Come Back (3 page)

I'm only mentioning this to re-emphasize the context for Dash's sad obsessions. He was writing passionately, and he was disintegrating, at the end of the era when sex was still real. That he never obtained the precious title of Doctor might be tragic — if the title had not become so meaningless. That I am a Doctor and you are a Doctor has, of course, more to do with the fact that we have somehow been able to satisfy the various corporations that now go under the name of universities. In Dash's time, academia had not quite reached that stage of decadence. It's important to note that these were once at least semi-real institutes of learning. There was a very earnest pursuit of research, and some accent was actually placed on teaching. However, it's true that even in Dash's time this was all changing. The obsession with technology would eventually lead to our present situation — the cold, soulless efficiency of virtual classrooms in which human teachers have become obsolete. It's so easy to forget that the beginning of the millennium was still, to some degree, in the shadow of the sixties; that there was still a notion of academic freedom — even though universities were gradually receiving less and less funding from the government and beginning to work in the service of business. Today it behooves us to justify the pragmatism of everything we do; back then this was only just starting to occur. I have you to thank, as usual, for the fact that I can research pretty well anything I desire. But your well-inflected but dangerous implication — I was surprised that you dared — that I was a very famous person hiding in secret (in the secrecy of an unrecognizable body, in fact!) was enough to subsidize a fat salary for me until I die. (If I ever die.) Nothing interests a university more these days than the possibility that one of its professors might become a cybercelebrity. But aren't we all cybercelebrities?

Back then it was much the same, in terms of academia. Dash got his position as a rather elderly graduate student because he had some experience in the “gay theatre.” His name had been in the newspapers (remember how important the newspapers once were?) for founding a gay theatre in Toronto. At the turn of the century, we find Dash desperate for work. He has been turned out of the theatre he founded. The cause? A lessening interest in identity politics, and a general abandonment of experimental and political work by both artists and funding bodies. The sad part is that Dash could never come to terms with what had happened to him.

Now, of course, we understand that old people are just that — old. As soon as their bodies begin to be replaced by the necessary machinery, it is time for them to be seen as rarely as possible and certainly never heard. At that time there was still a romantic notion that age might be meaningless. I remember eagerly watching romance movies during the sixties. Older women fell for younger men or vice versa, and the precious
de rigueur
lines of the era included the ubiquitous “age means nothing to me.” The irony today is that the old still have sex with the young, or try to. But when the young perceive that a potential partner may be somewhat cyborgian, they reject them. When people look into each other's eyes these days, they are trying to detect laser eye surgery, and will summarily abandon their potential partner if there is even the hint of a cataract. I'm sure you've heard that some young people actually carry metal-detection devices to root out the more ancient suitors.

But when Dash was fired from his little gay Toronto theatre, he was in his early fifties. And though life had clearly passed him by — that is, his creative and romantic life was effectively over — he was valiantly and pathetically trying to jump-start a second career to remain young. I know this because he wrote several articles that are still easily findable, articles that deal with aging. In these articles he babbles bathetically about what a good time can be had by older homosexuals. He claims they are still desirable, they are misrepresented in the media, they are misunderstood as “garden variety fags.” This last was his invented terminology for older conservative gay men — fags who garden. You really should look up these old identity-based articles, they're quite a hoot.

Dash King's plays are also an entertainment in themselves. He wrote quickly, so quickly that it was impossible for him ever to write a great play (or what might be considered great by the artistic standards of the time). Some of his plays were written in the space of one week, and he often defended himself by comparing himself to the likes of Donizetti, Noël Coward and Lope de Vega. We won't even discuss Donizetti and Lope de Vega; they were prolific, but that is something quite different than shallow and careless. As for Noël Coward, not even Noël Coward ever lived up to being Noël Coward, and if
Private Lives
was
written in a week, it certainly shows. Some of Dash King's plays can still be found, and there is something touching about them. But more as an antithesis to the “Death of the Author” paradigm: they are interesting only because of what one knows about the author. I think Mr. King would have been quite perturbed to know that he has not been remembered, not even as a gay activist. In fact, one of his whining articles goes on about his concern that he will be remembered as a gay activist rather than as an artist. Well, the fact is, the only chance he has of being remembered at all is if our discussion of his lost papers becomes the foundation for an article that is widely read. This is, in itself, also unlikely. Anyway, the plays are mostly unreadable rants about homosexuality, peppered with nostalgia for the good old days of gay liberation when gay men were girls and had “high heels in their hearts” — one of my favourite kitschy King lines. As I say, the plays hold little interest except as a footnote to his tragic life.

His imploded scholarship, however — especially the scribbled notes on several printed versions of the
Hamlet
essay — is interesting, particularly in the context of his heroic attempt to resurrect identity politics at a time when they were so very clearly over. I neglected to mention the
Hamlet
article marginalia because I am saving the best for last. King's essay appeared in an online journal when online scholarship was in its infancy. The journal was concerned with the notion that Shakespeare was not “the man from Stratford,” as the journal likes to put it, but instead Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

There were many reasons why a late-twentieth-century faction who called themselves “Oxfordians” had decided that the Earl of Oxford was the real Shakespeare. But for King it was all a matter of identity politics — everything was. Other heterosexually identified Oxfordians found the proof they needed for identifying de Vere as Shakespeare in the Earl's background, life and learning. He was an aristocrat, and was certainly a very learned — if not a dissipated, and perhaps criminal — sort of man. When one begins to research the old Oxfordian websites, one may be surprised by the notion that their entertaining fictions might indeed be fact. There are certainly a remarkable series of coincidences connecting the two men. For instance, the Earl's life resembles, to a shocking degree, the plots of Shakespeare's plays. The Earl of Oxford had three daughters, was married to a woman who cuckolded him (or was thought to), spent much time in Europe, was the adopted nephew of the real-life person on whom Polonius was inarguably based . . . The list of coincidental similarities goes on and on. All of this might matter — if Shakespeare mattered. It might matter if work that is so antique and indecipherable was still read or performed; if it still interested people in any way other than in an archaeological sense.

For King, who considered himself a playwright, Shakespeare was a romantic figure. The mystery surrounding his identity became an obsession. King's interest was related to the fact that de Vere was probably a sodomite, in an Early Modern sense: that is, he probably had sex with boys. He had brought from his Italian travels a castrato with whom he was rumoured to have been intimate. King's argument in his essay is for an effeminate Hamlet: that Hamlet is a difficult character to portray because he is effeminate — and therefore, according to a Foucauldian definition of sexuality, gay. King is suggesting that Stratfordians (i.e., Nelson, below) argue that de Vere could not have been Shakespeare because he was an effeminate sodomite. King wants to celebrate Hamlet, and de Vere's sexuality, and claim them, essentially, as homosexuals. In the key passage, he begins in classical identity politics style, criticizing Nelson (de Vere's poisonous, Stratfordian biographer) for being homophobic:

Particularly interesting is Nelson's focus on what he obviously perceives as one of Oxford's most significant character flaws: his alleged propensity for buggery. One of the chapters in Nelson's biography is labelled “Sodomite,” and in his introduction Nelson finds fault with one of the earliest and most prominent Oxfordians, Bernard M. Ward. Nelson suggests that in Ward's Oxfordian (and therefore slanted) biography of Oxford, “solid information is thus suppressed in the interest of good form, and also, in Ward's case, to protect Oxford's reputation.”
3
What “solid information”? For example, Nelson suggests Oxford's enemies accused him of being a sodomite but “where anyone who casts half an eye over the libel manuscripts in the
PRO
[Public Record Office] will encounter the words ‘sodomy' and ‘buggery,' Ward retreats into circumlocution.”
4
Nelson's biography takes two questionable assumptions for granted — first, that a great artist must necessarily be a “good” person, and second, that homosexuality is a flaw that is unlikely to be found in a man whom many consider to be the greatest poet of all time.

The attached notes to this passage show that even at this time of supposed academic freedom, King had to deal with censorship around what were then issues of sexuality. This hurt and angered him deeply. You see, as eager as the “Oxfordians” were to prove that de Vere was Shakespeare, they were also eager to protect de Vere's reputation. King is astute enough to focus his article not just on Shakespeare's sexuality, but on whether or not the greatest writer of all time was — or had to be — a “good” person. But the two go hand in hand: an evil Shakespeare would be one who was profligate, homosexual — and a good one would be, presumably, happily married and monogamous, or perhaps even celibate. So, attached to the above passage, on three separate sheets of paper, are three alternative versions of the last sentences of the above paragraph from King's essay. King saved them, in melancholy fashion, to prove a point to his advisor.

All of these papers appear to be addressed to Antonio Legato, an elderly University of Toronto professor emeritus. (There are no comments from Legato in King's papers, but Dr. Legato is sometimes addressed in the papers.) At any rate, it is in the following three versions of the same paragraph that we come to see the disintegration of King's scholarship (or his attempt at scholarship) and its implications. It matters little to the academic community that King became disillusioned. Yet I find it fascinating. In these papers we read King's private agony over the censorship he perceived had been directed against him. And it seems pretty clear from the paragraphs below that, indeed, he had been censored. The first paragraph is labelled “Additions by the editor.” The paragraph begins where the passage above ends, and we can see that after “the greatest poet of all time,” a parenthetical passage has been added, for obvious reasons:

Nelson's biography takes two questionable assumptions for granted — first, that a great artist must necessarily be a “good” person, and second, that homosexuality is a flaw that is unlikely to be found in a man whom many consider to be the greatest poet of all time. (Now, de Vere was undoubtedly heterosexual — he had the children and family to prove it.)

What is evident is that because a squeamish Oxfordian journal did not want to see the Earl of Oxford (their candidate for Shakespeare) presented as a homosexual, they added a parenthetical sentence informing us that the Earl of Oxford was not gay. The next attached passage is labelled by King as what was finally printed. We see now that the paragraph is longer still, with further additions:

Nelson's biography takes two questionable assumptions for granted — first, that a great artist must necessarily be a “good” person, and second, that homosexuality is a flaw that is unlikely to be found in a man whom many consider to be the greatest poet of all time. Now, de Vere was undoubtedly heterosexual — he had the children and family to prove it. Also, he was a confirmed “man's man,” being an enormously successful warrior who served many times on the field of battle, and had the battle scars to prove it.

King's anguished note, following these passages, I find heart-wrenching:

Antonio:

I called Balthazar Goetz and had the most horrible conversation with him. He seemed like such a nice man via email. I suppose he is nice; he just has no idea what I'm talking about. I said, “Dr. Goetz, what about the changes to my article?” Of course, there was nothing I could do about it. I had allowed the smaller changes because they twisted my arm (are journals supposed to do that?). But when I saw they printed all that stuff about Oxford being a “man's man,” I was at my wit's end. At first Dr. Goetz claimed ignorance, saying I had given him permission. Well, yes, I had given him permission to say that Oxford was married and had two children, because that happens to be true. (Even though it doesn't prove anything about his sexuality.) But I was not warned about all the inserted sentences suggesting Oxford was masculine. And this is supposed to prove that he was straight? Dr. Goetz said, “Didn't we run that by you?” I told him that he hadn't. He apologized and said, “But doesn't it make sense?” What am I supposed to say to that? I tried to get him to understand the basic Butlerian difference between a performed gender identity and sexual orientation. I also tried to make him understand that it is very important for me to open up the possibility that de Vere was a homosexual. The saddest part is that he doesn't seem to have read his Butler or to even care about the issue. “But de Vere always won at his jousting tournaments. Doesn't that suggest he was a man's man?” Can you imagine? He seemed like a very nice person . . . who didn't give a damn about sexual politics. It wouldn't be so bad if his attitude wasn't the general attitude, and if his answer hadn't made me feel so small. And so alone. I'm sorry to get so personal. But what's happened here seems like a turning point to me.