Sad Old Faggot: A Novel

By Sky Gilbert

A daring foray into the groundbreaking genre of autobiographical fiction

Sad Old Faggot is the absorbing, sometimes embarrassing, always entertaining story of a lonely, self-obsessed, selfish, deluded, impotent 62-year-old gay man named Sky Gilbert who — despite his best intentions — cannot help but become a stereotype.

Sky’s main claim to fame is founding Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 1979. But since leaving Buddies, he’s fallen on hard times. Sky Gilbert is no longer even remotely famous. He has to fight off his own bitterness as audiences for his plays steadily dwindle. Theatre people dismiss his work as old news and point to the fact that he teaches at the University of Guelph as proof: his descent into academia clearly signals his failure as an artist.

All along the way, the book questions our truths and celebrates their mutability. What is really true about each of us? What do we actually know about ourselves? And how much, it asks, of our own personal truth is based on fact — and how much is rooted in fiction?

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781770909267

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

Copyright

How Should a Faggot Be?

I found a worm in my bed.

I was checking because we got this notice about bedbugs in our building. Christ, I don’t even like to think about them crawling all over me.

There’s a painting at the MLT in downtown Toronto — you know the MLT, the Magic Lantern Cinemas? They sometimes show art there and they have a piano and it’s really very, you know, friendly.

I’m sure it won’t last long.

Anyway the painting — it’s more of a drawing really — is of a woman with little bugs crawling all over her. The artist who made it is fucking lousy. I say that because I can tell it’s meant to be artistic . . . pretty . . . whatever. I mean for anyone who has ever had bugs crawling all over them (and I have — there were bedbugs in our apartment once) it’s hard to look on a painting like that as artistic.

Anyway I was tearing the sheets off the bed and searching for bedbugs and at the end of the bed in one of the ridges in the corner of the mattress where you usually find bedbugs I found a little worm.

It was writhing in the sunlight.

It was probably dying.

Or who knows — it could have been wriggling around having a gay old time thinking about its happy worm future. Who knows?

Anyway, it freaked me out so much that I just flicked it off the bed and onto the floor. Which was a dumb thing to do because after that I never saw it again. I think it might have been not a worm, but the larvae for some creature. Some creature that could grow into something big and buggy and eat me.

Jesus.

So, I’m going to tell the truth about Sky Gilbert. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I know you’ve heard that before, and you’ve also heard many a doofus question What is truth? But when they say shit like that you know you’re getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Look in the toilet bowel. Look at your asshole in a mirror, that’s truth. Everything else is salad dressing.

Sure you can challenge me — what do I mean when I say my truth? And I would say: what I know about myself for sure. I’m going to tell all here, though I’m not going to trash people. I mean there are obviously some people I can’t talk about — mostly because I don’t hate them. That’s the trouble with a book like this. You end up sounding like a crank. (I am a crank, and that’s the truth.) I can’t write about the people I love except to say I love them. So when I get to someone I love I’ll just say I love them. Which means I’m not going to talk about them in any detail. Because, truth be told, there are of course things I don’t like about them, even though I love them. But I love them too much to tell you those things.

You just have to accept that. Or at least accept the fact that I’m telling you the truth.

This book isn’t going to be like the one I wrote 16 years ago called Ejaculations from the Charm Factory. That was a memoir about my life up to the age of 46. I’m not going to say that the book was a lie. But it was certainly very carefully calculated. My editor Michael Holmes came to me with the idea of a memoir and at first I didn’t want to do it because I figured I’d have to tell the whole truth and alienate a lot of people whom I still loved. But Michael said, Hey, you can be very strategic about what you write and what you don’t.

So that’s exactly what I did. That book is not the truth about me. In fact it is the furthest thing from the truth in some ways. I like to say that it’s the facts about me but none of the inner truth. I only said nice things about my friends and I picked very specific people to trash. Only people I really hated at the time. For instance I really let Kyle Rae have it. And the Good Reverend Brent Hawkes. That was very calculated — in the sense that I thought not only that those two people deserved my hate but that it wouldn’t hurt my career to trash them. I wasn’t, for instance, going to trash Tim Jones — so I tried to minimize the conflict we had when he was my general manager at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre — because I knew he was becoming a powerful arts executive. And even though I knew really scandalous gossip about Toronto Star theatre critic Richard Ouzounian, I didn’t want to put that into the book because he was, well, a big deal at that time.

Now I’m not saying that my memoir is a piece of shit. I still think it has some value as a document about growing up artistic in the crazy Queen Street of Toronto in the ’80s. But as a fucking memoir, who cares? When it comes down to it, who gives a shit about me in the grand scheme of things?

So what the fuck am I doing here? If my story doesn’t matter then what’s the point of me writing another book about me? Well, the inspiration came from an article by Susan Swan I just read in the Globe and Mail. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read a book by Susan Swan. I’ve read hardly any books by Canadian authors, period. Sorry about that. I mean I used to like Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies when I was a teen. But basically, it’s like this. I start in on a Canadian novel and it doesn’t take long before I just get bored and disappointed. I recently really tried to read Lynn Coady. It started out great, then . . . I just lost interest. I don’t mean to trash Lynn Coady especially. She seems a lot better than the rest. (I read nearly half the damn thing.) I mean it really was readable . . . whatever. I can’t remember the title. It had a good title, and the book was funny but . . . I don’t know. I apologize for not being more Canadian.

But I do know who Susan Swan is and she seems to me to be very smart and beautiful (even if she’s old like me). The article was a review of some Swedish writer whom I will probably never read so forget about him. But in the article, Susan Swan talks about the new novel and how the new novel is not fiction but biography. And she uses Sheila Heti’s book How Should a Person Be? as an example. The gist of her argument is that the new novelists are better because they reveal so much about themselves, their real actual lives. They write fact, not fiction, or at least mix the two together in heavy doses. And you can’t measure a novel by how imaginative it is, but by how much it actually reveals about the author’s life.

Okay, so I read that. And I thought, hey, I can do that.

Probably better than fucking Sheila Heti.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against Sheila Heti. I met her twice. I think she is fucking gorgeous, for sure. If I was straight I would totally be in love with her. Totally. She reminds me of a thin version of Lena Dunham — and honestly, isn’t that what everybody wants to be? She’s obviously very delicate and sensitive and smart as a whip. I met her at Hillar Liitoja’s house — he’s a director friend of mine and she was on the board of his theatre company. Sheila was very polite to me but we didn’t bond until we ended up at a donor’s dinner together for another little theatre company. Then we let loose and gossiped and had so much fun. I was completely charmed by her.

So I’m seriously jealous now because she is the greatest novelist since sliced bread and I’m not.

But really I have nothing against her. It’s not about Sheila Heti being awful, it’s about me being awful for being so small-minded as to be jealous of her.

And the only reason I think I could do this whole reality novel thing better than Sheila Heti is because of this: it’s easy to be a reality novelist when you are young and beautiful and brilliant and have your life before you, and the biggest problem you have ever faced is breaking up with Carl Wilson.

Okay, this is the thing. I’ve never even met Carl Wilson, but he published an article of mine once and I’ve talked to him on the phone. And he strikes me as one of the most brilliant and sensitive males on the face of the fucking earth. I would like to marry him (and I don’t want to marry anybody). And he was Sheila Heti’s partner.

I’m sure most straight women would kill to have had Carl Wilson as a lover or husband or even just a one-night stand. I read Carl Wilson’s book about Celine Dion called Let’s Talk About Love and I just fucking adored it. (Okay, so I did like one recent Canadian book.) Now the truth about that book is — and I’m not telling tales out of school because Wilson admits as much — Let’s Talk About Love is all about Sheila Heti. That’s why I love the book so much, because it’s a love letter in the form of an essay. Read between the lines — Wilson keeps digressing and talking about Heti — and the book is up there with Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse as far as I’m concerned. It’s a theoretical book that is actually driven by a real love affair.

Wow.

So what I’m saying is that Sheila is young and beautiful and brilliant with her whole life ahead of her and has only had the singular misfortune of being loved too much by a perfect, brilliant man.

So who wouldn’t want to read a reality novel about her charmed fucking life?

And me, I’m an old, crippled faggot. I’ll never run again. I’ll never kneel again — not without help — very humiliating, let me tell you, for an old cocksucker like me. I’m 62 years old and I drink too much and I’ll probably be dead soon. And I’m still a fucking hopeless (and I mean it is hopeless) slut.

The real truth about Sheila Heti is one thing.

But who wants to hear the real truth about me?

What It’s Like Being Sky Gilbert

I know it’s really hard to get into anybody’s brain and live there, but I’m going to try and give you some idea of what it’s like being me.

I am one really sad, lonely, old faggot.

First of all, I’ve always just generally been sad. I cry a lot. Or at least a lot for a man. I even like crying, which suggests to me that I am essentially a sad person. My favourite thing to do is to put on an opera or a piece of romantic music and get all misty-eyed. It’s irrelevant what kind of music it is — mostly stuff that other people reject as too pretty or lightweight (Donizetti, Bellini). Or music written by fascists like Richard Strauss or by sad-eyed Russians like Rachmaninoff. Yes, I actually like his Piano Concerto no. 2, and it always cheers me up to have a good cry over it.

But I don’t know if I’m convincing you, because even as I’m writing this I’m thinking, wow, it sounds like crying is a good time for me. So that makes me happy, not sad.

But I don’t think that’s true.

I think you can get a good insight into me if you think about a certain piece of music that someone once suggested reminded them of me. It was a ’70s power ballad called All by Myself, and it was all about some lonely guy who is saying he doesn’t want to be all by himself anymore. I can’t remember who sang it. But the song was actually set to the music of the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2. I can’t remember who recommended that piece of music to me. But let’s just say that after the person said, This song reminds me of you, I cheerily went out and bought the damn thing and it was like getting hit with a ton of bricks. The song is probably the most depressing, lonely song ever written. In fact I couldn’t listen to it anymore after the first time because it just reminded me too much of myself — if that makes any sense at all.

My loneliness seems to have originated with my homosexual desires. I spent years and years growing up being alienated and writing in little journals, trying not to be attracted to boys and just trying to be straight and fuck women (which I did until I was 30 years old, still nearly half my life). Of course I thought I was evil and I couldn’t tell my parents, and I disapproved of my desires, and all around me kids were having fun and dating and falling in love and I was so busy feeling bad about myself for having gay feelings that I couldn’t even get attracted to other guys or fall in love with them. I was just lonely and separate and unhappy. I used to read Ayn Rand and imagine I was Howard Roark. The whole bit.

And then when I got older and became more well known in my career, I got popular, in the sense that my name was in the papers, but it didn’t matter to me deep down because even though I was deluding myself, somewhere inside me I still liked to believe that maybe I was being loved for me — whatever that is.

But you know what? If you want to know the truth, there’s not much me to love.

I don’t mean physically. I weigh over 200 pounds and I have a pretty flabby belly.

What I mean is that now I know that I’m not a very nice person. (It’s a difficult thing to have to say about yourself, but there it is.)

Basically I realize my modus operandi is that I’m essentially a performer, an achiever, and I want to be loved for my performances and my achievements, but I really haven’t the faintest clue how to act on a one-to-one basis with anyone. I mean I can do it, but it’s really tough.

For years I tried to make friends and I ran around trying to be popular. I used to agonize because I didn’t have enough friends, and I was always losing friends and having to find more, and feeling that my life wasn’t filled up enough with people, and fearing being lonely and alone. And now I’ve kind of given up. I’ve finally realized that people don’t like me because I’m selfish, uncaring, and I don’t want to be friends with them in the sense of caring for them and listening to them. I just want them to clap for my entertaining stories.

And unfortunately, at 62, it’s a bit too late to develop a caring personality.

So I’m lonely but I’ve created that loneliness. I’ve created it because truth be told, I don’t really want to be around people or put up with the trouble of being their friend (I only want to