Come Back

by Sky Gilbert

  Again, I think you can see — especially in my response — that I have no personal investment in Dash. I am distanced from his agonies. Dash was a kind of Samson Agonistes — or, at any rate, saw himself that way.

  I see Dash’s obsession with fame as humorous because he wrote during his — what seems to us exceedingly short — lifetime perhaps fifty plays. They were occasionally produced. By himself, I might add. They were also occasionally celebrated — mainly by politically correct people who were trying to be nice. They were considered shocking for the post-Victorian sensibility that peaked before the turn of the last century. People still had the capacity to be upset by gay plays. Gay actually meant something. Dash’s demonization at the hands of the public and academia — at least, according to himself — ultimately led to his suicide. Dash’s papers indicate this. And it was certainly suicide: death from a heart attack induced by extreme overuse of amyl nitrates — poppers.

  In the passage below we find Dash in the throes of agony over what he says is his academic humiliation. Academia was evidently where he went to escape his lack of success in the theatre world. (Nothing short of world renown would have satisfied his narcissism!) In the end, it is to this world of fame obsession that Dash retreats. He becomes possessed by his ostracism, of what he perceives as his enormous, hugely underrated talent. His later papers are to some degree all about fame. This, again, is ironic. Dash was no Marlene Dietrich — he only imagined himself to be. It’s important that you understand I am not emulating Dash for his insane megalomania. I do not wish I were Dash. Nor do I — lady with the cantilevered face or not — wish I was famous again.

  Here is Dash. Brace yourself; it’s not pretty.

  Antonio:

  I guess you know the latest. All of you academic types know what’s going on with each other all the time, don’t you? I mean you probably knew about my journal article being rejected before I did, didn’t you? I’m so fucking pissed off right now it’s hard not to be pissed off with you too. You are the most fucking sympathetic heterosexual I ever met. How’s that for a compliment? But I’ve had it. I’m not casting these pearls before swine anymore. My whole artistic life has been about that. I’m a very funny guy, you know. I could have written for TV. I could have done any sort of writing for money. But instead I decided to write for theatre because I believed in gay liberation. Once! Not anymore. Not now — now that none of the faggots ever want to see this old drag queen’s irrelevant plays. You’re just a sympathetic liberal. You don’t know how savage the gay community can be. Take my word for it — they’re a bunch of wild animals. They tear apart their young, and that means any member of their community that becomes rich and famous. I was only famous for a while, and it practically killed me. I’m still suffering from the effects.

  So Queer Studies has rejected my piece on drag. This is after they accepted it, and the journal went to print (but without my article). It’s the last straw. I’ve had it with the whole fucking lot of you. You’re all a bunch of pinched assholes, your mouths are little pinched assholes and you’re so insanely focused on your fucking career trajectories that each and every one of you takes pride in stamping out any point of view you disagree with, or that might threaten yours. I assume you know that I was pushing the idea that drag was transhistorical? Yes, my article had the temerity to suggest that maybe there were drag queens in the Early Modern era. I was nuts to even think about suggesting such a thing. The powers that be won’t have it. The academic line they’re all toeing is “Foucault says that homosexuality was invented by Oscar Wilde in the late nineteenth century so how could there be drag queens in 1580?” Of course, no one would dare question Foucault. Never that.

  But what makes me maddest is not the rejection — although that was pretty amazing. Some heavy-duty backstage politics must be going on. I mean, the editor accepted the piece and then a month went by and then some mysterious second reader decided to drop it. Then there is the rejection phrase. I’ll never forget it. The reader who cut my article thought my argument about drag was not “sufficiently nuanced.” Fuck, after nearly thirty years of doing gay theatre and being a drag queen, and after three years of reading a bunch of damn boring theory books and fucking tedious histories of Renaissance theatre (why do we have to call it fucking Early Modern; can’t we just call it the Renaissance?), my argument isn’t sufficiently nuanced? I’ll tell you what happened. They didn’t want this drag queen writing for an academic journal. I mean, they at first thought they did. For a while. They started out by thinking it would be great to have a real drag queen’s point of view. Instead of the usual, academics talking about drag queens, they finally get a real one to talk about herself. But when they actually have to read an essay by a fucking drag queen — an essay that sounds like typical academic crap, but hey, I can’t hide it, is actually from the heart — well, they can’t handle that. I mean, wow, the piece might actually have some truth in it. I guess I just don’t do enough academicspeak to hide that truth.

  This is why I’m leaving academia and why I left the theatre. Everybody hates me because I’m too gay. I’ve always been too everything. Now I’m too gay. When I came out, people believed being gay was being a girly boy and a pansy and confronting the patriarchy. Now that’s old-fashioned. Nobody wants to see a gay play or read a gay poem. So I figured I’d become a gay academic. I mean, everybody’s doing queer theory, right? But I’m too late. I didn’t get in in time to escape the latest academic bulldozer. You know — postgender, transgender. Because I haven’t had a sex change I’m actually behind the times. Hey, you know, I wish they said they were rejecting my paper simply because it was dated. There’s a lot of resentment in that word, nuanced. Let’s face it, these guys know who wrote it. I mean, the article may be submitted blind, but they can find out. People know I’m going to school here, and that I’m a triple threat: a writer, director and academic. They can’t hack it. I’m the real thing. I know you think I’m becoming unbalanced. It’s pretty interesting that you said you are uncomfortable with how personal I am getting. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the gist? Academics can’t ever be personal.

  Hey, I’ve got news for you — scholarly stuff is personal. That high-toned, distanced jargon they use is just there to hide the fact that it’s all about personalities. They’ve got the same petty jealousies, the same plotting and planning behind the scenes, as other flawed humans. You said in your phone message that I should stop sending you written messages because you want to talk to me in person. Or, you think I should see an academic counsellor.

  Well, I’m not like ordinary people. I’m a famous faggot and I’ve been around this too small town too long. Do you know who the academic counsellor at the University of Toronto is? He’s another faggot. Haven’t you seen the little rainbow flags in his office? And he even has one that says, “Safe space for queers.” Right, I would be so safe with him. I’ve met him a couple of times at academic gatherings. He’s come right up and talked to me. And he indicated that if I needed any help he would be there. I know what this is all about. It’s not about him getting in my pants — he just wants to have a famous patient. So I can’t go to the school’s academic counsellor because he’s gay and I’m gay and I’m too fucking well-known. He wouldn’t approve of me, anyway, because I’m such a slut. None of them do. Jesus Christ, I could never talk to him about my boyfriend. Most faggots think me being a slut is bad enough. If they knew how fucked-up my relationship with my boyfriend is they’d never forgive me. I’m sure the good counsellor would want me to dump my reason to live. Sometimes I think the beautiful boy is also my reason to die. The good counsellor would advise me to get a boyfriend who was old and fat and sensible.

  Shakespeare would understand what I’m going through. He understood it all in those damn sonnets. Love doesn’t make sense. And I can only see a gay psychologist, because if I were to tell the details of my promiscuous life to a straight one they would have me locked up in a nanosecond. But
the gay psychologists always want me to fall in love with some doctor or lawyer type. Isn’t that funny? Some professional guy. Well, I know two gay doctors who are married. They are HIV positive and both on heavy-duty AIDS drugs. They also like to do a lot of non-prescription pharmaceuticals that they get for free from pharmaceutical reps. They do these drugs when they’re having unsafe sex with their HIV-positive friends at the sex parties they have once every week in their living room. Oh yeah, I should find myself a nice respectable doctor and get married.

  The world is coming to an end. I know because I’m watching it fall apart around me. Maybe it’s just my world that’s ending. Maybe that’s what suicide is. Don’t worry, people who really end up committing suicide don’t talk about it. Or do they? Have you heard about David Prent? Of course you’ve heard about him. I think what happened to David Prent is what’s happening to the gay world. We are being erased and forgotten. Am I the last faggot? Is God trying to kill all of us? All the interesting ones, at least? I do think there’s something to the idea that all the interesting ones died of AIDS — because they did! Only the mediocre, dumb fucks are left. And the mediocre dumb fucks are busy figuring out ways to procreate with dumb-fuck lesbians of the same ilk, so they can have mediocre dumb-fuck children and take over the world. Well, David Prent was a brilliant gay visual artist. And now he’s brain-dead. And what are they saying happened? Oh yeah, an embolism. He had a brain embolism, and now he’s lying in a hospital bed staring at the wall. That’s nice. Good for him. But of course no one mentions the fact that he was a party boy, and liked to do party drugs.

  Everyone is doing drugs and having unsafe sex these days, as if there is no AIDS. As if AIDS is over. Or maybe it’s just that AIDS can’t kill you the way it used to, so these guys choose to overdose on party drugs instead. You can’t go to a bathhouse and get a legitimate fuck without someone trying to get you to try some Tina or just get right down and do crack. And all the nice dumb faggots try to keep up the fiction that we all like to stay home and knit with our husbands and our nice sexless lesbian friends. Well, drugs may become the cause of our demise but they aren’t the reason. The reason is that the good Lord above has decided to rid the world of every single fag that ever lived. AIDS started the job, but there are still a few stragglers. Like David Prent. You know what David Prent was working on before his brain died? He was putting together a visual history of the asshole. He’d been working on it for about six years. And he just got a huge Canada Council grant. Do you believe that? From the Canada Council. And what was David going to say about the asshole with his artistic research? He was going to say it was important to world history. He was going to say that the asshole was a way of life. You know what Hocquenghem says? No. Nobody cares what Hocquenghem says these days — except for me. He says, “We’re all women from behind.” Well, David’s artistic project was to build a little library dedicated to the asshole with all the materials he had collected about asshole fetishism. And this Museum of the Anus was going to be housed at Dalhousie University. And he was fabulous and feeling like all was perfect in his world. After all, he had the Canada Council and some crazy Maritime university behind him. Then, just like that, he had an embolism. I had met with him a couple of days before he went vegetative. He talked about how well his life was going. He had quite a bit of material for the Rectal Rectory: videos, sex toys, books, articles . . . He was going to do them up all pretty. He told me there were a couple of huge rooms full of stuff. Then, pffft! The next day he’s gone. What’s going to happen to David’s Butt Breviary? Dalhousie would have probably been too scared to display it anyway. But part of his Canada Council grant was to be paid to that university, so they couldn’t very well say no. So, what will probably happen is the Asshole Library will sit somewhere in the bowels of Dalhousie, because the only person who was interested in it was David Prent. And now he’s lost his wits. And no one else will touch his giant visual ode to the asshole with a ten-foot pole.

  I’m going drinking tonight. And after that I’m going to do lots of poppers. I’m going to get lots of strange boys who remind me of my boyfriend to sit on my face. Sometimes I can imagine it’s him sitting on my face. That’s the closest thing I know to love. My boyfriend even said that he may never pee on me again. Who cares? I’ll have a nice night out. And maybe I’ll die in the hot tub. That’s where I’d really like to die, with the smell of some strange boy’s butt in my lips. Some butt that makes me cry — because I can imagine it’s the butt of the boy who will never love me the way I want to be loved. Oh, by the way, if I do die, can you tell that nice lady that edited the journal that I just wasn’t “nuanced” enough for this life? I’d really appreciate that.

  Dash’s melodrama suits his personality and his career. His plays are filled with screaming drag queens and pathetic dramaturgical attempts to create real female characters, who are of course nothing but drag queens themselves. Thank God the drag queens don’t do me anymore. It was a kind of homage. But ultimately it became fromage. Am I being flip enough for you? Dash King was a footnote to history — if that. Like all those at the beginning of this century who were still flogging identity politics and bemoaning its demise, he became obsolete. But even this passage — where he bemoans the death of David Prent’s dream — is symbolic of an era. It is an era of extreme self-delusion. This is a man who believed that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. He could also convince himself that he was exemplifying the masochism of Shakespeare’s sonnets by remaining in a sick, loveless relationship. He was a man who relished the ultimate humiliation. He routinely searched for the aroma of the anus of the man he loved in the anus of strangers. In terms of Dash King, there is no “there” there. This is only a lost soul who has left reality behind.

  My theory is that he involved himself so deeply in identity politics that he lost any sense of who he actually was or what he wanted. The narrative he fell into (like Alice down the rabbit hole) was that he would be a tragic figure and suffer for his love. Is this not something like Baudrillard’s hyperreal? Baudrillard’s notion that Disneyland was America — was that not a particularly camp, homosexual notion? How much reality is there in valourizing a library devoted to the asshole — except as a futile reaction against the reality of the homophobia he was all too powerless to defy? Yet Dash’s obsession with identity made the whole situation even worse than it might have been.

  Is it not possible that post-structuralism itself is just, in its intellectual reality, a bunch of fags denying that any “there” is there? Remember that Gertrude Stein, a very gay lesbian, invented that catchy phrase. Well, Gertrude and the fags that followed her have been desperately trying to convince the heterosexual world that their lives had transcended that fantasy. They fervently hoped that marriage and traditional families — which they were excluded from at the time — were constructs.

  Dash despised Foucault for, it seems to me, very silly reasons: identity politics mostly. But he would find my critique of Foucault homophobic. It’s too bad he can’t come back from the grave to argue with me. I would say, “Relax; have sex with whoever you want. If you had lived long enough, like me, you would be able to do that. In the future, in cyberspace, all things are possible.”

  Listen, I want to tell you something. It’s a minor thing, very minor. It’s not really related to my analysis. But, of course, I must tell you everything.

  I remember looking for an analyst during my “comeback.” My first therapist was in awe of me — much in the way that Dash imagines that therapists are in awe of him. But Dash shows his superficiality and banality when he suggests that he couldn’t have a therapist because he was too famous for one. On the contrary, Dash’s actual lack of fame was his big disappointment — but one he would never own up to. He was not internationally famous, so there would have been no reason for a psychoanalyst, psychologist or therapist of any ilk to be in awe of him. But it’s more than that. Analysts are only in awe of great people. I’m not saying that I am grea
t, in the sense of being an amazing talent. Although it’s true some people seem to think I am. I can’t think of myself that way, of course. And shouldn’t. And don’t ever now. But there is such a thing as a “great” person — and by that I mean large. That is what I always was — too large for this world. Dash suggests that he was too much. But that too-muchness — this can be gleaned from his letters — is easily contained. It is even more easily parodied.

  On the contrary, some of the therapists I visited literally ran from me, frightened, tails between their legs. I had one lock me out of his office. True, I was high on something at the time. I thought it was very funny when it happened; we got into an argument and I just wouldn’t let up. I had to have it out with him. He was terrified. This didn’t have anything to do with me being famous. It had everything to do with me being “great” — not just a little “too much,” but really too much for this world.

  Anyway, my very first therapist said something I will never forget. I think I was worried because Sid, in his effort to support a cleaned-up but very obese version of moi, desperately wanted to know everything about me. He endeavoured to peer into every corner of my life. And, at the time, that included searching my chest of drawers.

  Yes, I kept a little stash of uppers in a bra — one I never wore because it was way too tight. The bra had been a functioning part of my wardrobe when I was way too skinny. I asked the doctor rather ingenuously if Sid had the right to look in my drawers simply because he was my husband. I remember he smiled indulgently. Little did he know that, with every word he said, he was enabling my overpowering addiction. I could find enablement anywhere. He said to me, “In every marriage, there is something that is hidden between two people. My father was a very mild-mannered, quiet sort of person, who was dominated by my mother.” (Another one of my special talents — I could always get a therapist to end up telling me his troubles instead of listening to mine. I certainly didn’t deliberately try to turn the tables on them, but I am very sympathetic, I have a good sense of humour and I love people. Therapists are so attracted to and intimidated by me that they find it more comfortable, ultimately, to talk about themselves.) He went on: “And my mother really did control my father, and he was very quiet and passive. But after he died we did find some things hidden in the closet, something that belonged to my father that none of us, even my mother, knew about.”