Come Back

By Sky Gilbert

The year is 2050, and, contrary to popular belief, Judy Garland did not die in 1969. At the grand old age of 138, she’s re-embraced her real name, Frances Gumm; she’s a feminist scholar, working on her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto; and she’s writing her thesis on a little-known gay Canadian playwright and drag queen, Dash King, whose rather dismal career ended in a plethora of drugs and promiscuous sex. Obsessed with King’s antiquated notion of gay politics, Frances’s own meditations on addiction are triggered by his tragic story. Will she go back to drugs, or will she finish her thesis?
Framed in an intense communication between Frances and her Ph.D. advisor, Come Back explores a dystopian future and muses on everything from the merits and demerits of post-structuralism to the future of queer theory. Sky Gilbert’s Judy Garland is angry, profane, funny, and very, very smart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770901896

Sky Gilbert

Sky Gilbert is a writer, theatre director, and drag queen extraordinaire. He was the founding artistic director (1979 to 1997) of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre—one of the world’s longest-running gay and lesbian theatres. There is a street in Toronto named after him—Sky Gilbert Lane (you can google it!). He has had more than forty plays produced and has written seven critically acclaimed novels and three poetry collections. He has received three Dora Mavor Moore Awards, the Pauline McGibbon Award, and the Silver Ticket Award. His latest novel, Sad Old Faggot (ECW Press), was critically acclaimed. His book Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry was the World will be published by Guernica Editions in 2020. He lives in Hamilton.

Book preview

you.

Iam still reeling from your last letter. I can almost smell the invective. I read and reread the first few paragraphs. I think what I treasure most are your threats. All this talk about my liver — can you not see that it is old-fashioned? As you well know, they have made a fourth from my own tissue; it is therefore indestructible — or so they tell me.

I think this was the turning point for civilization, if I may digress. But I want you to know that what you have said is serious, very serious, and your threats are real. I do acknowledge that. I want you to think about the time when there was some sense — an order that was more than random — when we had to take threats to our health seriously. Do you remember when there were consequences? When actions had results? There was a time when medical insurance cost more if you put your life in danger, and people thought about taking risks in terms of the cost of their health insurance. Do you remember? Without laser healing, regenerative organ replacement and cyberbodies, these things had to be taken into account. The turning point came when people began to believe there were no consequences. Remember the middle of the last century, when doctors had a smoke while they warned you of the dangers of lung cancer? It seems we have returned to that era. One day people stopped caring about what they did, and ethics became inconsequential. Ethics are related to survival, but when survival is taken care of in ways that we don’t entirely understand, ethics become a questionable luxury. Fortunately we have the police. Unfortunately, the police can do nothing about hurt, betrayal, insensitivity or lies. No there are no personal penalties either — little that’s left is personal.

There is one thing about Dash’s essay that I particularly liked. Dash talks about Olivier’s Hamlet giving up, giving himself over to death and flying like a bird — with his sword drawn — and finally falling on Claudius and killing him. He reads Hamlet not as a destroyer, but as a mystic. One who surrenders himself to the death instinct. Isn’t that what we’ve all done? We have given up, and why shouldn’t we? It is the only response. We know things will be taken care of, that things will be done for us, and that someone (we are not entirely sure who) is in charge. There is something unhuman, or dis-human, but completely typical and human about this response. On the one hand, Aristotle imagined that being human involved action, decision. But then the philosophies of the Far East — and, it seems, Hamlet — were telling us the opposite: that to be human is to relinquish all claims to the ability to change our fate. The concept of fate itself is old-fashioned. Fate still implies fighting against something: Do not go gentle . . . Of course, I gave up long ago. (Thank God.)

Now, to address your concerns, because yes, they must be addressed. So I will calmly sit and mouth the words my father. I was astounded when you made reference to him, but I have every right to respond in kind, now that you have thrown down the gauntlet. And I know what you expect — you expect me to stop. You expect that the spectre of all that will be enough to shut me up. I’m not sure that it is.

I will talk about him, and I will say that I blame it all on the ushers — one in particular. His name was Francisco. Frank, for short. I am not saying my father didn’t experience desire for the ushers, but I don’t believe his lust was ever consummated. It was a different era. Do you understand what it was like to be the manager of a movie theatre back then? He was a member of a Showmen’s League, of course. He was a showman and a performer. But back then running a movie theatre was more than just hiring projectionists. When he started, there were vaudeville acts between the films. Nowadays we know only the megatheatres we create for ourselves in our heads, the cyberexperience of going to the theatre.

It’s my fault if I go back there, as you kept repeating, over and over. I can’t believe you use that phrase, as if I could actually go back in time! How can I convince you? It’s gone! I am not her. My body is desiccated; I’ve come to terms with it, and so can you. But those ushers were fucking beautiful. And people who are beautiful and know it just don’t understand those who aren’t and don’t.

There are two different kinds of people in this world; there is simply a dividing line and never, never, shall the twain meet. Yes, Mayer called me his little hunchback. But look what I have become! He was right, of course. I’m more than a hunchback: I am the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But it wasn’t about what I looked like, it was never that. And it has nothing to do with anorexia. I wasn’t anorexic — a disease that causes you not to see your real body at all. Anorexia is about control — about controlling life and death. That is not relevant to my case. I just hated the way I looked. And Louis B. could call me whatever he wanted, and men could ejaculate all over me — many did. But it didn’t matter, because I never believed, I never once believed, for one second, that I was beautiful. I was never connected to my body. But I knew that beauty was the most important thing. And I knew there were people like that, people who were connected to their bodies in a fundamental way. They didn’t have to learn how to love their bodies, or how to be attractive. They just were.

When I think of the ushers around my father, I think of how they tortured him. My father, like me, always hated his body, didn’t understand it, would have been better off without it. But Francisco and the other ushers were different. They were all dark boys, for some reason. They were probably Hispanics — it was southern California. My father would take me to the theatre and introduce me to them, and they would swarm around him like flowers showing their faces to the sun — and they’d touch him! I saw them touch him. I’m not fucking saying that if my father molested them, it wasn’t his fault. But he didn’t! I’m sure he didn’t. Sure he wanted them, he wanted it so badly — and it wasn’t just because he was a homosexual. Who would not fucking want them?

You know very well about those who used be called straight men — the men who have sex with women — how proud they once were about not being attracted to other men. But how can anyone not be attracted to men? Oh Christ, how I hate those women who go on and on about how they don’t have those kinds of desires — we all know what that means. It’s all about the penis being ugly. June Allyson was like that. Sure, I loved her onscreen. Who wouldn’t love her, if for no reason other than that voice, and what happened to it. She was a very nice person — but nice only goes so far, you know? There was a butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth thing going on with her.

I think there are two kinds of women. The cocksuckers and the . . . not. The not are women who just couldn’t be bothered to do that unpleasant thing to their husbands — as they are, invariably, married. Well, what’s the problem? I would even argue that there is still an identity politics — but it has nothing to do with object choice. It has to do with whether or not you are a cocksucker. I know you’ve sucked the odd cock. And I know you’re not fond of it. But it’s not like you’d go on about it, scrunch up your eyes — that’s what June Allyson would do, scrunch up her eyes, become girlish and revulsed: "Ew! How could anyone do that?" I don’t know how to tell you, June — thanks a lot for the sentiment, but there’s nothing quite like managing to get a thick one down your throat. And if you can’t grovel — I mean, really get down and grovel — in front of a dick, then you haven’t lived, and you don’t know nuthin’, baby.

Now, that doesn’t mean I devalue clits. But if we’re talking about genital ugliness here, who wins the prize? In the last analysis, the wrinkles of a scrotum and the folds of labia are in a dead heat. You’re bound to be repulsed by one or the other — but to be repulsed by both? There’s something seriously wrong with you.

I think it has to do with humility and the human condition, because it’s all about ugliness. This is what I don’t understand, and what makes me feel really old. Ugliness used to be the big secret for anybody who liked to whore around. Nowadays no one is allowed to be ugly, so we’ve forgotten how to get off on it. But people left to their own devices are drawn to ugliness. Not because they’re settling, or because they can’t get that special cute one, but just because ugly is fucking sexy, and grovelling in front of it is sexy. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s where sex and death come together, if you want to get philosophical. But at this moment, frankly, I don’t.

But back to the ushers that used to swarm around my father. They weren’t ugly, but they knew that what they had between their legs was ugly. And they knew that he wanted it. As I’ve said, why wouldn’t he? He was human. But they also knew he hated himself for it. My mother was one of the June Allysons, one of the face scrunchers. Put that away, that’s ugly. I’m sure she said that to my father. I know it must have happened in the dark for them to beget three kids — they probably drilled a hole in a sheet like the Mormons and the Jews and the you-know-who-we-aren’t-allowed-to-mention. Yes, I’m going to say that — I’m going to say that. I mean, who is actually listening? Everybody and nobody, as I understand it — whatever that means. I know how careful everyone is, but I don’t feel like being that fucking paranoid.

Just think about this tortured man. He knows the kind of ugliness he wants, and he goes to work, and those ushers swarm around him. . . . If you want to know the truth, he fired Francisco. Why? Because Francisco came on to him, and he was afraid he might give in to the temptation. That’s what happened. And then two weeks later Francisco was reporting him to the police. I know all this because my mother told us. I mean, she didn’t tell us in so many words. But she told us in enough words that we would grow up being seriously conflicted about our