Buddies in Bad Times was founded and then run for 17 years by gender nonconforming individuals. Founder and past artistic director Sky Gilbert is a gender nonconforming gay person assigned male at birth (and a drag queen). Past president Johnny Golding (formerly Sue Golding) is a gender nonconforming person assigned female at birth. In the early 90s, controversially, Buddies invited Patricia Wilson — a transsexual female — to be our publicist, and for nearly two years she was the public face of Buddies.
There have been several times in Buddies history when bullies have tried to intimidate Buddies’ artists. However, in the past, it was conservative politicians — not the artistic director.
In 1993 Christina Blizzard, a columnist for the Toronto Sun wrote an article about about two Queerculture events: S and M Workshops, and the Female Ejaculation Pajama Party (led by Shannon Bell). The S and M workshops, organized entirely by lesbians (some of whom were sex trade workers) involved “live demonstration on creative bondage, sensory deprivation, implements (floggers, paddles, canes) and their use, and brute force.” Another workshop explored “abduction, fisting, knives, forced confinement, bloodsports, rape play, etc.” After Christina Blizzard’s article, Toronto City Council (with the support of a young counsellor named Rob Ford) tried to stop city funding for what is now the 12 Alexander Street theatre, saying Buddies ‘was a theatre that shows violence and perversion.’ Did Johnny Golding (formerly Sue Golding) and Sky Gilbert turn their backs on these radical lesbian artists? Certainly many people found their words, views and performances controversial, and personally hurtful — even hateful. But no, Queerculture events were part of our artistic programming, and unlike the present artistic director, we stood behind the work being presented at the theatre, and the artists who presented it. This is the kind of theatre that Buddies used to be.
What Evalyn has done is not censorship; it is something far, far worse. Evalyn is an artistic director who has exhibited bullying behaviour towards me — one of her selected artists — and tried to intimidate me to the point where I have felt condescended to, humiliated, isolated, and unsupported. But most of all she is an artistic director who does not seem to fully understand an artist’s chosen voice — specifically, the fragile, dangerous, nuanced, heart-crushing, searing, soaring, uncompromising language of poetry.
In 1989, federal Revenue Minister Otto Jelinek spoke at the Milton, Ont., Chamber of Commerce saying that it was time to stop arms length funding of the arts, using my play Drag Queens on Trial as an example. Now, many years later, here is an attempt by the artistic director of Buddies to silence my drag queens once again. I literally don’t know what to say. I will let Lana Lust speak: “I have not been afraid to look inside myself, to live on edge of morality, society, of the world itself — and if I must die for it — so be it. And to all the little boys out there who don’t want to wear their little blue booties but pick out the pink ones, to all the little girls who would rather wear army boots than spike heels, to anyone who has ever challenged authority because they lived by their own lights. I say don’t turn back. Don’t give up. It was worth it!” (Spontaneous, canned applause.)
