I don’t know how I feel about psychoanalysis. I’ve had a lot of it, and it seems the more I have, the less I like it. A good psychiatrist ends up teaching you how little you need him. And so it’s pretty clear to me what you’re trying to do and it won’t work.

If, as you say, I am teetering on some sort of edge, then does challenging my identity sound like a good idea? I think I may need to see you in person. If my new academic focus is going to end our friendship, the least you can do is come to Toronto and say goodbye. I know you have (or had) a friend here. We won’t go into that. I know we mustn’t. But surely you could risk seeing her if it meant seeing me. If you don’t want to risk coming here to say goodbye — which is the least you could do — then I am, to quote Mr. King, “at my wit’s end.” I know you take issue with King’s fondness for homosexual hyperbole. I should not even quote him, and certainly should not imitate his diction.

So yes, the fact is — at the very least — you find my academic interests shallow. And you think the entire pursuit of this worthless and perhaps unsavoury subject is wrong. No, more than wrong — a catastrophe waiting to happen. I have lost my mind, or I am losing my mind, according to you. The fact that I have a cigarette now and then is enough to start you raving. You think it’s not about King at all. You think I couldn’t care less about King. And anyway, it’s all a ruse. Ultimately, you believe I shouldn’t care about him because he is a typical, shallow homosexual. I am going to go back, certain to return forever to the dark days. This temptation is an indication, a warning signal, a dire, dangerous turning point.

You really are a very serious person. And I am not. Even though I pretend to be. What I mean is that I am essentially an optimist, while you love dread, revel in it. Nothing could be more exciting for you than imagining the most severe of outcomes. I sometimes think that if there were no horrific consequences, there would be no point to living for you at all.

So it may just be that we have different ways of looking at things. For me this new academic subject matter is simply a risky change, a refreshing new leaf: “Open a new window; open a new door!” (If I hadn’t had to get a second new liver, I could have played that part in the movie!) For you it’s something akin to swallowing a busload of pills and inviting strangers to my hotel room for blow jobs. But then, perhaps I am not the only one who is not in her right mind. Maybe what I have said has also triggered you. I know that when you were young you nursed several old homosexuals who were dying of AIDS. (Amazing that they can cure so much today, but not that, hmmm. . . .) And perhaps you had a bit too much of that kind of self-destruction. Those old homosexuals didn’t like to call it that, but of course what else was going on? In fact, when they began to take care of their health, have safe sex and slow down a bit on the non-pharmaceuticals, they got better.

At any rate, you don’t want to be my friend and/or mentor if I am going to be self-destructive, do you? But I’m going to accuse you of what you are accusing me. In other words, your reaction to my “subject matter” is not as unemotional and measured as you think it appears. Instead, it shows evidence of panicked emotional baggage. But whatever is actually going on between us — and I’m sure one way or another we will find out — I must directly address your analysis of my situation. For you know very well what you are doing. It’s not been that long since I’ve seen you.

And besides, I will never forget what it was like to watch you sitting across from me, preparing to chastise me. I can picture your face, warming up to the challenge. You get that irritated, angry look in your eyes. You imagine I’m going to have a fit and start crying — and then you won’t get to say everything you want to say. And so you push the vituperation, ratchet up the attack. All this because you have to test me — make sure I’m not going to run and cry, descend into my old, childish, self-destroying self.

I am here to tell you I am a changed woman. Or, more accurately, a changed being. I welcome criticism — I do. I know you don’t believe me. I am quite cool, calm and collected — despite the ancient crippled pile of bones I appear to be. I am also fully capable of leading a counterattack.

You raise a particularly cutting critique of Dash King’s letters — the notion that they are shallow. It’s important for us to address this because it is the typical reaction one finds to homosexual writing of any sort. To some degree, it’s Wilde’s fault, because he went on about the lie that tells the truth, the mask being more honest than the face beneath, and style being more important than substance. (You will see later that Dash, too, is concerned with the notion of style and substance.) Eve Sedgwick, bless her heart, suggested that the lie of Modernism was that an obsession with style was meant to hide the desire for a beautiful young man’s body. She meant that a beautiful young man’s body was the content of Wilde’s contentless works of art. A lovely notion, prettily expressed. In other words, whenever Modernists go on about the amorality of art and aesthetics, they are actually talking about a very large penis — the elephant in the room whose tumescence fills the vacuum left by empty Modernism. For instance, Wilde claimed The Picture of Dorian Gray was not about anything; it was amoral. In the introduction to his play he goes on and on about “true art.” “True art” has no moral; it is simply beautiful. But his novel actually concerns itself with a very specific beauty, that of a young man. Wilde would rather that we didn’t notice.

But all this is too easy. It’s too easy to dismiss Wilde for the things he celebrated in himself. To call Oscar Wilde shallow would be like calling Michael Jackson showbizzy, Beau Brummell vain or Donald Trump (remember him?) rich. Of course Wilde was shallow, but only in the sense that he suggested that the shallowest things were actually the deepest. This means his constant ranting against naturalism was a bit of a pose. (Like everything he did.) Wilde believed naturalism was shallow. But it was only shallow, and not paradoxically deep. Naturalism was simply bad writing. Wilde was quite right to scorn it and to try to create beauty beyond the ordinary. The Importance of Being Earnest is about the rhythm and the fascination of completely trivial things: vanity, lechery, greed and hypocrisy. And yet, these things are not trivial at all.

What I’m trying to say is that to call a homosexual shallow — or the homosexual movement, or homosexuals in general — is in itself shallow. It is playing into their hand, and their hand is, more often than not, holding their own — or someone else’s — cock.

So do you really want to go there?

But it’s more than that. Because at the basis of everything you’re saying is something we have to confront now or never.

When we first met, one of the things that brought us together was homosexuality. Of course, there were no bona fide homosexuals left, but we were women who enjoyed the concept of homosexuality, and occasionally had had sex with men who would have been called “queers” at an earlier time. (Me much more than you, of course.) There is a kind of imaginary world going on here. You — who pride yourself on seeing beyond the myth of what we used to call “the Fantasy Me” — are caught in the web of its fiction, terribly insecure about me becoming immersed in it all again. Of course, there were individual homosexuals with whom I became entangled. And there was Mickey. (Not Rooney. Of course, you know which Mickey I mean. But that’s different.)

Okay, let me say it once and for all.

I didn’t like them. I didn’t like it. (By it, I mean the whole “homosexual as my audience” thing.) I wasn’t in love with them. I didn’t do it all for them. I didn’t play it for the homosexuals. And this is the most important idea of all — they didn’t kill me. And by that, I don’t mean simply the tautology that I am not dead. Or, at least, I don’t think I am. And I imagine I can be trusted in these matters. Or are we going to throw out Descartes with the bathwater?

What I mean is that I died in a very public way — though I actually continued living. And the homosexuals were thought to be responsible for my death. They loved me too much; they had showered me with too much applause — they fed my soul-crushing need for drugs by pressing me back onstage night after night to fulfill their extravagant demands for entertainment. They created “the Fantasy Me,” “the Unreal Me” and ultimately “the Dead Me.” The homosexuals become — as the French were once to the English (or the Turks and Greeks to almost everyone in Western Europe) — the abject purveyors of an evil influence. Everything they touch turns to dross — no, to shit — and dies.

This is all just homophobia, ancient and cloying.

No, they did not kill me; they did not curse me, love me too much or contaminate me with their love. The whole idea is ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I knew they were there. For one thing, they were always in the front row. It makes me sad to think about them. But it’s not nostalgia; it’s more piquant. I was, to them, something panting, untouchable, inexplicable — so near yet so very far, a rare tropical dying bird, something religious, a mystic vision. It’s too much to say I was their mother. I think a lot of them had fine mothers. Have you ever met a mother of a homosexual? She’s like anyone’s mother, the same infuriating mixture of saint and monster. But homosexuals are no more obsessed with their mothers than we are. They may have talked about them and written about them more, but that’s just because so many of them were writers.

But the front row, it would inevitably be natty young men in thin ties and very expensive Arrow shirts. And I want you to think for a moment. How could I not be conscious of what was going on? When I played those concerts for them, I was desperately in need of money to keep the kids by my side. And I was doing what I always did. I was performing the best I could, goddamn it. But it wasn’t for them; it was for me. Do you know what I thought about when I looked at them — rigid, intense, frozen, asphyxiated with adoration?

I pitied them.

Not for loving my work — they were moved by me, that’s fine; that’s what I get the rush from. I’m talking about the cult of me, the worship of me, I’m talking about the political party that I didn’t even ask to be the president of, that I wouldn’t ever wish to preside over. I’m talking about people who — instead of living their own lives — were competing to touch my hand. Some made their homes shrines to me and didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t fuck (most pitiful of all) because of me. They were lost little boys. They were not lost because they were homosexuals. They were lost because homosexuality at the time meant being excluded from the most aristocratic of artistic professions. These were the florists, the interior decorators, the hairdressers, the chorus boys — forever, they thought, relegated to the subsidiary arts. No one else would hire them, because they were freaks. They were lisping, effeminate, outcast ninnies.

I wish I could say I loved them. I loved performing for anyone who would really listen. And many of them did. But that’s as far as it went. I watched my funeral on TV. Of course, you already know that; I told you about it. But I don’t think I ever told you the extent of my disgust, which was realized, in practical form, by my laughter. It was very cruel laughter — what can I say, I’m not going to apologize. I had a good laugh. Who were these freaks? And I don’t mean their effeminacy. How many prancing girlettes placed wreathes on my coffin, and knelt down to kiss it, one pinky raised in the air, their painted eyelashes damp with tears? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry their lives were so harsh. But their much-vaunted love for me was all about a human impulse I’ve never really understood — the stupid, desperate (and this is the worst part), unimaginative need to be a part of a pack, a herd — to be, once and for all, accepted.

People always natter on about how I wanted love.

All she wanted was love. And the homosexuals gave it to her. And that love killed her.

Fuck off.

I was a fucking artist and I knew what I was doing. I was damn good at it, even when I was fucking lousy. And I always gave them a show; I always gave everybody a fucking show, not just those crazy homosexuals.

And later? Later it was much worse. I mean, back in the day, I didn’t have contempt for them really — or tried not to. But after my “death,” they continued to buy my records and it went beyond beyond. Don’t get me wrong, the records are okay. But I really was a live performer, a living performer. You had to see me live. And here they were collecting my records and gossiping about my demise. Here they were enjoying interviews in which I’m drunk or clearly on drugs (and there were many such instances). And they only did this because they wanted to belong. I was a drunken lighthouse, a shot in the dark, the delirious painted-pony mascot they hoped would lead them out of their social insecurities.

I don’t think that later, in the seventies and eighties, when the drag queens were still doing me, they had any idea of who I was. I mean, maybe some. But most were just going through the pathetic old routine because I had become part of their identity — part of their little jokes. To be known as my “friend” was another word for homosexual. I had simply become as mundane as the rest of popular culture.

I’m not saying it’s any more sad and contemptible than people who flocked so recently to see Holiday — you know, the musical they did about Madonna’s life. God, that creature lived for so long — it was such an awfully long time they had to wait before they could get the rights to her songs. But when at last she kicked the bucket, they could finally buy out that shyster son of hers. (What’s his name — Jesus? What a businessman he turned out to be.) Holiday is, of course, an inspiredly boring title. And how did they manage to make all those “slap my ass” songs mainstream? The people who go to see the Madonna jukebox musical are just as contemptible as the homosexuals who bought my records and came to worship me. It’s about identity, selling brands and belonging; so sad, so lonely, so solipsistic and resting like an atom bomb at the hollow centre of capitalism, where commodities define us.

My father, on the other hand, was another kind of homosexual. He didn’t live to buy my records. He didn’t want to belong; he never even tried. The problem wasn’t what many thought it was. My father didn’t molest boys; he just looked like he did. And it wasn’t even effeminacy, though there was a little bit of that. He couldn’t help being out and open — even though there was no “out” then. So what this meant was subtle: he was too enthused about everything (but mainly show business) and dressed too well. He wore wristwatches and undershirts before they were fashionable for heterosexual men. But, most blatantly, he loved all kinds of beauty, was obsessed with it.

As you know, it is Christmas, and tonight I caught sight of a particularly tedious broadcast simply because there was nothing else to do. It featured the Georgia Boys Choir. It had a lot of black young men in it. Amazing how, culturally, we can talk about race but pretend not be talking about it at all. Anyway, the choirmaster, who was of course white, was extolling the virtue of his own pedagogy. In this case, that meant reminding the audience that he was teaching virtue by helping young men to appreciate beauty (as opposed to violence). I’m sure no one out there watching was fooled; it’s no accident that those professions that involve working with youth have a natural attraction for pederasts.

My father was no pederast, but the way the audience must have perceived that fawning choirmaster in those viral Christmas images, explaining how he was teaching young men the importance of beauty — their shining faces and mostly unchanged voices singing “make the yuletide gay” — is exactly how people must have perceived my father. You can’t be so open about your love of beauty and get away with it. Men are not supposed to be concerned with beauty, unless it is the beauty of a woman, and even then, as we all know, he must make sure that adoration (which should be purely sexual, not emotional) is under control. He must not love a woman too much, too passionately, or he’ll lose himself.

Strange how this attitude has still not disappeared. So much else has changed. Sexualities have come and gone, bodies have become unrecognizable in their perfection. And yet the idea of masculinity and femininity is still with us. I am tempted to quote Foucault on power. But it’s even more profound than that — a nostalgia, again, for difference, for friction, for the “rubbing up against” in its most primitive and basic form, which is just so eternally sexy. No one knows who was born male or who was born female anymore, and no one seems to care. Gender is irrelevant. And yet our masquerades are ineluctably linked to hard and soft, dark and light, weighty and airy, sweet and cruel. There are no real men anymore, but there are so many convincing imitations. The transsexuals predicted we would all become indistinct in-betweens. But nobody really wants to be an in-between. (There’s that word again. It is truly one of my favourite songs.)

I must admit that sometimes I still get the urge for plastic surgery. Apparently it wouldn’t be too difficult to actually set my head erect upon my spine. Even though I have a special bed, like the famous Elephant Man, who died trying to lie on his back, I do so yearn sometimes to stretch out and sleep flat.

Anyway, to return to my analogy. My father was that choirmaster, completely recognizable as a dangerous outsider, opining piously about his love of movies, vaudeville, stars, songs, costumes and lighting. He was, remember, a natty dresser. And he was, simply, drawn to men. He liked to talk to them, wine them, dine them, amuse them — it was all he wanted from life. Of course, he was also the perfect husband for my frigid bitch of a mother. Anyway, when they finally drove him out of town, when he finally realized they wouldn’t hire him anywhere, he just simply retired from life. My father died of meningitis in a shack; no one can ever understand it — it’s all so perplexing. I mean, I was still so young. I was a child and he did not communicate with me . . . formally. But we were close. And I knew what he was doing. It was a Manichean struggle; it was the flesh and the spirit. He had decided he couldn’t be a father to us if he couldn’t be who he wanted to be (i.e., a man who loved men). And if he couldn’t achieve self-respect being who he was, then it was best for him to disappear from our world.

I have proof of his struggle in the form a letter he sent my mother. I found it in the garbage. It is still crumpled, but I had it framed. It says, in quite lovely, elegant handwriting: “I haven’t drunk anything for some time now and don’t intend to as long as I keep away from it.” That he would seek pity from my mother — a woman incapable of any human emotion, especially pity — says something about his judgement. So does the pathetic idea that by “keeping away from it” he could cure himself. And I’m sure this wasn’t just about booze. It was about his body, about the body in general, about its tyranny.

I visited him, and saw where he lived, and looked into his eyes. My mother didn’t want me to do any of this. But I made Virginia take me. I insisted. I could see there was a Buddhist sort of struggle going on — a veiled calm behind his eyes, and the veil was tears. I’m not extolling him because he wasn’t one of the young men in a front row reaching out to me. I’m not praising him for suffering. But his devotion to me (and I know he was devoted to me even though he lived far away at the end) was a devotion that was purely his own, purely independent, purely original. He loved me despite my mother, despite who he was and despite a world telling him he couldn’t love me and still remain himself. His adoration was not part and parcel of trying to be accepted by a group; in fact, it was quite the opposite. When I sang: “Zing went the strings . . .” on the radio the night he died, I was singing to one man only: to him.

I didn’t mean to get onto this “father and the radio show” business, even though I warned you about it earlier. I thought you might interpret it the wrong way, and you may still. But that’s one of the things I have been thinking about lately. Of course, I realize that I am an addict, and I don’t have any delusions about not being one — or of graduating from that condition. But I am thinking about the way I divide things so carefully now, in such a controlling way: a time for this and a time for that. I dare not speak or write about certain things, or do them, because it will connect me with you-know-what. And of course I cannot, must not, go back there.

I think instead there is a point when a person can’t live with, and doesn’t need, boundaries. Dangerous talk, you will say. I am not abandoning the self-evident truth that I am an addict. For in a world in which there are so few truths, strangely, addiction is empirical. Even that antique deconstructionist Derrida acknowledged empirical truths, of opening a door or touching a table or being struck in the face and feeling the sting. Well, the tangible reality here is my addiction. But what I am frustrated with is the relentless order of my life — which I have imposed upon myself to protect me from ever straying. The loss of those minute satisfactions — I hardly ever eat old-fashioned unpackaged food, hardly ever have a sip of coffee, and I feel so guilty, so very guilty, for the occasional, very occasional, cigarette. Perhaps these activities might not, in the future, be spaced out so religiously (or should I say Jesuitically?). Is that possible? Because this tedious discipline has become my way of life. And I really don’t think I have anything to fear by making tiny alterations.

I love you and never want to leave you, but part of love is recognizing growth and change in the one you love. I think I am changing; I want you to know about it. If I were on the desperate slide to addiction, would I be telling you about all this, asking for advice? What I am saying is that I don’t think it makes sense for me to stay away from homosexuality, or homosexuals. This fear is based on a false notion, which I have already explained — that they killed me, or that I cannot control my feelings about them, or I do not understand what happened to me when I was so close with them. It’s very clear what happened to me, and I have no desire to go back to where I was. Being obsessed with Dash King is not a signal through the flames, it’s not a signal of any kind, nor a hint, or a bad sign. It’s simply an interest — that’s all.

Here is Dash’s next paper (dated approximately one month after the last). The monthly missives emailed to his advisor were partly an academic duty — the pressure was on for Dash to write his thesis. And if he were to procrastinate, there was always the danger he would drift into the vast, uncharted desert populated by those who never finished their theses. (This happened, eventually, as he died relatively young, before he could finish.) So it was important for him to make contact with his advisor in order to not jeopardize his funding.

As we can see from these papers, several things were happening — not the least of which was that his scholarly writing was quickly disintegrating into personal memoir. At this point he wasn’t completely cognizant of the process. It seems he felt that confiding in his advisor was somehow relevant, though obviously digressive. The material below is ostensibly about the Shakespearean authorship again, as King is speaking of his disappointment with his lack of success at organizing a conference. But it quickly meanders into confession.

Let me give you a little more background. I know the details of his personal life because I have communicated with a professor who was a student at the University of Toronto during Dash’s declining years at the turn of the century. He was an excessively beautiful and cheerful man who caught Dash’s eye. Now he is quite old — but still very cheerful — and seems to remember quite a bit about what Dash was up to. Apparently Dash had organized a small meeting of University of Toronto professors in an attempt to interest them in the idea of a Shakespeare conference. The conference was to centre on the subject of Shakespeare and sexuality, which was of course an acceptable area of inquiry at the time — in the context of the New Historicism (which quickly became old) of Orgel and Greenblatt. New Historicism purported to juxtapose literature against history, without insisting that history should necessarily be thought of as authoring literature. At any rate, there were all sorts of ways in which such a conference might have been justifiable and fundable.

What’s interesting about Dash’s focus at this time is that his interest in the notion of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare had clearly superseded his interest in Shakespeare’s sexuality. My talks with the cheerful academic who knew Dash (his name is Trevor) have been revealing. He and Dash were drinking companions. Trevor was friends with many attractive young male university students, as he was a graduate student when he first met Dash, and later an assistant in the “Department of Difference.”

It’s interesting that these departments were named (even when they first came into being) in a manner that predicted the erasure of sexuality as a subject of study. They were such sad things — these departments of “Difference” and “Equality” (there was even one in Brussels dedicated to “The Othered and the Abject”). Of course, since sexuality as an academic pursuit would soon be on the wane, it’s almost as if the university administration realized it was best to name these departments in a way that might also suit any other emerging academic issue — disability, transsexuality and indeed the transhuman being the issues that eventually ate — or I should say devoured — departments that were originally devoted to race and/or sexuality.

At any rate, Trevor and Dash were drinking buddies, and Trevor is a veritable treasure trove of trivial yet indispensable personal information about King. Trevor informed me that Dash — until he tried to organize the Shakespeare conference that quickly became a turning point in his life (the failure of the conference was a huge blow to him, as you will see) — had been trying to control his addictions. After the conference failed, he began falling prey to his most pernicious habits. Trevor claims Dash was addicted to poppers. (This could explain his eventual heart failure.) Dash associated poppers with late-night promiscuity and alcohol. He was also prone to paranoia, unable to smoke marijuana and was, according to Trevor, afraid of chemical drugs of any kind. Dash had, for many years, controlled his obsessive attendance at the gay bathhouse by limiting his visits to the early part of the evening, and imbibing afterwards, thus avoiding the dreaded poppers.

I don’t know how familiar you are with gay bathhouses. Of course, they haven’t existed since the paranoia about disease grew to such epic proportions. (Strange, isn’t it, how unconcerned we are with consequences of our actions, and yet the fear of disease is omnipresent.) The gay steambaths had little to do with steam, or even baths. If you want to learn more about them, there are some cyberbaths that apparently provide a lot of fun for those nostalgic for the experience. These sites are a fair — though obviously mediated — representation of what the real experience was like. People today would find the actual experience alien and discomfiting — for there was much real, physical, sexual contact. (Although the contact was under controlled conditions. Condoms and lube were made available, along with suitable sanitary facilities, etc.) This is, of course, completely alien to present-day sexuality, which rarely involves human contact at all, at least, that is, above ground — or commonly.

In Dash’s day, sex was still linked with propagation, even though people feared that homosexuality might wipe out the human race. It’s quaint that people might have thought that, isn’t it? What actually happened was that matters of convenience, issues of population control and the fear of disease made it more practical for human beings to be conceived in test tubes. In fact, at the turn of the last century it was, paradoxically, people who called themselves heterosexuals who campaigned for a safe, sterile method of procreation that did not involve intercourse.

The steambath was a series of tiny rooms that one could barely move around in — rooms the size of closets. This was certainly ironic. Gay men fought so long to get out of the closet, only to find themselves cruising the darkened hallways and tiny rooms that were so very much like closets in search of a passionate embrace. The tiny sex rooms also resembled prison cells. Indeed, the prison motif was played up in establishments (as it is today in cyberbathhouses) — barbed wire over the doorways, sexy little prison windows, that kind of thing.

So this was where Dash would spend the early part of his evenings, followed by drinks with Trevor and the students at the university. It was a sad and lonely life — at least, in terms of the sexual practices of the time. For there were other “gay” people who were not only still having actual sex with each other, but falling in love, getting married, experiencing romance. Dash got drunk almost every night — remember, for him this was controlled, “good” behaviour because he separated his drinking from his cruising. When Trevor asked Dash why he enjoyed this lifestyle so much, he said, “I’m not very good at sex.” This certainly smelled of paradox for someone who had sex so frequently. So Trevor suggested, “Does that mean you’re practicing?” which apparently Dash laughed at, or rather Trevor couldn’t really remember what his response was. At another point, after the death of his Shakespeare conference, Dash was very depressed. He confided to Trevor, “I don’t really want to go to the baths, but I have to because my boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” Trevor became instantly sympathetic — he’s a very sympathetic type of fellow — and wanted to talk to Dash about his “problem.” But Dash became defensive, saying, “It’s not because my boyfriend and I don’t have sex.” He then specified, “That is, we don’t have sex, but it’s not because of that.” Trevor, who had a notion of himself as a kind of amateur psychoanalyst, tried to probe into Dash’s promiscuous habits and reluctant boyfriend, but had little success.

It was also during these discussions that Dash revealed that his interest in Shakespeare’s sexuality had turned primarily into a fascination with the authorship question. Trevor was confused by the switch, and again the conversation was a drunken one. But one night at the bar, Dash apparently frightened some young wet-behind-the-ears undergraduates from the Department of Difference by banging on the table and yelling, “It’s de Vere. I know it’s de Vere! I can’t stand the lies anymore! I have to expose the lies.”

Once Trevor had calmed down the undergrads and had found a private corner on the patio, he was able to get Dash to explain that “the lie about a heterosexual Shakespeare is actually less appalling than the lie about Shakespeare himself.” On further probing Dash said, “De Vere was definitely a fag, but what drives me crazy is the way the academic establishment refuses to discuss him. . . .” Or something to that effect.

Trevor’s revelations concerning his drunken talks with Dash shed a glaring light on Dash’s disappointment in the writing addressed to his advisor. It’s obvious that Dash’s depression over the conference may have been the cause of his disillusionment with academia, and may be related to his tragic romantic life. Here is the passage:

Antonio:

I want to relate something that is really upsetting. You may think that I am blowing it out of proportion but I want you to know that I am not. At least, it’s important to me, very important, and something we really must talk about. Or you simply have to listen. Here, let me write this to you. I’m sorry I’m not being very articulate. But I’m deeply, deeply angry. I’m going to tell you the whole story. It all has to do with organizing the conference. I might as well tell you right off the bat that I’m not going to try to organize a Shakespeare conference. I’ve given up. As far as I’m concerned there’s no point; all my enthusiasm has gone. The first thing I want to say is that I apologize. I feel terrible for getting everyone together and asking for advice and then copping out. I wouldn’t be pulling out if I wasn’t so discouraged and upset. As you know, in my spare time I have been reading a lot about the authorship question. You’ve been very kind about it, as you are always kind about things — and you haven’t seemed particularly disturbed about my pursuit of these ideas. I’m new to academia, as you know, and I thought that even though the ideas I am interested in are considered radical by some, controversy might be important to a conference.

Well, I’m beginning to understand that specialization is all-important, and that your acquiescence on this topic may have to do with the fact that you are not a Shakespeare scholar, or even an English professor, but a prof in gender studies. I find it shocking that people can be so sensitive about their areas. What if I suddenly decided to have a conference about the idea that identity politics was dead? I’m not sure you would go for it — not because you are not a nice person, but because it would just be too controversial for your area. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’ve picked the wrong analogy. I’ll just get on with it. Anyway, my interest in Shakespeare authorship has been my secret agenda in terms of this conference. I know I first suggested that the subject of the conference might be Shakespeare and sexuality, which everyone, including Dr. Braithwaite, seemed to think was a good idea. But of course I wasn’t being completely honest, especially with Dr. Braithwaite. Of course I’m interested in Shakespeare and sexuality, but I’m also quite interested in the authorship question. And I was hoping — more than hoping — planning — that the conference might have been devoted not just to Shakespeare and sexuality, but could feature a few panels on authorship. Specifically, I was hoping to invite Dr. Mittenstatt from the University of Massachusetts who is the first American scholar to write a thesis on the notion of de Vere as Shakespeare. (Just Dr. Mittenstatt, just him, just one scholar on this topic, among — how many — thirty or forty?) Well, anyway, as you know it’s been very important for me to get Dr. Braithwaite’s approval and support and I was really looking forward to having lunch with him. Neither of us was going to be at the university last Wednesday so he invited me to his house for lunch. I was very flattered by this and this probably adds to the general humiliation. You know how difficult it has been for me to make the adjustment to academia from the world of the theatre. I’ve never really felt accepted by the literary community because I’m an out, gay writer. (You’ve been very encouraging to me on this subject; it’s not because of you that I’m insecure. In fact, the opposite.) As you know, Dr. Braithwaite’s wife, Amanda, is a professor here and also a prominent poet. I’d never met her, but I’ve always kind of admired her, even if only because of the way she tosses her hair around at meetings of the graduate department. I mean, they make quite a handsome couple, don’t they? He is elderly but still very, very muscled, well-built, blond-bearded, distinguished and such a kind man — and kind to me — while Amanda looks like a dominatrix, or at least a woman in charge. I’m kind of afraid of her, but in a worshipful way. So when Dr. Braithwaite said, “Why don’t you stop by and have lunch with us,” I thought I might be having lunch with the scholar and his wife, the prominent Canadian poet. I really was looking forward to it, which makes the whole thing super-humiliating. I wish I could abandon this need to be “accepted.” It’s the bane of my existence. You’d think that, being such a rebel in my writings, I would be able to handle being an outsider on the Canadian literary scene. Well, I can. But what I can’t seem to handle is being abandoned at lunch.

I met Dr. Braithwaite at the Broadview subway, and he was going to drive me to their home overlooking the public swimming pool. But as soon as I got in the car, Dr. Braithwaite said, “I’m sorry, something has come up and we won’t be having lunch at our home.” Here is where it gets a little sketchy. I’m sure it’s possible that something did come up, and that this was not an excuse. But you know how people use that phrase “something has come up” — it’s almost always a textbook euphemism for “I’ve decided I don’t want to spend time with you.” Now, I don’t think this would have been coming from Dr. Braithwaite himself, who is a very nice man and is always very cordial to me. I can’t help thinking of Amanda. . . . I could just hear her saying, “Oh, I’m in a mood today and I have to finish that sonnet and I just can’t bear having lunch with Canada’s pre-eminent gay playwright — not today, could you just put him off?” I know that’s what happened; I’m sure that’s what happened. And you know, it doesn’t matter if it is a preposterous idea, and it is. But the fact is that I will never be accepted by the Canadian literary establishment. And I would like to pretend I don’t care, but I do.

Anyway, the whole thing set my paranoia off, but I vowed to myself that I would be a good boy and have a nice lunch with Dr. Braithwaite because I had a Shakespeare conference to set up. We wound up in a coffee shop because it was all that was open in the neighbourhood. “Will this be all right?” he asked. He is so nice — I just couldn’t say no. Well, we sat down and everything was very warm and chatty, and we really got to know each other. Did you know that Dr. Braithwaite is starting to lose sensation in his fingers? He must be sixty-five years old if he’s a day, and it made me very sad to think about it. He was trying to be blasé, and he is the very epitome of the absent-minded professor. But all I could think of was, does his dominatrix writer wife with the perpetually flippy hair, does she know about this? Is she taking him to clinics, or is she just too busy writing the next great Canadian poetry collection? So I was feeling very sorry for him, and he was giving me lots of great advice about the conference, trying to work in some Dekker stuff because that is also his area, you know, which I expected and was completely open to. Then when everything seemed perfect, and he said he was going to contact people he knew, like Stephen Orgel (I was very impressed!), I thought the conference was in the bag. So we were finishing our coffees and I decided to just throw in a little question about Shakespearean authorship. I didn’t anticipate his response, not for one moment, and even though it was quick and casual, it hit me like a ton of bricks. “So, I was hoping,” I said in an offhand way, “that I might invite maybe one scholar who could talk a little bit about the authorship question.” “Like who?” he asked. And I didn’t think there was anything wrong yet. “Well, like Peter Mittenstatt,” I said. “And who is he?” he asked politely. “Well, he wrote the first PhD thesis on the notion that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare,” I ventured. “Oh —” there was a pause; it was endless; a pause I will never, honestly, never, forget — “well, you couldn’t do that.” He said it just like that, just like it was the most absurd idea anyone had ever had. “Why not?” I asked. “Because,” he said, still looking very sweet and grandfatherly, “if you did that no one would come to the conference.” “Literally?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid they wouldn’t.”

After that I tried to make conversation and be polite and smile, but I knew it was all over for me. I mean, so much is over. Why would I want to organize a conference when the whole reason for me running the conference — my major interest, the Shakespearean authorship question — would not and could not be a subject for discussion? I felt betrayed. Not by Dr. Braithwaite, who I still think is a kind man operating in a cruel and stupid system. Yes, I have to say it’s cruel. And I feel completely betrayed by it. And I don’t want to have anything more to do with it. What I don’t understand is, if it’s so ridiculous to think that de Vere is Shakespeare, then why would it matter if one stupid and irrelevant academic were invited to attend the conference and argue in favour of the bungheaded theory? Why, instead, would that make everyone boycott the conference? What are they all afraid of? And how could a man as kind and brilliant as Dr. Braithwaite treat me as if I had just farted in public when I brought up the subject? Is the emperor wearing any clothes?

Okay, I’ll stop. It’s becoming clear to me that there is no place for me in this world. I was driven out of my theatre company. Why? For being too gay, for championing gay, when gay is clearly over. At least, in the way I knew it. And now the only academic subject I want to talk about is verboten, and I am condemned to silence. I feel that when it comes to me, the rest is silence, because what else do I have to say, and what is the point of talking?

You don’t have to answer. But maybe you will understand why I have been late with my latest draft.

Thanks for everything,

Dash

The Hamlet reference is melodramatic but appropriate. Shortly after this, Dash abandoned not only his thesis, but any effort at constructive living. I don’t expect you to like Dash; he is eminently unlikeable, self-obsessed and self-destructive. And I’m not saying I like him, just that I am fascinated by him. Is this just nostalgia? At my age, I think I can be forgiven a little nostalgia. But I don’t think that’s really what it is. Dash’s self-destructiveness is rooted in a direct relationship with a discernable reality; that is, he knows he can destroy himself. (It is so difficult to destroy yourself these days!) But also, his obsession with Shakespeare is not only rooted in a time and place where identity mattered, but where truth mattered. When history seemed like something that could be proved. It is romantic, and I am romantic. And though I don’t want to stop talking, it is late. We have been talking practically all night — it’s so easy now that I am integral. But I suppose this isn’t talking, technically, as you haven’t had a chance to respond. Yet I haven’t needed a cigarette because I have become drunk on you. You can’t imagine what a job it is to haul this carcass — and that is literally what it has become — into bed. But that’s what I am going to do. Sometimes I think the only thing that keeps me alive is believing you’ll listen to me. When we meet again — I am certain it will happen someday — will you buy me dresses? Yes, I would look ridiculous. It would be like putting the Blob in an evening gown, mud glittering with diamonds. But I should like that. And I would especially like you to go on again about how you cannot wear dresses, that you don’t know how to wear them. But I can.

I can no longer twirl. I can no longer dance. Perhaps that’s why I am playing with words — because they remind me of what it was like to dance for you.