first time I’ve been to the Shaw Festival since he died. But suddenly it hit me. He’s not there. It’s not that I had seen Christopher Newton so very much in the recent past — the last time was about 2015 (and before that it was approximately in the year 2000). But he was always 'with me.' I don’t know how much I was 'with him'; but whenever we talked he was excessively warm with me, acting as if it was a blessing to have me around -- but he was always like that, beyond charming. I met him in 1981, in the dressing room of The Theatre Centre, at 666 King Street West, after a performance of my play Cavafy or the Veils of Desire. I can’t remember what he said —but he was effusive — something like 'you must call me, we must talk!' I was so excited, not daring to wonder what the artistic director of a giant theatre festival might want with me. And lo and behold, in a couple of weeks I was invited to the Shaw to be his assistant director on The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. I was enchanted; it was like a dream. When I arrived there that summer I had a house to myself, and there were all those amazing productions — especially Robert David MacDonald's Camille and my favourite — The Desert Song. Christopher confided that it was his very gay version of the old Sigmund Romberg operetta. 'Notice when she sings a kind of hymn to his sword — I wonder what that's about?' His favourite line was when some turbaned elderly actor -- before an exit -- announced ‘I’m off to the baths!’ Christopher was my friend, I thought. I would go over to his house every night after rehearsal, and get very drunk, and he would play me his favourite music, and we would talk about art, and I was on cloud nine. I know it sounds like a kind of fairy story; it definitely was. I didn’t know he was attracted to me -- as I was only 30 and I had just come out of the closet and my 17 year old first love had just dumped me; I had found a sort of lackadaisical love in Toronto, but suddenly down at the Shaw Festival Christopher made me feel like a young prince. And then one night, he casually said something like — ‘shall we go to bed?’ — and of course I said yes. He was 18 years older than me, but very handsome. Apparently the very short shorts I had been wearing (the colour of my shorts and my head bandanna always matched, I must have been quite the sight!) reminded him of the various Aboriginal outlaws that were usually his lovers. He told me their stories. One was in jail. He used to meet them at his favourite sleazy bar in Vancouver (The Shaggy Horse). He said that though I had the young hairless body of one of his Aboriginal bad boys, I was his ‘lawyer’ —and I didn’t know what that meant — and he said, you know ‘the one you really settle down with.' I was overwhelmed and charmed. I won’t tell you any more about our love affair. (Except for when we first saw a picture of Canadian actor/writer Paul Gross in the entertainment section of the newspaper, and Christopher blithely opined 'I think I'm dropping you for him' and when Tennessee Williams died, and the newspaper reported that the great writer choked on a bottle cap, Christopher said 'It was definitely poppers!') But like so many love affairs, it didn’t work out. We fought so many times, basically because he was trying to persuade me to be his associate artistic director (the job later went to Duncan Macintosh). I didn’t want any of that, and ultimately I didn’t want to be his lover, because that meant to some degree being his personal assistant, and forever his admirer (the amount of admiration Christopher demanded was kind of astounding, but I supplied it for as long as I could). I needed to do my own work, and I was obsessed with younger men in Toronto. So that was that. Being back at Shaw today, in 2022 when he is dead, is so strange and sad, because even if I didn’t usually visit him -- I always knew his house was there, the house he loved so much. And he was always in it, tending the flowers, drinking some wine, writing in his journal (someone has to find that journal and publish it, he would have wanted that, and there’s good stuff in there, I just know it!). But I feel compelled to make it clear to you -- to anyone who will listen anyway -- what Christopher did for me. He did something for me as a young gay artist that no one had ever done before and will never do again. But it was absolutely necessary. I realize now that I won at least one award (The Pauline McGibbon Award) due to him — he kind of arranged it, he was on the committee and suggested my name. But most importantly — no one in the Toronto theatre scene would produce my work, and even when I founded Buddies no one knew what to do with me, especially the gay community, and everyone was frankly so mean and jealous, and he took me away and supported me and made me feel like I was important, and talented, and that my work mattered. He thus set himself up for ridicule — because I was a drag queen and a slut and (all that other stuff) and my work was always sexual, and his public association with me (even though he never revealed our private association, and wouldn’t hold hands with me in Niagara-on-The-Lake -- ‘the twitch of a curtain means a ruined reputation in this town!’ -- he used to say.) He gave me the courage to be, because I needed an older gay man brave enough to believe in me, when the rest of the world wouldn’t. And now when I go to the Shaw Festival, I prefer to imagine Christopher is still there, tending his garden, getting stoned, being disappointed because I won’t smoke weed with him (it makes me paranoid), telling me that someone ‘wore’ the actor Leonard Chow to a party as an ‘ornament,’ sniffing poppers with me in bed, playing a new album by Philip Glass, teaching me proper table manners (“You’re going to need them some day at those fancy gay dinner parties!' — parties that of course, never materialized), popping antibiotics ('Well you can’t be too careful!') admiring a young actor from afar ‘That Dan Lett, he’s so slim, so easy on the eyes, isn’t it heaven?’).
I could go on.
