch breaks for impractical and uncomfortable shoes, pleated pants and collarless shirts for the next weekend’s revels. Le Château was the go-to place for club wear, perfectly straddling that line between threatening punk and much more palatable new wave.

  Cam met a thirty-year-old hairdresser and was immediately deeply in love. He would move in with Lorne weeks after their first meeting.

  We also learned about the dangers of hanging out at gay clubs.

  One night Cam was busted at the club when we stepped out onto the loading dock to smoke a joint and two cops appeared out of the shadows. The only thing that saved me was that Cam was holding the joint and had the weed in his sock. I had nothing on me. It would take him years to be pardoned for these charges so he could travel without restrictions.

  People were bashed all the time on their way in and out of the club. Drag queens were regularly beaten by cab drivers, and a friend who went to PA a few years after me was punched in the face when he stepped onto the loading dock to have a smoke. All of the exploitation and violence made us more careful, but it didn’t keep anyone at home in fear.

  * * *

  —

  Later that spring With Love from Your Son won the adult category of the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition. It was my first attempt at a full-length play and was as ambitious as it was naive. I’m sure it won the award for my sharp dialogue, rather than anything original. I got a nice bit of prize money and was invited back to Banff for a workshop and staged reading of my play—thankfully only for a week this time.

  The first prize that year included a production of the winning script at a new theatre in town. This was very exciting, as I was desperate for a professional production, but after a couple of meetings about the play I felt little connection with the artistic director who would be at Banff to direct the workshop and could see that he was uncomfortable with the sexual material. Then he told me that they were going to produce the second-place play and not With Love from Your Son, as my script “wasn’t quite right” for their audience—even though they had no audience at all. This would be the first of many times my work was passed over for something less successful but also less “controversial”, meaning less gay. It hurt every time it happened.

  A few nights before I was due to take the bus to Banff, Cam persuaded me to go to the local bathhouse, the Pisces Health Spa, for the first time, even while he was shacked up with Lorne. We were both drunk and I was dying to see one of these places I’d only read about, mostly in porn mags—a place devoted to nothing but sex. It was my greatest dream and my greatest fear combined.

  The guy behind the window glanced at our ID, took our cash and leered at us like the chickens we were. Just inside was a snack bar, so we decided to grab a quick snack before going further. We were immediately confronted by a deranged-looking hippie dude with long black hair and a skinny, hirsute body. Looking about as high as a person can look, he said, “If you boys want some fun tonight, Kinky’s in room 201,” then whipped off the towel he was wearing around his waist and shook his generous cock at us. The guy behind the window yelled, “Kinky, you know you can’t do that shit where we serve food.” Kinky laughed and scampered off into the darkened corridors that branched out from the snack bar. “He has a nice cock,” said Cam as he scarfed down the last of his fries, and then we ventured into the hallways beyond to see what was what.

  What we found was a series of cubicles facing each other across a series of corridors. One fairly large space was the dark room for those who wanted completely anonymous sex, and another was occupied by a hot tub, steam room, sauna and bathroom area. We’d gone on a weeknight and so the place was only mildly busy. Cam disappeared into someone’s room almost immediately.

  After wandering the corridors and peering into rooms containing horny men I felt no sexual attraction to, I spent most of the night sitting in the room of a soulful hairy young guy, chatting. Nothing happened, but I did give him my number. Although I wouldn’t know it until Banff, he’d given me something too. Finding the treatment for crabs at a small-town drugstore was most embarrassing—but I did manage to do it.

  Reaction at the Banff workshop to the public reading of my play was vaguely disapproving while acknowledging my potential if I’d just give up the gay shit. People were encouraged to leave written reactions anonymously, and the one that stayed with me the longest was the one which said, “We’re not all sad, angry mama’s boys, you know.” That was my first inkling that being gay might be about what I was actually experiencing rather than what popular media told me it was.

  Paul Reynolds, who was back that year although we’d had little time to spend together, was not encouraging about the script but assured me I’d write better someday and urged me to look him up if I was ever in Toronto, where he was relocating to work at the Shaw Festival. I was confused. Canada had a Shaw Festival? I’d never heard of it. The idea that Canada had a festival celebrating the, in my estimation, most boring playwright of all time appalled me, although I assured Paul I would look him up if I ever got out there.

  The other significant development that summer was Randy Sandowski coming back into my life. Ever since his break with Cam he’d been AWOL, but when I got home from Banff, Phil informed me Randy had called a couple of times.

  Cam, whose absolute immersion into gay life had left me a bit uncomfortable, had also started experimenting with drag. While I was all for guy/guy sex, this alternative sexuality/gender business left me a bit confused, so I pulled away from Cam. After years of being called a fag and a fairy as a child, I still felt I had to prove my masculinity, whatever my sexual preferences.

  Randy and I became best friends that summer. It began with our shared sense of humour, our love of the irreverent and our delight in dissecting the most sacred of cows as cruelly as possible. There was literally nothing we would not say to one another.

  I took him to Flashback for his first time. Cam was there, seated in a booth near the door. He stood as we walked by, smiling in his sweet snatchy way, saying, “Hey, girls.” Randy smiled back, barely concealing his disgust. I cheek-kissed Cam, waved at the others at the table and ushered Randy to the bar.

  * * *

  —

  In 1979/80 I did various duties
on five of the eight shows in the Walterdale season. I started out by designing the set for and playing a small part in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

  It was during auditions for this show that I met Kate Newby. A compact woman with dark hair, pale skin and a tough edge, I found her highly attractive. The day we met she was dressed in a man’s antique white shirt, the high-waisted, pleated jeans that were popular at the time and ballet pumps. I was impressed with her reading. We flirted a bit that night and by the end of the run we were dating. Although I was beginning to identify as gay, I still liked to go out with women and found some of them genuinely physically attractive.

  Walterdale was getting interesting in that period, thanks to an eccentric and talented Romance Languages professor named Vivien Bosley, a British expat who was the artistic director of the theatre. Despite coming from the country that blessed us with most of the plays Walterdale produced, Vivien was much more interested in taking chances with some Canadian shows.

  We got on well, and shortly after the announcement that I’d won the Alberta playwriting competition for the second time, she asked me if I’d be interested in writing something for the following season. I immediately said yes and started thinking about what kind of play I’d like to write. She gave me no guidelines, and neither did anyone else at the theatre.

  The next year became a whirlwind of rehearsals, writing and job-hopping. I got bored at the telephone company and left to work at a graphic arts store where my friend Hilda from PA was employed. I hated the nine-to-five hours but the people were fun and I was quite good at selling the merchandise, which I had experience with.

  During that period I saw a play that left a lasting impression. Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box was crucial to what would come later in my writing career and life, not just for its fearless look at a difficult subject—three familial units coming together at a hospice for the terminally ill—but also for its fragmented use of choral techniques in the dialogue to advance the story and enhance the mood. The structure was both commercial and poetic. I’d read it before seeing it, thankfully, because the production I saw never quite came together theatrically in the way the script demanded.