Come Back (16 page)

Do I need to spell it out for you? Nothing really has stepped into the breach to take over where theory and post-structuralism once reigned. There is the ever-perplexing transhuman philosophy, but this is, in my view, simply a rebranded version of post-structuralism (where the natural, real universe is not shaped by language, as the post-structuralists suggest, but instead by a future in which reality as we know it is, simply, old-fashioned, because we no longer exist in our bodies). I've always found this repellant. I fear that perhaps you're becoming a convert. Every time I ask you about your opinions on this, you change the subject. It is becoming increasingly clear that you will also change the subject when I talk about the death of post-structuralism in relation to Dash King. So I will not make another argument here. I have exhausted my arguments and I am insulted — not on an academic but on a pragmatic level — that you didn't respond. I will present you, instead, with more evidence for my previous argument: that Dash's decline is a significant metaphor for the decline of an entire era.

But also, I think it's very important that you notice my attitude to Dash's spiralling fortunes. For instance, you comment on the fact that Dash's pathetic fate was to be romantically involved with a boy he seemed obsessed with on some manic/romantic level. Someone with whom he had nothing in common and with whom he couldn't have sex. It was a classic case of “mad love” — beyond even, or not relevant to, the “demon lover” syndrome, because, after all, Dash's lover simply did not have enough personality to be a demon.

But then you suggest I am interested in Dash because his neurotic relationships are somehow like mine. You don't come out and say it, but it seems you are implying that some or all of my lovers were inadequate, or that my relationships with them were mad. You also seem to think my lovers were also ciphers who, like Dash's lover, were too emotionally inadequate to be given the demon moniker. I hope this is not what you mean to suggest — though I think it is. I won't go there. I have just explained how horrible I find this condescension (or anyone's condescension) towards my romantic life. And why it disgusts me.

But the fact is I don't emulate Dash or idolize him — I analyze him. I certainly don't romanticize him. This is something you consistently imply, but you have no proof. I can see only one possible similarity between my romantic life and Dash's. The sole similarity (and this is me really searching . . . searching) is that Dash obviously prefers partners who are somewhat remote, who are ultimately inaccessible. What was the term in my time? Oh yes, people who were “emotionally distant.” This is certainly the type of partner I always preferred. But I think that tendency is adequately explained by the boundary issues that were created by my mother.

However, there is no equivalency here. Dash was emotionally abused by a young man who treated him very badly. This is classic homosexual masochism. This is not something I have experienced or wanted to experience. A little distance is enough for me; outright cruelty is taking things a bit too far. The reason I would like you to examine the writing below is that Dash talks, in his own sad way, about the effects that fame had on him. The whole idea of such a small-time theatre artist in a one-horse Canadian town being obsessed with the effects of fame on his short, though melodramatic, life is . . . amusing.

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.