by Brad Fraser
John’s death made me question this relationship I seemed to be embarking on with Grayden. He and I kissed deeply and engaged in oral but always used a condom for anything invasive.
Grayden was well known in a number of different circles in the city and was as comfortable in a suit at a municipal meeting with politicians as he was dancing shirtless on a speaker while high on E.
If anything he was too popular. Too many people knew him, too many people wanted him, and too many people lived with him—specifically his two younger ex-boyfriends, one in his early thirties and one in his early twenties. Grayden assured me it was all just friendship and convenience, but I could tell there was more to the story. I could also feel more than a little resentment and curiosity emanate from them whenever I arrived on the scene.
It became apparent to me that there was a negative dynamic to Grayden’s relationship with the two exes profoundly connected to who infected who first. This question, I will admit, was also an issue with me at the time.
Despite my doubts, I felt better than I ever had in my life. I remember walking down Queen Street on a beautiful late-spring day, the clockwork madness of Toronto, pedestrians, cyclists, streetcars and vehicles ticking around me, and thinking, “This is perfect. This moment is absolutely fucking perfect. I wish everything could stay like this forever.”
Grayden and I took a break from our budding but still uncommitted romance when I flew back to Edmonton to direct a musical version of Young Art at Theatre Network that was underdeveloped and under-rehearsed. The best thing that can be said about it is that it featured a young Damien Atkins, who would make his name as an actor and writer across the country a few years later. While I enjoyed being back in my house and among my beloved collectibles, I was distracted, wondering if Grayden was being faithful to me even as I was sure he was not.
The show opened to general indifference and I was glad to get out of town fast. Only later would I realize how tired I was when working on that production. The other shows, the trips back and forth to L.A., the Australian adventure had all taken their toll. I was shocked to discover my formerly endless energy had limits.
To further darken my mood, a right-wing, anti-tax propaganda organization that the corporate press loved to refer to as a “think tank” got wind of my government-sponsored trip to Australia and decided to make it an issue.
That year a great many prominent Canadian artists had travelled with the sponsorship of the government—given because promoting Canadian talent around the world does indeed help the country in many ways—but for some reason I was chosen from among all the other uniformly straight artists to be attacked. The propaganda organization started this whole “why are our tax dollars being used to promote homosexuality?” outcry that the complicit media amplified.
I fought back as I always did, but what was particularly sobering for me was that I got absolutely no public or private support from my fellow Canadian theatre artists. I’d made my reputation by speaking out not just for myself but for anyone I felt was being unfairly treated in the press or the profession, and many of my peers had thanked me for my support over the years. I took on and pissed off some very high-profile and powerful people in the name of denouncing hypocrisy or corruption, but the Star’s inflammatory story about my supposed stance against public arts funding prejudiced everyone’s opinion, and there was no defence for me.
I returned to Toronto chastened and had a bit of time off, but another project on the horizon I’d been working on with Daniel MacIvor was about to take precedence.
* * *
—
Since our first meeting years before in Calgary, we often hung out, particularly after Nick Sheehan had asked both of us to be in a doc/drama fusion film he was directing called Symposium: Ladder of Love, which featured a number of prominent gay men of the time expounding on their ideas of love.
Danny has a great wit and the soul of a true poet. We both liked to drink, smoke pot, occasionally suck up some blow, and talk. One night, while doing exactly that, we had come up with the idea of making an entirely improvised low-budget film on Gay Pride Day. It started as one of those pie-in-the-sky “someday we should…” ideas, but gradually we both grew serious about it.
Before I’d left for Australia we had outlined a basic plot for the film and committed to hiring equipment so the camera, sound and other technical volunteers we were enlisting would have something to film with. We also committed to a budget—small in film terms but large because it was our own money. Randy and Hilda came on board as producers.
The project was highly questionable in light of our various union affiliations, which frowned upon improvisational film projects using members who didn’t get paid. To get around this we made it a cooperative effort: everyone involved signed general releases as co-producers, should money ever become an issue in what was never meant to be a money-making enterprise. Neither Danny nor I wanted to ask anyone’s permission or deal with the endless bureaucracy that came with these kinds of projects.
The plan was to film the exterior scenes on the day of Pride, throughout the Church/Wellesley village. Danny and I each had a crew of a cameraman, a sound person and someone to help them. There would be no lights, no costumes, no fluffers; Parade was to be all au naturel, raw and fast. We met with the entire crew to find out what they would need and worked out a schedule for the day. We then met with the large cast we’d wheedled into appearing in the film and gave them a breakdown of the day with written instructions of where to be and when as well as a general idea of the situation and their character. We even included a helpful map of the neighbourhood.
Danny and I then planned to schedule a couple of days of interior scenes to fill out the story and see what we came up with in the editing suite.
While all this planning was going on, the Toronto theatre awards, the Doras, announced the nominations for 1995. Poor Super Man was nominated for best new play, best production, best direction and best performance by a male.
The Parade shoot started at seven thirty. The hood was rife with film crews on Pride Day, so we knew people would take little notice of us. Everyone was in their place at their allotted times, we had a quick confab, then shot the scene, improvising all business and dialogue.
Danny and I played long-time partners who were going through a period of conflict on Pride Day just as Danny’s character’s hot younger, straight brother shows up on the scene. We each had our separate storylines that only intersected at the beginning, briefly in the middle and at the end. Danny’s character, a display artist at the Bay, was having an existential crisis about staying with his inconstant, aging club-boy lover, a brash, outspoken bartender from the Barn, played by me. The straight brother (played by Trevor McCarthy, an alumnus of Blood Buddies five years earlier) accidentally takes ecstasy and has his own narrative for the day.
It was a magical, insane experience fuelled by adrenaline and determination. Danny and I were a great team and had organized things brilliantly as we wove our way through the village to the various locations. There were no breaks. We ate whenever we had a moment. When filming was over we met at an after-hours place in the alley behind where the Manatee used to be and most of the cast and crew did ecstasy and partied late into the night.
We then had a two-week break until we reconvened to shoot the interiors for the film, and Grayden and I flew to New York City and Fire Island for our first vacation as a couple.
We spent two days in the city in early July, when NYC was at its most surly. We lunched and shopped during the day and danced at the latest hot bar at night. When we got back to the Gramercy apartment of one of his friends—a literary critic who was in the last stages of AIDS who was already at the island—I fucked him and he purred like a happy cat. As we fell asleep spooning, I felt that we were at that moment embodying everything that was amazing about being gay.
The next day we caught the train to Fire I
sland. I was excited. This was gay history. I’d been reading about Fire Island my entire adult life, in literature and in porn. Everyone who was anyone in New York’s artistic history had summered on Fire Island. If they were rich they did it in their amazing homes; if not, they rented a time-share room in one of the many gay co-operative houses on the island. Grayden and I would be experiencing it mostly in the fashion of those who had money. His friend, whose New York apartment we’d fucked in the night before, had a half ownership of a beautiful but not too ostentatious house on a low-key part of the island.
I was charmed by the endless elevated boardwalks and the fact no cars were allowed there. We stowed our luggage in our bedroom and met our other guests, four incredibly handsome, built, upwardly mobile young white men in their late twenties and early thirties who were making their names in the world of publishing or galleries or something equally fabulous in Manhattan. I felt gauche and clumsy, so quickly defaulted to a quiet listening persona that took no risks in order to avoid embarrassment. Grayden was far more comfortable with these people than I. Positively garrulous.
He gave me a full tour of the island, including the infamous outdoor cruising/sex area known as the Meat Rack, as well as the few bars and clubs that catered to the endless flow of gay men. We did ecstasy and went to a dance, but it wasn’t a good trip and neither Grayden nor I were particularly attentive to one another as the drugs made us both internal and silent. The music seemed to be mostly pots and pans.
When we got back to the house the guests were all gathered around the pool having drinks. Grayden joined them, but I begged off and went to the bedroom, where I took my lenses out, stripped off my clothes and climbed into bed. I did that “not quite committed to sleep or awake” thing for a while before Grayden came in to change. He got naked, sat on the edge of the bed and grabbed my cock. He leaned over and devoured it, coaxed it to its full length—and it always seemed to be just a little bit longer for him—and gave me a long, slow hummer. He stretched out on the bed next to me and said, “Why don’t you come out and join us?”
I said, “I’m too tired and—weird. That ecstasy went sideways.”
“You want a lorazepam?”
I said, “Maybe half. I’ll probably skip dinner.”
He gave me half of the pill and I swallowed it with some beer I had in a glass beside the bed. He kissed me as I slipped into blackness.
When I woke my mouth was cotton and sand. I felt weird. The E still fizzed through my system but not as intensely. The light was wrong. Things were disturbingly quiet.
I fell out of bed and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts. The clock beside the bed told me I’d been out for hours. In the kitchen I ran myself a glass of water and downed it quickly. I heard distant music, some Frankie Knuckles remix of something significant to my meeting with Grayden at the time. The walls and ceiling were painted by a soft, undulating blue light that emanated from beneath the water of the pool and was cast back into the house.
Through the window I could see the gangbang happening at the other end of the pool. Grayden’s friend who hosted us sat in a deck chair and watched with bright eyes as Grayden, bent over the table, was fucked by the swarthiest of our fellow houseguests, with the rest of them lined up waiting their turn. None of them were wearing condoms.
Grayden’s face contorted with a smug, savage pleasure as the first guy came in his ass. I pulled farther back into the shadows, angered but also turgid, a thick thread of pre-cum already oozing from my cock as I experienced an arousing mixture of jealousy and desire. They were doing the one thing Grayden and I never could.
I was consumed with resentment as I jerked off indifferently onto the dying literary guy’s expensive carpet. They were still going at it when I wandered back to our room and passed out again.
I woke up well before Grayden did, and wandered the boardwalks. Eventually I sat on a rail overlooking the protected dunes and the pounding ocean beyond them. Suddenly Fire Island seemed like a very expensive graveyard to me.
I said nothing of what I’d witnessed as we packed for our return to Toronto. When he dropped me off at my place we shared a perfunctory kiss.
In August Grayden and I flew to Edmonton for the folk festival, which was held just down the hill from my house. The festival was a big deal, and knowing someone nearby where you could use the toilet and freshen up between acts was a lovely bonus. A number of gay male friends from Calgary stayed at my place and mingled happily with my mostly straight, married Edmonton friends, many of whom had children by now.
I had my entire family over to meet Grayden. He was smooth and charming and they were surprisingly intrigued. During the years Pete and I were together they’d essentially acted as if he didn’t exist, even when they were all in the same room. My friends were also much impressed when they met Grayden. On the surface we were an ideal couple. We had great sex the night before he left—he topped me for the first time, and when his airport limo picked him up the next day, after a lingering kiss I watched the car pull away and thought, “I think I might really love this guy.”
When I got back to Toronto a week later and called him, he suggested we meet at a popular greasy-spoon breakfast place.
The restaurant was packed. We were seated at a deuce in the centre of the room, chattering tables all around us. I could tell right away something was off. After we’d ordered I said, “What’s going on?”
Grayden started to say things. They were fragmented. They were general. They were odd. Something about a rise in the virus in his system. Something about not being comfortable with a dominant man because he was a dominant man. Something about not being ready for a relationship.
I said, “Are you breaking up with me?”
He gave me his most charming smile and said, “Yes. Yes, I am.”
My face was frozen. My eyes were hard. “Is it something I did or said?”
He flashed another charming smile. “It’s not you.”
“If it’s not me, why are we breaking up?”
Grayden said, “There’s so much going on in my life…” and let it trail off so it encompassed all possibilities.
Everything in me wanted to say, “Please don’t reject me. I don’t like it. I’ve had too much of it. Tell me what I need to do to keep you and I’ll do it. I will. Anything you ask.” Instead I gestured for the waiter to bring our bill and made a point of paying.
When we walked out of the restaurant I insisted on walking him to his office to further understand why he was dumping me. By the time we got there he’d made it clear that he was originally drawn by my confidence and public profile but, sexually, I wasn’t what he craved most of the time. We shook hands at the door.
I said, “I saw you. At Fire Island. With the guys around the pool.”
Surprise, shame and defiance flickered across his face, then he shrugged unapologetically and disappeared into the building.
I trudged home, devastated.
With the luxury of hindsight I can now examine my behaviour after this breakup and cringe. I was wounded and angry, and they are a dangerous combination. There were late-night phone calls and accusatory letters that he rightfully ignored, which only increased my fury. I came close to sexually acting out negatively a number of times. I’d been shaken badly as I realized everything I’d accomplished to date, and having so many of my dreams come true, didn’t insulate me from failure or rejection at all.
Also, it was time I faced the fact I had terrible judgment when it came to boyfriends.
PART SEVEN
MARTIN YESTERDAY
AS ALWAYS MY RELIEF FROM heartbreak and depression came with creativity, and I had a huge project on my plate—the editing of Parade. Danny came in for part of the work and we had a lot of laughs getting high and playing with the material while being alternately thrilled and horrified by the performances and shots we were seeing. The incidental footage of Pride Da
y and the parade itself was quite marvellous, with tons of detail and quirky shots. Danny had a lot on his plate at the time and I had a lot of free time, so the bulk of the editing fell to me.
I worked into the fall on a rented editing suite in my bachelor apartment, which for months looked like a storage room for video cassettes, empty pizza boxes and ashtrays full of roaches. We now had to digitize the material we knew for sure would be in the film so it could be properly cut and processed for projection, but the cost of doing so in Toronto was high. Randy made a deal with the Alberta Film Association to use their state-of-the-art equipment at a fair price. This meant I would be spending November, December and January in Edmonton working with a professional editor for the final fine cut of the film.
On the one hand, it was comforting to be back at the house with my things and my cats healing my broken heart. The editor and I worked in an old building in the river valley during afternoons and evenings and then I’d either head home or off to the Roost for a drink.
It was odd going to the bars in Edmonton now. Just a few years earlier I’d been a local celebrity and my appearance always created a stir. By this time I’d been away for so long, and my work had been distant enough, that only the old-timers had any idea who I was. I could actually have a drink on my own without someone approaching me to talk, express their admiration or tell me what a charlatan I was, as had become the case in Toronto.
In the final week, we spent about eighteen hours a day in the editing suite during one of the worst winters on record. It nearly killed us, but we got a cut that came in at just over eighty minutes, and I flew back to Toronto with a copy of it in my hands.
Danny’s reaction was positive, and he had a professional friend of his give the cut a polish while we did a couple of test showings, one in Toronto and one in Edmonton. Randy would take care of setting up the Edmonton event, while Danny had his producer oversee the Toronto showing.