RuPAUL IS STILL QUEEN OF THE CATWALK - AND DEFENDER OF THE DRAG FAITH

RuPaul says, "Montreal to Americans is sex city. It's such a sensual place." (All photos courtesy RuPaul/LOGO)

 (December 11) Rarely has a mother been more prescient than RuPaul’s mom, who, when Ru was born on November 17, 1960, told her nurses at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, "His name is RuPaul Andre Charles and he’s gonna be a star! ‘Cuz there ain’t another motherfucker alive with a name like that!"

The rest, as they say, is herstory.

Today drag lovers worldwide know the RuPaul story, and everybody else has seen it on A&E’s Biography. But the rise of RuPaul really began in 1987 with her arrival in NYC.

RuP

"My first Wigstock was 1989. I was there when Lady Bunny did drag for the first time," RuPaul told me. "Now it’s a drag queen festival. But it used to be a bohemian thing. Drag for me was a commentary on life. ‘You mean I’m not supposed to do this? Well, fuck you.’ Then I found out I could make a lot of money doing it."

RuPaul was voted "Queen of Manhattan 1990" by NYC club owners and did a scene-stealing cameo in the B-52′s Love Shack video. Envious of the Billboard success of her friends Dee-Lite, she recorded her own album, 1993′s Supermodel of the World. When the album topped the charts worldwide, Elton John came calling with his duet Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and RuPaul landed gigs hosting her own VH-1 TV series (The RuPaul Show on VH1) as well as top-rated morning-drive radio shows in both L.A. and NYC. Today, RuPaul  is a speaker for CAA, and host mentor and judge on the enormously popualr RuPaul's Drag Race on LOGO and VH-1 (watch the Season 4 promo clip below).

Along the way, RuPaul also became the "First Face of M.A.C.," raising $22-million to fight AIDS during her six years with the Canadian cosmetics company.

Still, RuPaul’s favourite moment was watching television with his mom when Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder introduced RuPaul the supermodel, her first time ever on MTV.

"Coming up next, she’s, er, ah… He’s 6’4" and supermodel of the world," Loder said.

"No one predicted I could make a living out of this except me and my [late] mother," RuPaul says. "My mother was a real rebel. She was Creole from New Orleans and our family was from Nova Scotia. I believe my life lessons [growing up] as a black man helped me deal with the adversity of life as a drag queen."

Grabbing life by the balls


RuPaul – called a sissy by neighbourhood kids – has come a long way from the basketball courts of his youth. "There was a minute I was sort of good with basketball, but I could never deal with nasty attitudes [on the court]. Those boys can be nastier than the meanest queen."

All these years later, RuPaul remains disappointed many people still haven’t learnt that we’re all in this together, even in the gay community. "We are more segregated today than we were years ago," RuPaul quips. "I remember there was such optimism at my first Gay Pride in 1982. That optimism has diminished and I have promised to help bring it back."

RuPaul adds, "Gay culture these days is very polarized. We don’t celebrate diversity enough.

"I took a hip-hop class in San Francisco and afterwards I told the story of Stonewall, a subject very dear to me because it was those queens who had the guts to throw that first brick [at the police]. It’s my goal to never let those brave drag queens be forgotten. That type of tenacity is what led this movement from the very beginning. That type of tenacity is lacking today. That’s why the [gay liberation] movement is so fucking lame right now."


Unseating the system

Many point the finger at RuPaul as a symbol of the mainstreaming of gay culture. But radical Ru – who notes the men he dates have "usually dated women because they are men who see outside the box" – is having none of that.

"Our culture still can’t creatively get beyond two men loving one another. The last taboo for humankind has to do with men playing with girls’ things and men loving men. We can’t move forward. We are at a standstill."

RuPaul adds, "I know the difference between American League and National League baseball. But I have to explain the difference between transsexual and transvestite all the time. Our culture has a vested interest in not understanding us. It would unseat their belief system so much they’d have to reformat the whole fucking computer."

Still, gay life isn’t always obvious, even to those closest to us. Once, on Oprah, RuPaul explains, "My sister Rozy said she didn’t know [when they were younger] that I was gay and Oprah was like, ‘Really? Come on!’ I also just assumed that everybody knew."

Today, if there’s anyone left who doesn’t know that RuPaul – now immortalized in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum – remains the world’s number one supermodel, well, let’s get one thing straight:

"I love dick!" RuPaul tells me, and then lets out a big, hearty laugh.

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LEGENDARY CREATOR OF QUEER VILLAIN THE JOKER JERRY ROBINSON PASSES AWAY

Who can forget Joker donning Wonder Woman’s tiara on the delicious eye-popping cover of the August 2004 edition of Wonder Woman?

I adore a queer villain and Batman’s nemesis The Joker - introduced in Batman #1 (Spring 1940) and created by legendary American comic book artist Jerry Robinson who died on December 8 at the age of 89  - has to be the most fabulous villain of them all.

But make no mistake: The Joker is a cocksucker and the cock our lavender zoot-suited bitch most wants to suck is Batman’s.

The Joker creator Jerry Robinson at the 2008

Comic Con International in San Diego (Photo

By Dan Chusid via Wkipedia)

When I insist The Joker is a fabulous faggot, some straight folks mock me: "Yeah, according to you everybody is gay!"

To which I can only reply, "Why do you insist that everybody must be straight?"

I mostly blame Hollywood for this because Tinsel Town has helped make life a living hell for real and imagined gay people.

Never mind that the tightly wound closets of the world’s most famous matinée idols continue to reinforce the shame of being gay – a homophobic lie that directly affects the lives of every single homo on this planet.

No, when homosexuality itself isn’t used as the root of a villain’s psychosis, then gay life is otherwise erased.

We will likely never witness the true love lives of such gay people as Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln and Florence Nightingale on the big screen.

Don’t believe me?

Take the life story of famed Hungarian Count Laszlo Almasy in director Anthony Minghella’s 1997 blockbuster The English Patient. Like the Michael Ondaatje novel it’s based on, the Oscar-winning film is a lie: The real-life Count was a gay man passionately in love with a German officer whom he tried to help avoid going to the Russian front.

Jack Nicholson as Joker

Apparently homo plotlines are box office poison. Unless, of course, you’re the cross-dressing serial killer in Silence of the Lambs.

In other words, the dream factory is still all about heterosexual voyeurism.

So let’s cut the crap and call a spade a spade: It isn’t homosexuality that drives people to kill, it is the brutal homophobia of straight people that drives many gay killers nuts.

Except for America’s beloved, iconic Joker, who was heterosexualized in director Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman flick by a memorably over-the-top Jack Nicholson, panting after Kim Basinger like a dog in heat.

Except comic book artist Jerry Robinson's Joker has always been queer (although my friend, famed playwright and comic-book buff Brad Fraser makes a good case for The Joker being asexual.)

Today, in Hollywood, if you want your audience to instantly recognize a bigoted southern sheriff, all you have to do is portray him as a tobacco-spitting, N-word-using caricature.

This same kind of shorthand was also used to portray The Joker. Batman creator Bob Kane and his early successors used Joker’s appearance, from his ruby-red lips to his lavender zoot suit, as code for "faggot," which in those days was a term interchangeable with "criminal."

This is offensive in and of itself. But at the end of the day I don’t have problems with celluloid villains being queer, especially when they’re as entertaining as our Joker, who by the time Frank Miller redefined Batman in 1986 in The Dark Knight Returns, had grown into a, well, fully fleshed character.

"You know, you look so pretty when you’re mad!" Joker cackles to a fellow inmate in the 1989 graphic novel Arkham Asylum. "Kiss me, Charlie! Ravish me! But no tongues, ya hear? Not on our first date."

Heath Ledger as Joker

Also in Arkham Asylum, Joker tries to stick his fingers up Batman’s ass through his cape. Then there is Joker’s unnamed boyfriend in Devil’s Advocate and Joker even goes into detail about the sexual nature of murder in Dark Detective.

There is the more recent introduction of Joker’s fag hag Harley Quinn in Joker’s Favor because the script called for a female stripper at a police party, a role The Joker was originally supposed to do in drag.

And while we are on the subject of drag, who can forget Joker donning Wonder Woman’s tiara on the delicious eye-popping cover of the August 2004 edition of Wonder Woman?

I am not offended by a queer villain. I am offended that straight people want to make Joker straight.

So I had little hope that Heath Ledger’s sociopathic Joker in director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight would be sexually attracted to Batman.

But when I saw the film I discovered that – wonder of wonders – Joker is, kinda.

In a monumental role that rivals Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear and Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, Ledger’s Joker turns to the camera and says of his beloved Dark Knight, "He completes me."

End note: Jerry Robinson, the famed comic-book pioneer best-known by fans for creating The Joker, Two-Face and Robin the Boy Wonder, and also praised for his work as a comics historian and creator rights advocate, died at age 89 on December 8, 2011. Robinson reportedly died in his sleep. RIP.

DC Comics remembers Jerry Robinson. Click here. 

Twitter.com/bugsburnett

DAUGHTER JUDY LEWIS WAS NOT THE ONLY SECRET IN CLARK GABLE'S CLOSET

(December 3)  Judy Lewis, the "secret" daughter of Hollywood stars Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died on November 25 at the age 76. Lewis was only 31 before she discovered she was the daughter of Hollywood royalty, then confronted Young in 1966.

"Loretta Young’s deception was contrived to protect her budding movie career and the box-office power of the matinee idol Gable, who was married to someone else when they conceived their child in snowed-in Washington State," The New York Times reports. "They were on location, shooting the 1935 film The Call of the Wild, fictional lovers in front of the camera and actual lovers outside its range."

Judy Lewis, in a publicity photo, around 1977.

But Judy Lewis was not the only secret Clark Gable did everything to conceal.

While many Hollywood historians continue to ignore the real truth about Clark Gable's sexuality, it is now indisputable that Gable was a deeply-closeted homo.

I blabbed about Gable's secret gay life with famed British biographer David Bret, who has written bios of Elvis Presley (Elvis: The Hollywood Years claims Elvis had an affair with actor Nick Adams and Col. Tom Parker blackmailed Presley by threatening to reveal "secret information" that Elvis was a homo), Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn, Maria Callas, and his good friend, the late Marlene Dietrich ("I was the last person she talked to - she called me two days before she died").

Bret also wrote the 2011 bio Elizabeth Taylor: The Lady, The Lover, The Legend 1932 -2011. Taylor once called Bret "a shit, but a lovable shit." But I digress.

Bret's 2008 bestselling biography Clark Gable: Tormented Star exposes Gable's secret gay life. And, let me tell you, it was extensive. Or at least it was "until 1942, when he 'became' straight," quips Bret.

So just how repressed was Clark Gable about his bisexuality?

"Gable was brought up in a gung-ho atmosphere working with his father in the oil fields," Bret explains. "On Friday night [the oil hands] would fetch the local prostitutes and had 10 minutes each. That's also the reason why Gable was so paranoid about cleanliness - from having sex with whores. And he did this because his father told him to. His father brought him up to believe he was a sissy. In the macho world of oilrigs, Gable was regarded as a bit of a pansy and his father called him that until the day he died. So Gable spent his entire life trying to prove he was a man."

David Brett

(Courtesy Random House)

There is a famous story Bret recalls in Tormented Star about why famed gay director George Cukor was fired from Gone With the Wind by David O. Selznick and replaced by The Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming. Back at a 1937 party Cukor hosted, Gable spotted Cukor chatting with gay actor William Haines - whom Gable had serviced many times in his early years to further his career - and he assumed they were talking about him.

So, unable to look a "woman's director" in the eye, Gable had Cukor fired.

"Gable thought anyone who knew Haines had to be a raving queen," Bret says. "He didn't want others to think that of him."

Gable also outed other actors such as Johnny Mack Brown and Rod La Rocque to prevent himself from being outed.

"In those days there were two gangs in Hollywood - Joan Crawford's and Carole Lombard's," Bret explains. "Lombard is the one who termed 'fag hag.' These gangs went to all the gay bars in Hollywood and no one thought anything of it because [actors like Gable] all had beards. But Gable was more discreet with his relationships, like Rod La Rocque.

"But when Johnny Mack Brown was making the [1931] movie Laughing Sinners with Joan Crawford, Gable had him fired because he thought he could do the role better," Bret continues. "Then he threatened to out him if he revealed their affair."

If Clark Gable was once a debonair hero, he no longer is in my eyes.

"Yes, he was very hypocritical. [Outing men he slept with] did make me think of him lesser as a man," Bret agrees.

Here I must mention that Bret is long married to a woman but is also openly bisexual ("I get the best of both worlds!").

Says Bret, "Had I been in the same situation [as Gable], I would have done the same thing [stayed in the closet]. It was very difficult being gay in those days, much more than it is today. And today it's impossible. But today I'd also stick to my principles. Back then I would have made allowances because you would not have had a career."

The same might be said of Hollywood's current crop of closeted matinee idols.

"Others will be writing the same thing about them in 50 years," Bret says, noting of Gable, "It was okay [for him] to deny he's gay. But to ruin his boyfriend's career? That wasn't cool. But Hollywood is a cutthroat business."

Twitter.com/bugsburnett

THE WORLD OF HARVEY FIERSTEIN - WITH JOHN WATERS, SCOTT CAPURRO AND FELICE PICANO

 Harvey Fierstein (Photo by David Shankbone)

Bugs' column originally ran in the November 27, 2011, edition of his Abominable Showman column in The Charlebois Post.

Lord knows how many times I’ve (unsuccessfully) requested an interview with Harvey Fierstein, but I know many folks who’ve met and worked with the theatre legend over the years. And I’ve heard mostly good stuff. For which I’m happy because the gravel-voiced actor is something of an icon not just in theatre circles but in the gay community where his work – from Torch Song Trilogy to his adaptation of La Cage aux Folles on Broadway – have helped advance the cause of gay civil rights across North America.

So this week as The Vancouver Playhouse premieres its month-long run of La Cage, I dug up some of Fierstein’s most famous quotes – and blabbed about Fierstein with entertainers like John Waters and Scott Capurro, as well as literary legend Felice Picano.  

You'll also find below a recent 20-minute Broadway.com interview with Fierstein in which he discusses his upcoming Broadway musical Kinky Boots currently in rehearsals (Cyndi Lauper wrote the music and lyrics) based on the 2005 Golden Globe Award-nominated British-American comedy film about a traditional British shoemaker who turns to producing fetishism footwear in order to save the failing family business and the jobs of his workers.

Cast of La Cage at The Vancouver Playhous, until Dec 24

Fierstein’s first role in theatre was as an “asthmatic lesbian cleaning woman” in the Andy Warhol play Pork, which opened on May 5, 1971 at LaMama theater in New York for a two-week run and then was brought to the Roundhouse in London for a longer run in August, 1971. “So, did I work with Warhol?” Fierstein once asked rhetorically. “I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.”

If you can imagine Fierstein rolling his eyeballs, that’s because most folks who knew Warhol thought of him as a vampire who sucked the talent out of other artists for his own personal gain.

As John Waters told me a couple years ago when I asked him his thoughts on Warhol, “I didn’t meet Andy until I made Pink Flamingos [in 1972]. I’d met a lot of the people in the movie business but I hadn’t met him because he’d been shot [by Valerie Solanas in a 1968 attempted murder] and I didn’t want to meet another bunch of lunatics! Andy invited us to screen the movie at the Factory. When it was over he told me, ‘Wow, you’re going to make the exact movie again’ and asked what I was doing next. He said, ‘I’ll pay for it.’ It was Female Trouble. And I know why [I refused] – it would have been Andy Warhol’s Female Trouble.”

Like most folks, beginning with fabled NYC poet John Giorno (“I was the Factory's first superstar and he was getting rid of me,” John told me over lunch once. “It was the beginning of a pattern for Warhol”), Fierstein moved on. “Pork was in 1971, and I stopped hanging out at The Factory by like 1973,” Fierstein says. 

His Tony-winning play Torch Song Trilogy – about an effeminate Jewish drag queen who adopts a gay teen – is really a collection of three plays rendered in three acts: International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First! Before it opened at the Richard Allen Center in October 1981, the book was published by my mentor Felice Picano, The New York Times bestselling author of Like People in History whom I call The Godfather of Gay Lit.

(Picano is the founder of two pioneering gay presses, SeaHorse Press and The Gay Presses of New York, which in addition to Harvey Fierstein, also launched the literary careers of Dennis Cooper and Brad Gooch. Moreover, with Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Edmund White, Christopher Cox and George Whitmore, Felice founded The Violet Quill, considered to be, to quote Wikipedia, “the pathbreaking gay male literary nucleus of the 20th century.”

(Incidentally, Felice isn’t just a literary legend – he is a world-class name-dropper like me. And I’m still determined to get Montreal’s Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival to host a historic panel with the three remaining living members of the Violet Quill – Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and Felice – which my buddy, playwright Brad Fraser has told me he’d love to host!)

Like his Tony-winning musical La Cage aux Folles (the music and lyrics were written by Jerry Herman and the book was written by Fierstein based on Jean Poiret’s 1973 French play of the same name), Fierstein says, “I’m not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.”

Besides his leading role in the film version of Torch Song Trilogy co-starring Matthew Broderick and Anne Bancroft, Fierstein also appeared in the 1996 Robin Williams vehicle Mrs. Doubtfire, playing Williams’ makeup-artist brother opposite his on-screen partner and real-life stand-up comic Scott Capurro. When I first interviewed the acid-tongued Capurro in 1997, he had nothing but nice things to say about Williams and Fierstein – but nothing nice to say Hollywood’s “Black Pack” (which consisted of Magic Johnson, Arsenio Hall and Eddie Murphy) just weeks before Murphy dropped his $5 million (U.S.) libel lawsuit against the National Enquirer for that tabloid’s eye-popping cover story headlined “Eddie Murphy’s Secret Sex Life—His Transvestite Hooker Tells All.”

Openly-gay Capurro – like Fierstein – is ferociously out and last time we blabbed, Capurro told me, “I was a closeted comic in Los Angeles for three years and I hated it. I don’t know how [comics like] George Wallace do it without talking about being gay. [Comic actor] Anthony [Clark of the old CBS sitcom Yes, Dear]—he’s queer. I don’t know how he does it.”

Cast of La Cage at The Vancouver Playhous, until Dec 24

Fierstein would go on to make headlines dressing in drag in the Broadway musical adaption of the 1988 John Waters film Hairspray, playing the role of Edna Turnblad, first made famous by the late, great Divine in the original film. Discussing Divine’s talent as an actor, Waters told me, “Divine once passed a lie detector test, when he passed bad cheques! He passed a lie detector test and I think that was brilliant acting!”

When it comes to drag, Waters added, “After Divine’s death I don’t think anybody did it better than him.”

But Fierstein is pretty damn good. And funny. “I think the average voice is like 70 percent tone and 30 percent noise,” Fierstein once noted. “My voice is 95 percent noise.”

About working on the stage, Fierstein says, “You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theatre because it is an unmerciful life. It’s six days a week. It’s eight performances a week. And that’s doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.”

Fierstein, now 59, also admits to being picky about the roles he plays. “To me, if a heterosexual has a right to do it, then I have a right to do it,” he says. “And if it's important to the gay youth – who are now setting the agenda – then it’s important to me.”

The Broadway hit musical La Cage aux Folles – starring accomplished Canadian actors Greg Armstrong-Morris as Albin and David Marr as Georges, and directed and choreographed by Max Reimer, also artistic managing director of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company – plays at The Vancouver Playhouse (at 601 Hamilton, part of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Complex) from November 26 to December 24. Click here for more info and tickets.

Bugs is Senior Editor-at-Large of The Charlebois Post - Canada (CPC) where he also writes the weekly "Abominable Showman" theatre/arts/pop culture column.  Click here for CPC archives of Bugs' interviews and columns.

REMEMBERING FREDDIE MERCURY

Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia  on November 24, 1991

When Queen frontman Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia on November 24, 1991, he decided in his last hours to publicly disclose his condition, no longer caring what the world thought – and keen to shape his own obituary, unlike Rock Hudson six years earlier. That gesture undoubtedly helped educate many rock fans about HIV and AIDS in an era when gay men were still dropping dead like flies all over the damn place.

No doubt it made one of my old friends – a well-known Canadian rock journalist from the era who prefers to remain nameless for this story – think about his own mortality. In fact, my colleague was befriended by Mercury when Queen taped two live concerts at the old Montreal Forum on November 24 and 25, 1981, for the famous 35MM live film Queen Rock Montreal.

“He wanted to sleep with me,” Mr. Rock Critic told me, pointing out the band had rented out the entire floor of a Montreal hotel. “He chased me down the hallways! Lets just say I ran the 100-metre dash in record time!”

There is another fun Montreal connection with Queen, featuring yet another old friend of mine, legendary CHOM deejay Tootall whom I like to say has the sexiest voice on Montreal radio. Anyway, Toots broke Queen’s #1 worldwide hit Crazy Little Thing Called Love right here in Montreal on CHOM back in 1980. 

TooTall of Montreal's CHOM FM

“What happened was CHOM deejay and man about town Doug Pringle was in London and sent me a tape of Crazy Little Thing Called Love which was apparently on the British forthcoming release of The Game but he said they weren’t sure if they would release it in North America since it sounded so un-Queen like,” Toots told me. “So he sent me the song and I kept on playing it. The station’s music director – who shall remain nameless – didn’t like it and gave me grief. Of course when the album did come the song was on it and it became a big hit – the Number One song of 1980.”

I also recently asked Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford what it was like to rise to showbiz fame in the 1970s at the height of the homophobic “disco sucks” movement.

Samantha Fox and Freddie Mercury atop Barkers
Photo: Courtesy Samantha Fox

“I saw Freddie, it must have been in the early 1980s, and I was going to Mykonos with friends from London via Athens,” Halford recalled. “We got to the hotel [in Athens] and did what we all did then – the clubs, the parties. At one club Freddie was holding court at the other end of the bar. We were two ships passing in the night. He waved, I waved. The place was packed and we never got the chance to connect. The next day we all went to Mykonos and I was on a beach when his yacht sailed by.”

A few years ago I also had a heart-to-heart with openly-lesbian 1980s pop siren and British pin-up Samantha Fox about the showbiz closet. When we discussed Freddie Mercury, she recalled rubbing elbows with British pop royalty in a nightclub above London’s iconic Barkers department store on Kensington High Street 25 years ago this past summer.

“It was an outrageous party! The place was filled with naked women painted green,” Fox said. “And everybody was there: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, even Gary Glitter. And Queen was playing. I had just one [hit] song [at the time], but Freddie Mercury pulled me up on stage and said, ‘Do you know Johnny B. Goode?’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’ So we sang it together!”

May 2012 update: To mark the band’s 40th anniversary, the Queen officially-approved Queen Extravaganza contest begat a concert tour by official Queen tribute band the Queen Extravaganza, which headlined Montreal's Bell Centre on May 27, 2012, which I attended. It was a truly excellent tribute, and Montreal native Marc Martel of the Juno Award-winning band Downhere was the (no pun intended) Freddie Mercury deadringer who won the Queen Extravaganza contest. Check out Martel’s winning audition here:

June 2015 update: British pop star Mika has long reminded of Freddie, and he channeled Freddie on his new 2015 album No Place in Heaven. One recent weekend in Montreal, Mika and I talked about his beautiful ballad Last Party, the emotional centerpiece of his new album and an ode to Mercury.

"The last time I saw you," I told Mika, "you imitated Freddie backstage from Queen's We Will Rock You: Live in Montreal 1981 DVD . . ."

"Yes! I remember — that interview is something straight out of Absolutely Fabulous," Mika replied, laughing. "The song Last Party started with this idea that I had, when Freddie Mercury found out that he had AIDS, he closed himself up in a nightclub and had a crazy party for three days, with drugs and everything. It was the worst possible thing to do after discovering that kind of news, but that’s what he did. That’s why that song is called Last Party, and it’s one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard."

Twitter.com/bugsburnett

CLIKS TRANS FRONTMAN LUCAS SILVEIRA: "GOD BLESS WHOEVER GAVE ME THIS BODY"

 

Lucas Silveira was named Sexiest Man of the Year by Canada’s Chart Attack magazine (Photo courtesy Lucas Silveira)

 
I once had sex with a pre-op tranny, a she-male, a chick with a dick, if you will, and it was a complete and utter mindfuck.

But it took that night for me to understand things I never did before. Like the pre-op transwoman who fucked me that night never identified as a gay male before beginning her transition because she always identified as a straight woman.

Another transwoman I know still sleeps with women, not because she "became" a lesbian but because she always was a lesbian.

So it’s been strange watching how trans politics have transfixed America over the last few years, from transgendered male Thomas Beatie – who has given birth to three children since 2008 and was recognized in 2010 by Guinness World Records as the world’s ‘First Married Man to Give Birth’ – to Chaz Bono making international headlines on the reality TV show Dancing With The Stars.

Right-wing pundits are still having a transphobic meltdown. During his 15 minutes, Beatie was called an "androgynous freak show" on a David Letterman Top 10, and Beatie duly visited with a slack-jawed Oprah. This year, ABC officials became so worried about Chaz Bono’ssafety both on and off the Dancing With The Stars studio lot, TMZ reports, that Bono was put on 24-hour protection leading up to the show.

Personally, I was horrified when my friend Dr. Margaret Somerville, founder of McGill’s world-renowned Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, was quoted by the London Daily Telegraph chastising Beatie: “You’re a woman and you’re having a baby. Just because you put on a clown suit doesn’t mean that you don’t still exist underneath.”

Then a couple years ago I was blabbing with Lucas Silveira, transman and frontman of one of the finest rock bands to ever come out of Canada, The Cliks. Silveira has just released his debut solo album Mockingbird and headlines my buddy Maggie Cassella’s Flying Beaver Pubaret in Toronto on November 26.

“Growing up sucked,” Lucas says. “It was extremely confusing. I didn’t have the language for it. I was 3 or 4 when I realized it – when I saw my brother’s wiener and I asked my mother when I was going to get one too. ‘When are you going to buy me one?’ Now I’ve bought a few!”

That doesn’t mean life, or sex, is no longer a mindfuck.

“[My transition] is as complete as it’s going to get,” explains Lucas, who is currently writing his memoirs which will be published by Random House. “At this point [physically I’m] going to stay [this] way because I don’t want to risk it. But transitioning mentally, I don’t like being called ‘she’ and having to pull myself out of my body every time.”

If Lucas’s identity is a problem for some, it most certainly isn’t for fans of The Cliks, including comic Margaret Cho, who says, “No one else can inspire such crushed-out admiration and full-on rock star screaming. I thought those embarrassing fangirl days were long gone for me, but The Cliks have brought them back with a vengeance!”

“She wants to kiss every time she sees me!” laughs Lucas.

Cyndi Lauper is also such a big fan she invited The Cliks to co-headline her 2007 True Colors Tour (a Vans Warped-style tour to raise money to fight for gay civil rights).

And Ian Astbury of The Cult loved Lucas and the band so much he invited them to open The Cult’s cross-Canada tour, which I saw them wind down with a truly massive concert at Montreal’s Olympia Theatre in April 2008.

Gives new meaning to riding the Trans Canada Highway, no?

“[My] audiences are a mixed bag of queer and straight,” Lucas says. “It started off more on the queer side since that originally was our major source of media coverage. Now we’ve got people of colour, moms, dads, trannies, queers and straight college kids.”

That’s because the alternative and mainstream press have finally come on board. After The Cliks conquered SXSW in Austin in 2007, The Boston Globe raved they “rock with primal, stylish ferocity reminiscent of the early Pretenders.”

Lucas adds, “The Austin Chronicle also got us a lot of attention and helped us stand out from the 1,300 bands that were there.”

The Cliks were invited back to SXSW in 2008 where they rocked The Dirty Dog.  “The place is a dive but we kicked it!” Lucas says. “I love Austin. It’s rock’n'roll heaven. It’s like a rock’n'roll Pride. Music is blaring out from everywhere.”

Signed to Warner Records in Canada, The Cliks made history as the first band with an (overtly) transgender male leader to be signed by a major record label, Tommy Boy Entertainment’s gay-friendly imprint Silver Label, where their CD Snakehouse got raves. The band also transformed Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River into a rock anthem.

But the heart of the band remains unmistakably Lucas – which explains his new solo album Mockingbird, which includes covers of Leonard Cohen’s I'm Your Man and Kanye West’s Runaway.
So what’s it like being a posterboy for transmen?

“I think other people consider me that,” says Lucas, who was named Sexiest Man of the Year by Canada’s Chart Attack magazine in 2009. “I got little kids coming up to me all the time. One 15-year-old in Albany said if it wasn’t for The Cliks he wouldn’t feel normal. If I can help them, then I’ve made a difference and it’s all been worth it.”

Lucas continues, “I am a very political person, I just don’t tend to bring it in my songwriting. Just being transgendered is political enough. God bless whoever gave me this body.”

Lucas Silveira headlines Toronto’s Flying Beaver Pubaret on November 26. Purchase tickets by clicking here.

Facebook page for Lucas Silveira at The Flying Beaver Pubaret

Official website for The Cliks

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AN AUDIENCE WITH POST-PUNK LIVING LEGEND CAROLE POPE

 Carole Pope headlines The Flying Beaver Pubaret in Toronto on Oct 23 

(Photo courtesy Carole Pope)

It shall come as no surprise to most folks that I can morph into a splendid diva if I’ve drunk too much champagne. That’s exactly what happened to me in Vegas a couple years ago at a Pamper Party at the Kim Vo spa in the Mirage, where I demanded they pop open another bottle of pink bubbly while I got the rundown on which Hollywood stars pampered at Kim Vo have the ugliest feet.

I was sitting between my colleague, Toronto publicist Stephen Shinn, and his good friend, Canadian pop icon Carole Pope, as we each got mani-pedis.

"Oh my God," Carole told me, "you are so gay!"

With those words I was, essentially, blessed by our Pope.

Bugs and post-punk legend Carole Pope

at POP Montreal music festival in 2010

But the post-punk queen of raunch can’t stand that other pope, the one I call the Benedict Arnold of our times, Pope Benedict XVI.

"Don’t get me started," Pope says from her NYC home. "And just look at the Catholic saints, especially the Spanish ones – they’re into S&M, bloodletting, repressed sexuality. I think the Catholic Church is really kinky."

Kinky is also the word many would use to describe the lyrics of Carole Pope, one of the most subversive and influential pop icons to ever come out of this country. Though Pope herself maintains she and Kevan Staples thought of Rough Trade’s music as "sexual parody."

Still, from the time Toronto’s CHUM-FM demanded her old band Rough Trade change a lyric in their number one hit, High School Confidential (the lyric "She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way" was replaced with "She makes me mmm my jeans when she comes my way"), to her brand-new solo album Landfall (featuring a duet with Rufus Wainwright and a song written with Hawksley Workman), Pope has always made waves.

"I just want people to know that I’m still writing and making music," says Pope, who points out her terrific 2004 album Transcend "was not properly promoted by the record company. People don’t remember it. But I just want to move forward and expand my writing."

Still, it is hard to forget her past, especially since it’s so well-documented, including in her own star-studded bestselling memoir Anti-Diva (Random House), published in 2000. The film rights for Pope's autobiography have been optioned and a film is in development.  

Not to mention it was David Bowie who chose Rough Trade to open the Canadian leg of his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour. And it was Carole Pope who taught Divine – the iconic drag queen who rose to cult fame in director John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos – how to sing for the 1980 musical Restless Underwear at the Beacon Theatre in NYC.

She also rerecorded High School Confidential for the hit Queer as Folk TV series. And one of the great punk-rock songs of all time, Rough Trade’s Shakedown, stole the soundtrack of the hugely controversial 1980 film Cruising directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino.

The film is about a serial killer targeting gay men in NYC’s S&M scene. Gay activists absolutely hated the film at the time, which, to be honest, has aged quite well and hauntingly presaged the coming AIDS onslaught.


"It was pretty shocking back then but we couldn’t turn down the chance to work with Friedkin," Pope says today. "Even I found it shocking. But now it’s a big cult film and I love those ass chaps!"

The Rough Trade album Shaking the Foundations was also adapted into a musical by Montreal-based playwright Bryden MacDonald, who remembers it even shocked La Pope.

"She’s amazing and a little scary, but I think she’s an amazing songwriter," MacDonald told me last year. "When she found out [my play] was going to be [all] jazz piano, she was like, ‘Fuuuuuckkkkk…’ But it was five hot chicks in tuxedos and Carole almost creamed in her pants!"

Pope was also the long-time love of British music legend Dusty Springfield. In fact, when I bumped into Carole in an elevator in Vegas, I actually had a copy of the 2008 book It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems (Freehand Books) by Jeanette Lynes in my hand.

"[The author] is probably a stalker!" Carole deadpanned when I gave her the book.

Today, Carole says, "I thought some of that poetry was pretty good, pretty insightful."

What about the new Dusty Springfield Hollywood biopic now in the works – will Pope get involved?

"I don’t think so," Carole replies. "I do feel a bit protective about Dusty’s legacy. I really want [the producers of the film] to get what an innovative musician she was and not just focus on the sexuality and the drinking. Many singers were influenced by her."

Just like many have been influenced by La Pope, who now wishes she never got rid of her 1980s wardrobe. "I could shoot myself because they could be museum pieces!" she recently noted.

Like Grace Jones – who notoriously said of current fashionista Lady Gaga, "I prefer someone who is more original [and] not copying me" – Pope has little respect for Gaga. "She is very derivative and asexual," Pope says.

It’s true that 30 years ago Pope, now 61 (who goes to the gym four times a week and rides her bicycle all over NYC), was far ahead of her time. In many ways, she still is today.

"I’m flattered when people call me a living legend but…" Here Pope’s voice trails off and I am reminded of the time she told me a decade ago, "I’m so over me."

Carole Pope and her band headline The Flying Beaver Pubaret (488 Parliament Street) in Toronto on October 23 at 8 pm. Advance tix and/or dinner reservations strongly recommended (647.347.6567).

Facebook page for Carole Pope at The Flying Beaver Pubaret 

HOW ONE NIGHT IN MONTREAL CHANGED THE LIFE OF MARLENE DIETRICH

 Marlene Dietrich plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler herself

I adore Dietrich: her gaze, her husky voice, not to mention her participation in one of the greatest barroom brawls ever filmed, in Destry Rides Again.

But it's Morocco I love most. Dietrich plays a bisexual cabaret singer who gives everything up for the man she loves, a Foreign Legionnaire (a gorgeous Gary Cooper) whom she follows into the Sahara desert.

Even now, over 80 years after her Hollywood debut and nearly 20 years after her death on May 6, 1992, the tempestuous screen legend and gay icon still captivates. Just ask Montrealer John Banks, who was 15 years old when he met Marlene Dietrich backstage during her run at Her Majesty's Theatre in Montreal back in 1960.

Marlene with John Banks
at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre 
in Vancouver, circa 1964

"The announcement [that she was coming to Montreal] unleashed a frenzy of excitement that only a concert combining Céline Dion and Madonna might match today," recalls Banks, now 67. "The night itself — well, it was Halloween and there were more Dietrichs to be seen on the streets of Montreal [in the city's then-downtown Gay Village] than men in trousers, though quite a few of the Dietrich impersonators were wearing trousers too!"

After Dietrich's Halloween night concert, she met many of her admirers — including several Dietrich female impersonators — backstage. And there was Banks, who asked Dietrich to autograph three records. She refused to sign the third, a Decca compilation from her films.

"But these are old songs," Dietrich said. "I don't sound like that anymore."

Instead of acquiescing, though, Banks snapped, "Well, I wasn't around then and I like the way orchestras sounded back then!"

Dietrich paused, then pushed Banks aside and said, "You stay here."

Then Dietrich greeted her other admirers. Later, after drinks at Montreal's Ritz Carlton Hotel, Banks was hired as Dietrich's personal secretary for the next 12 years. "Let's face it," he says, "I was her gofer."

Banks lovingly explains how the unlikely pair became friends ("Jahn-ny," Dietrich called him) over plenty more meals and drinks while Dietrich toured Europe and America. "She was my university," he says.

"She never had her face lifted," Banks says, "because she didn't give a shit. She could tape it up and do all sorts of things to make herself look like Dietrich. But in her offstage life, she really didn't care. [Director] Mike Nichols said something that is so very, very true: When you went out with Marlene, she was the only woman he ever knew who didn't look in a mirror all night. And it's true. She was very secure in her looks. She had been an exceptionally beautiful woman."

Dietrich also had affairs with other women. She and Claudette Colbert were close all their lives, and Banks suspects they were even lovers. "Getting Marlene to talk about Hollywood was very hard," he explains, though he points out that Marlene never hid the truth.

When, for instance, rumours claimed she was having affairs with Maurice Chevalier and Gary Cooper at the same time (she was), she appeared at the 1932 premiere of Cecil B DeMille's biblical epic The Sign of the Cross on the arms of both men — dressed as a man!

"Marlene adored drag. At every show, there would be drag queens dressed as Marlene. And she liked meeting them backstage to see what they were wearing. In 1920s Berlin, she was often the only woman allowed in gay bars. She'd arrive in drag herself."

Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of

Tec 4 Earl E. McFarland at a U.S. hospital

in Belgium where she was entertaining GIs

on Nov. 24, 1944

With the rise of the Third Reich, though, Dietrich — ranked the ninth-greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute in 1999  — stunned Germany when she spurned Hitler's advances and took American citizenship.

Then she sang for the Allied troops during World War II. Of all the units that she adopted on her USO tours and who considered her one of their own, it was the 82nd Airborne that truly captured Marlene's heart.

"I think when she said her war work was the most important thing she'd ever done in her life, she meant it," Banks says. "She loved performing for the soldiers. She liked being one of the boys."

Banks points out that Dietrich, director Billy Wilder and other Hollywood Germans created a fund in the late 1930s to spirit Jews and dissidents out of Germany. "When she did Knight Without Armour in England in 1937, her salary — which was $450,000 — was put into escrow to help Jews escape Germany. Marlene went totally broke during the war."

In her 2011 book Marlene: A Personal Biography (JR Books), author Charlotte Chandler writes that Dietrich asked her onetime lover Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. for his help in an extraordinary plot: Dietrich would agree to make one film in Germany, on condition that she could be alone with the Fuhrer. And this would give her an opportunity to kill him.

“I would gush over how I feel about him, intimating that I am desperately in love with him,” Dietrich told Fairbanks. “I've heard Hitler likes me and I'm certain he would agree.”

Realizing she would be searched, Dietrich was prepared to go into Hitler's bedroom naked – but Chandler reports the only detail Dietrich could not resolve was how to smuggle in a murder weapon. She considered a poisoned hairpin, but Fairbanks said, “Fortunately, her idea didn't go any further because she didn't figure out how to complete the assassination, but she was a very brave girl and I know she would have gambled her life if she thought she had a chance of success.”

Dietrich's return to Germany in 1960 for a concert tour was controversial and made international headlines. While some Germans spat on her in the streets of Berlin, and protestors chanted "Marlene Go Home!" during her performances at Berlin's Titania Palast theatre, she was warmly greeted by other Germans, including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt.

Much of this is documented in British biographer David Bret's excellent book Marlene My Friend: An Intimate Biography, published a year after Dietrich died in 1992.

"I was the last person she talked to — she called me two days before she died," Bret told me a couple of years ago.

"I have called to say that I love you, and now I may die," Dietrich told Bret.

(I told Bret about John Banks and how John met Marlene in Montreal in 1960. Bret got back to me later, saying he'd dug up all of his Marlene interview notes and rediscovered that Dietrich kept referring to a man named "Johnny," which is Montrealer John Banks. So I offered to introduce Bret to Banks if ever he wants to follow up on his Dietrich biography.)

"When I die," Dietrich once said, "I'd like to be buried in Paris. But I'd also like to leave my heart in England, and in Germany — nothing."

When she died in Paris on May 6, 1992, though, her body, draped in the French flag, was flown to Germany in a German military plane and buried next to her mother in Berlin. To this day, neo-Nazis regularly desecrate her tombstone, whose inscription reads, "Hier steh ich an den Marken meiner Tage" (Here I stand at the milestone of my days).

Banks, meanwhile, says he'd finally had his fill by 1973. "[Her daughter] Maria, in London, would open a bottle of scotch in the afternoon for Marlene and that — that just threw me. And Marlene adored her daughter. There was no fighting Maria and I wasn't going to work with a drunk Dietriech."

Things only got worse in 1975 when Dietrich fell into the orchestra pit during a concert in Sydney, Australia, broke a leg and went into isolation for 17 years.

Banks last spoke with Dietrich in 1988 in Paris, where she lived out her final days in her 993 Park Avenue apartment surrounded by books, pictures and mementos. She watered her beloved geraniums, watched CNN and read several newspapers each day.

But Banks prefers to remember the old days with "Miss D" who, I discovered from David Bret, also remembered her "Jahn-ny" as that challenging loudmouth 15-year-old backstage in Montreal, where she took him under her wing.

"She was very nice to young people," Banks says softly, "and I miss her very much."

Read another version of this story in Canada's Xtra newspaper by clicking here

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STEVE GALLUCCIO LAUNCHES PAPERBACK OF HIS HIT PLAY 'IN PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO'

  Steve Galluccio: “When it comes to Mambo Italiano on Broadway, I’ll believe it when I see it onstage.”

Montreal playwright Steve Galluccio – best-known for scripting the films Mambo Italiano and Funkytown – launches the paperback version of his hit 2010 play In Piazza San Domenico at Montreal's Centaur Theatre on October 11.

Galluccio will sign books at the 5 a 7 cocktail that is open to the public, and the original Piazza cast will be on hand to do a reading from the book.

Galluccio, meanwhule, is not sitting on his laurels. He is currently writing his guide to Montreal called Montréal à la Galluccio (Les Éditions de l’Homme) which will be published in the spring of 2012. And Galluccio recently secured the French Canadian rights for the hit Broadway play 39 Steps.

“[Producer] Denise Robert and I saw the play together in New York [last year] and absolutely fell in love with it,” Steve says. “Our next trip to New York we negotiated the rights for French Canada. So we’re bringing it to Montreal in 2012. We’ve hired our cast and crew, our director is Benoit Pelletier and the translation was done by [theatre veteran and 39 Steps stage manager] Lucianna Burcheri. We start rehearsals in November and previews will begin in June 2012.”

Adds Steve, “We will not be presenting the play as part of a festival or theatre season. We’re doing this on our own, likely in several different theatres. So there is risk involved.”

Meanwhile, what about that planned Broadway musical based on Mambo Italiano with renowned NYC producers Jean Cheever and Tom Polum, whose rock musical Toxic Avenger did boffo business Off-Broadway?

This past January, when we last spoke about Mambo on Broadway, Steve told me, “It’s supposed to go for the 2012-2013 season but it’s very hard to get something done on Broadway right now. I don’t think we’ll break the show on Broadway. It takes a lot of time and patience. Not to mention the average cost of a Broadway play now is around $2 million to $2.5 million. The reality of doing theatre in New York on Broadway is so different than the reality of doing theatre here [in Quebec] where everything is spoon fed to you. You get money from the government, you put your play on for four weeks and then you go on to your next play. In New York you have to find investors and it may close after three weeks. There are so many plays that close in New York that it’s such a big gamble for everybody.”

By this week not much had changed in New York.

“The producers are still very excited, but they’ve been very excited for three years! Their option expires later this year,” Steve notes. “So when it comes to Mambo Italiano on Broadway, I’ll believe it when I see it onstage.”

In Piazza San Domenico book launch at Montreal's Centaur Theatre (453 St-Francois Xavier), Sept 11 from 5 to 7 pm

In Piazza San Domenico book launch on Facebook

October 13 Update: Click here to see pictures of the October 11 book launch, on The Charlebois Post, Canada's best source for all theatre news.

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CANADIAN “QUEER RIGHTS” HISTORY BOOK TOUCHES ALL BASES – EXCEPT SEX GARAGE

 Author Peter Knegt has written pocket book about the history of Canada's gay civil-rights movement, About Canada: Queer Rights (Photo by Adam Coish)

First-time author Peter Knegt has written a slim pocket book about the history of the queer rights movement in Canada – and it’s pretty good. Part of Halifax-based Fernwood Publishing’s About Canada series, this book is simply titled Queer Rights and briefly but concisely explores how Canada became a gay-civil-rights world leader.

“At first I just kind of did everything I could possibly think of: scouring every single issue of iconic gay liberation magazine The Body Politic at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives in Toronto; reading or rereading everything already written on the topic (most notably the work of Gary Kinsman, Tom Warner, David Rayside, Miriam Smith, Becki L Ross and Brenda Cossman); contacting any kind of authority on the issues I could think of – whether academics, artists, politicians or leaders at queer organizations – and trying to set up interviews,” Knegt tells Canada's Xtra newspaper.

“I ended up interviewing upwards of 70 people from across Canada, some on the phone and some in person. And that was a more important part of the process than I ever could have imagined. Hearing the stories of these men and women who had seen and done so much was intensely inspiring. I remember sitting across the table from Tim McCaskell or Kristyn Wong-Tam or Gerald Hannon and just feeling so floored by what they had to say.”

My one beef with the book is that Montreal’s July 1990 Sex Garage raid is not mentioned once. Without diminishing the importance of the 1977 police raid on Montreal gay leather bar Truxx, Sex Garage is arguably the most important queer event in the history of Montreal and Quebec. That night politicized an entire generation of queer activists who permanently changed the Quebec political landscape and led directly to the creation of the group Lesbians and Gays Against Violence.

"The Truxx raid never changed the attitudes of Montrealers towards gays and lesbians and it certainly didn't inject pride in the gay community," veteran gay activist Michael Hendricks - who has done more for gay civil rights in Canada than probably any judge or politician - told me. "That's why I believe Sex Garage was Montreal's Stonewall. It created community and brought us together in a common front. It also brought English and French together. We founded a group called Lesbians and Gays Against Violence and kept parading around the city for another two months."

LGV was the predecessor of La Table de concertation des gaies et lesbiennes du grand Montreal, the political-action group pivotal in lobbying for the Quebec Human Rights Commission's historic 1993 public hearings on violence against gays and lesbians.

Later, La Table was also key in lobbying for the 1999 passage of Quebec's historic Omnibus Bill 32, which extended benefits, pensions and social services to same-sex couples. That also led to Hendricks' 2004 Quebec Superior Court victory legalizing same-sex marriage in Quebec, a landmark ruling that also forced Ottawa's hand in the 2005 national debate over same-sex marriage.

Montreal publicist Puelo Deir produced the outdoor-stage show at Montreal's Parc Lafontaine following LGV's 1990 march from Montreal City Hall that, in tandem with other Sex Garage fundraisers, helped raise $5,000 to cover lawyer's fees.

That Sex Garage march also directly laid the groundwork for Montreal's Divers/Cite Queer Pride march that Deir co-founded with Suzanne Girard in 1993, a march that in 2007 morphed into the city's famed eight-day Divers/Cite queer arts and culture festival.

Sex Garage also inspired Bad Boy Club Montreal head honcho Robert Vézina to organize the BBCM's first Black & Blue circuit party in 1991. "We thought everybody needed a breath of fresh air," Robert told me years later.

Over the next decade Divers/Cite and Black & Blue would, ironically, transform Montreal into a choice gay tourism destination, pushing Tourisme Montréal to create a gay-tourism template since adopted by tourism authorities worldwide.

So a book on gay rights in Canada that doesn’t even mention Sex Garage can’t help but  fall short.

On the other hand, I was pleased to see The Montreal Manifesto – as it was read by activists who took over the opening of the 1989 International AIDS Conference in Montreal – made it into the book. As ACT UP founder Larry Kramer told me himself, “We made a difference at the AIDS conference in Montreal.”

Knegt admits it is impossible to include everything in a book as slim as Queer Rights.   

“My main goal – and honestly the greatest challenge – was to make this book as inclusive as possible,” he says. “Sure, I also wanted to make it as accessible as possible. This is really just an introduction that intends to lead readers into other educational directions. But it was important to make it as comprehensive as 150 pages could possibly allow. And that’s a significant challenge."

THE FAB GAY MAN BEHIND CANADA'S HOT NEW THEATRE WEBSITE, THE CHARLEBOIS POST

Award-winning playwright Gaetan Charlebois – who founded The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, the MECCAs (Montreal English Critics Circle Awards) and The Charlebois Post – is living proof you can’t keep a good bitch down.

(September 18) Alas, it’s true, my asshole is not the centre of the universe. It’s also true that lines like that will occasionally get me into trouble.

Just ask Gaetan L. Charlebois, publisher of Canada’s two new hugely successful theatre websites The Charlebois Post – Canada and The Charlebois Post – Montreal.

Charlebois – who used to write for both The Montreal Gazette and The Montreal Mirror – knows controversy.

His glory years at Montreal’s much-lamented Hour magazine were marked by two citywide uproars: The first happened in 1997 when Gaetan called out, "C’est d’la merde!" following the premiere performance of Koltès’ Quai Ouest at Espace Go.

Then in 1998 he was denied ticket privileges by that city’s Centaur Theatre when Charlebois panned then-artistic director Gordon McCall‘s Gone With the Wind Twelfth Night.

What a turbulent era that was.

But over the past year the openly-gay Charlebois launched the incredibly successful websites The Charlebois Post – Canada (CPC) and The Charlebois Post – Montreal (CPM or CHarPo, as I like to call it).

CharPo was set up to cover Montreal English-language theatre. “It seemed that during my six years as a pop culture columnist at The Montreal Gazette that theatre coverage had fallen off,” Charlebois explains.

[Disclosure: I worked with Gaetan at HOUR mag, I write the POP TART blog for The Montreal Gazette and I am a CPC columnist and CPC Editor-at-Large. My CPC column – called “The Abominable Showman” – tackles theatre, art and culture. Click here to read today’s column about hot actors stripping buck naked on the stage!)

Gaetan continues, “People like [CHarPO Editor-in-Chief] Estelle Rosen and [Mirror theatre critic] Neil Boyce – via the MECCAs, for instance – had worked hard to keep theatre front and centre but were being insulted (sometimes quite publicly) for the effort. I was recovering from an illness, had the time and joined the fray. And I lucked into a working relationship with Estelle that is one of the great ones of my career.”

But Charlebois says the establishment media’s lack of theatre coverage isn’t unique to Montreal. “The same problem that exists here exists all over the country. I was being told [that] when CharPo took off, so Estelle and I studied the possibilities [of launching CPC] for over six months before diving in.”

So just how desperate are Canadians for comprehensive theatre coverage?

“CharPo Montreal has been amazing – [after nine months] we have about 6000 regular unique readers each week,” Charlebois says. “CPC is growing steadily,  slightly slower than Montreal but that is also because we launched during the [slower] pre-Labour Day period to give us a chance to get the kinks out before the season rolled in. CharPo Montreal was launched right smack in the middle of the theatre season and so exploded right away, warts and all.”

Adds Charlebois, “I think our success means theatergoers in this country are starved for theatre discussion. We used to get that in magazines and radio and TV but many of the specialized magazines and specialized mass media shows have gone under.”

As for CharPo’s print competition – the weeklies and dailies – Charlebois notes ruefully, “The British national daily The Guardian is truly brilliant in all respects – columns, bloggers, commentary, discussion with readers – and their site is lively! The closest thing we have [in Canada] is The Globe and Mail's Kelly Nestruck who, no coincidence, is also a Guardian blogger. And now Kelly also writes for us.

“Kelly really blogs, really FBs and really tweets. Most of the rest of the papers and their people are sad. They don't get the immediacy of blogging, many are not on FB and the ones who are on Twitter often Tweet the dullest and most useless information. Simply: they don't engage.”

In addition to knowledgeable media contributors who have been covering theatre in Canada for years,  some of CharPo’s recent name contributors include Brad Fraser, Jacoba Knaapen (executive director of The Toronto Alliance For The Performing Arts), Arden Ryshpan (Actors Equity boss), Rick Miller (who is doing a run of three of his solos at the Factory) and Kelly Nestruck.

“Now that those are up, some terrific alternative theatre artists are stepping up for the next weeks,” Charlebois says. “But the trend all began at CharPo Montreal where virtually every artist we approached loved the idea of discussing their work: Gabrielle Soskin, Andrew Cuk, David Sklar, Johanna Nutter (who wrote a gorgeous blog for us) - the list goes on and on.”

Of course this being Three Dollar Bill, I ask Gaetan how gay is the theatre world. (Yeah, yeah…)

“It is the gayest art and yet, too, the straightest,” Gaetan replies without missing a beat. “Where else will you find a football player with six kids and a mortgage sitting in an audience bawling his eyes out when he hears Bess, You Is My Woman Now!”