There is no

doubt that we are in prison for a crime we did not commit.  At this point COVID-19 has killed .03% of the world’s population. I do not know a soul who has died of it (oh, sorry — an old man that I meant once died of it six months ago). I can think of maybe one person I heard about who got sick but did not die. I am not in any way challenging the medical importance of lock-downs; we can all give up on that. It’s quite obvious that lock-downs are the way of the future, public health is now running our lives, period. But be that as it may, because we have done nothing wrong (we have only lived, or tried to live) and because the actual illness called COVID-19 has touched so few of our lives in any serious way, the lock-downs seem unjust. We are in prison for a vast but uncertain length of time — our sentence could and does change weekly, nay, daily. There is no mercy from the unmovable powers that be; there is no merciful parole board. No matter what our opinion on this lock-down, our present incarceration nevertheless feels unjust; like an unwarranted life sentence. It does matter if it is ‘for are own good’ — prison sentences often are often framed as so — or if it is deemed necessary due to the equally amorphous notion of  ‘the good of others’ — we perceive it as unjust, and that is the important thing. I have personal experience with the perversion of justice, as do many gay people. One of my mentors John Herbert told me (about 20 years ago) — about his own incarceration — when I interviewed him for — well, I can’t remember now. We met in a coffee shop on Church Street (now gone, called The Devon — being ‘condofied’ as we speak). We sipped our coffees coincidentally at the very restaurant he had frequented when he was arrested as a young man in the 1940s. Someone tried to rob him and his friend during a lovely cross-dressed stroll down Church street. Herbert reported it to the police, and subsequently. the robber accused him of having solicited him for sex. Herbert did not solicit the man; he was merely having a little fun dressed as a girl. At any rate Herbert was placed in the Guelph Reformatory. The result was that —- many many years later — he wrote a play Fortune and Men’s Eyes, one of the first ‘gay plays’ — famous for posing an eloquent argument against imprisonment as rehabilitation. Herbert argued that prison -- rather than teaching miscreants to lead a better life -- actually creates criminals. I had my own encounter with the police about 40 years after John's encounter. I was dressed in drag, riding in a cab on Queen street, only to be stopped by a police car and ticketed  for not wearing a seat belt. All that had changed over the years was the exact nature of the bogus charge — instead of robbery it was now traffic safety; but the sentiment was the same -- both Herbert and I were considered to be prostitutes —and as we were not females, we were doubly depraved. The policeman, as I remember, asked me what I was dressed up for, and I’m sure I told him I was going to a party, which must have confused and irritated him, and/or perhaps caused a subtle stirring in the groin. Both my indictment and John Herbert’s much more serious tragedy both resulted in creativity; as playwrights and loudmouths we subsequently set out to turn the love that dare not speak its name into the love that won’t shut up. Of course you will — if you are woke folk ( or woke influenced ) say “But you Sky, you are a very ancient gay man — and like all of them — privileged, rich, and probably on your way to vacation in Mexico (But when might that be, I ask you?) This is untrue. Not only am I not planning a vacation anywhere presently but homophobia has continued to affect gay lives and will continue to long after I am long dead. Up until a couple of years ago, you could easily be imprisoned in Canada for spreading HIV — which meant simply not telling your partner you had it —whether you were wearing a condom during intercourse, or not. Under this law a young hooker I know was arrested after having a fling on a farm with some farmer. He stayed with the farmer for a couple of weeks, rejected the farmer’s marriage proposal and then was accused by said farmer of infecting him with HIV. (The farmer was not confirmed to have HIV — he had not had the test — but that did not matter, he was still justified under the law in making such an accusation.) My friend was put in jail (my, how times have not changed!) and -- although he was an actual male hooker whereas John and I were only accused of being  that - nevertheless we were all treated as the same garbage under the law. My lovely whore friend got out of jail after not too long a stay, and John Herbert and I wrote plays galore about the egregious injustice of homophobia.  These are the positive outcomes. We are not, however, all ‘Birdmen of Alcatraz.’ I question whether or not the unjust imprisonment of the entire universe that we presently call lock-down will have quite the same redemptive outcome. First there are the countless tragic unnecessary deaths in poorer countries that  are a consequence of economies being halted completely and willy-nilly. Then there are are those in the United States — and elsewhere—  who will turn to violence and insurrection to protest the loss of their freedom to live and work. Then there is the very real possibility that populist dictators may gain  power if they choose to run on the platform of 'no more lock-downs' — which they will, for sure. I see this as a very real threat. I certainly — at this moment--  might be persuaded to vote for a homophobic or anti-choice candidate if he promised no more lock-downs (the candidate would undoubtedly be a bloated, fascistic, Mussolini-like 'he'). At the end of John Herbert's Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Smitty -- the leading character “looking cooly out to the audience [as though through them he was addressing society at large] with a slight, twisted smile that is somehow cold sadistic and menacing… speaks his last line. ‘I'll pay you all back!’” (These chilling, prophetic words resemble Malvolio’s curse in 12th Night: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.”) There are many tragic victims of an illness called  COVID-19. But there will be many more victims of this endless lock-down. I do not eagerly anticipate their revenge. 


I don’t know

why I think of Irving Layton today, but I do. I was in his class many years ago, I imagine it would have been around 1970? He was teaching creative writing at York University and I imagined myself to be a a writer, even back then, and I took the class. There were many future notable Canadian writers in the class, including Sally Clark (who I became friends with and still am) Judith Fitzgerald, Daniel Moses (who, sadly, died recently of cancer) and of course Irving Layton’s future wife Harriet Bernstein. I may have told this story in my memoir but who cares, after all it’s another COVID-19 lockdown party now, so anything goes; and I will tell it again, but differently. Layton was incredibly imposing and intimidating and very macho. In 1970 you expected ‘great writers who are legends’ to make grand statements as teachers. He opened up one of the first classes with this remark: “No woman will ever be a great writer” — quite amazing, actually to think that anyone might have been able to get away with such a remark, ever, and there were several female students in class. And if one considers that he ended up sleeping with one of them  — and that she later became his wife — well, it adds a certain irony to his opening remarks, don't you think? I was in the closet. But Irving -- though macho -- was very sexual, so I don’t think he would have minded my sexuality. Indeed his favourite writer was the gay poet Edward Field, which was revealed when he made us read a poem called ‘Graffitti’ which I still remember with some fondness: “They leave behind a wall scrawled all over with flowers / That shoot great drops of gism through the sky.” I can’t remember reading a poem recently that contained the word ‘gism’ --certainly one of my favourite words (and one of my favourite things). The poem reminds me very much of ‘Kids Who Love Each Other’  by Jacques Prevert; he talks of kids who ‘kiss each other where they stand against the gates of night.’ This is all circling around the same notion; that adolescent sexuality is joyous and that the old hate it because they are puritans. That’s what I loved about Irving Layton’s class actually; that he was not a puritan, and that he spoke his mind about it. Harriet Berstein, his future wife (have I mentioned that?) sat next to him and was plotting and planning to snare him. I was very naive and had no idea. My friend Sally pointed this out to me though, after Harriet read out loud a poem that began -- “The fire in you, inspires the fire in me” — or something to that effect. And yes, the fact that I had absolutely no idea what was going on shows that at age 18 I was extremely screwed up. Apparently Layton divorced his first wife in the wink of an eye after Harriet Bernstein appeared on the scene --in no time he was married to Harriet who later wrote a book about him. This is the way it used to be in the olden days; now we daren’t mention ‘gism’ in university classes and professors must pretend that they are not attracted to their students, ever. And yet if you did a little tally of how many male professors marry their female graduate students you would come up with quite a tidy number I reckon. But I am here not to talk of pedagogy but poetry, which, if it is not sexual, is, I think, not worth the computer it’s written on. Poetry is of course love, and love is of course, sex. I know some of you won’t agree with that but it’s true. Love without sex is called affection, and yes we all need a lot of that, but love — the overpowering, life-messing-up kind of love is what it’s always been about. My lover committed an unspeakable act with me last night, which was, in the last analysis, sexual, or let’s just say it certainly involved the body. There, I’ve got you interested now, haven’t I? No I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to name it.  Let’s just say that even though my lover and I hardly ever do anything that could be called sex anymore (after 21 years or so, I can't remember!) my attraction for him is and was always sexual, and I still quite enjoy watching him sway around the house naked (that is, it sways when he walks around naked, yes). And here we get to the crux of it; 21 years (the relationship) 17 years (am I older than him) and if I tell you that freely, and remind you once again that I am old and lame, you will probably accuse me of objectifying my lover. And yes I still do, and did, because love is very much involved with‘objectification’ Don’t you see? That’s what so wonderful about it! You are drawn to the person initially because they have a big penis or or big lips big eyes or big breasts (it’s often about something physically ‘big) and then, if love develops, then what's interesting is that even though you fell in love because of that big thing, then you find you actually love them as a person -- and their 'big thing' too. And that’s not a awful. It’s kind of what separates us from animals; I mean we are animals, but what makes us human is that we can objectify people and love them at exactly the same time. Getting the body involved -- at one point or another --is what makes it so compelling. Irving knew this; and that’s what happened with him and Harriet Bernstein, and he was a victim of love, as all poets are. I’m reading a very befuddling analysis of The Faerie Queene right now. It says that classic poem all boils down to sex. This makes me think of Stanley Wells' Looking for Sex in Shakespeare. I hate Stanley Wells, almost as much as Harold Bloom -- but at least Bloom was likely an old pervert (he loved Falstaff a little too much to be a normal person) whereas Wells is obviously a puritan. Wells, on top of running the incredibly corrupt Shakespeare Birthplace Trust also believes that dirty perverts like me corrupt Shakespeare by reading our disgusting sexualities into work that is sublimely innocent. Which I will do now. I’m sure you know Shakespeare's Sonnet 20: 'A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted....', which contains the line: “And for a woman wert thou first created, / Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting” The poem is Shakespeare’s ode to a beautiful boy. But what Shakespeare does in that particular line is -- with the rhythm and his choice of words, create a perfect oral simulacrum of the gentle fall of a non-erect penis on a ripe boyish scrotum -- ‘fell, a-doting.’ So take that, Stanley Wells. If I am reading stuff into the poem that’s not there, then, well, good for me -- but one of the reasons I despise you so much Stanley is because you don’t understand that poetry is love, is sex. Is beauty.

Cam or

Cameron, I guess, is his name, But he said 'Cam' — so informal! I would not normally, that is .. I’m actually quite speechless. What I was trying to say was I would not normally speak of a young barista in a coffee shop, in such an obsessive way, especially since he is probably maybe 25 years old, and I am, well, aged. But can we forget that for a moment? We have stay-at-home orders for a month! And my understanding is -- anything goes? Isn’t that what Doug Ford said? That we can do anything we want as long as we follow the rules? And didn’t he also say that it was time to let loose, set ourselves free, take off all our clothes if necessary, run wild, and let the wind whip our privates in only the pleasantest way possible (i.e. consensually?) Well anyway there I was (by the way, these notes are for Samuel Delany) on my way for my afternoon coffee because, well, what else am I supposed to do — after all I can’t listen to Donizetti and write all day, can I? I put on a new shirt, for no one in particular, just in hopes that — well have you ever done that? Honestly, girls? (I suppose the men might have done it too) worn something in hope that you might meet someone you could wear it for? And whenever I go into this particular coffee shop (it’s named after a tree) I think of him, because he is a fantasy. But he is never there (‘I work weekends,’I think I heard him say) or he just doesn’t talk to me. And because of this I imagined he hated me. Why wouldn’t he? (For I am old, and lame.) He must be gay, he just must. I’m honestly not interested in them if they’re not; that kind of hopelessness is not my cup of tea (other kinds of hopelessness, however, are more my style). The reason I say he’s  gay is because he’s probably five foot five — small — but he’s not Napoleonic. Of course there are some short very Napoloeonic fags (one of my best friends is one). But if you see a short man who doesn’t mind at all being short, he’s probably gay. And the short ones do have a thing for me because I’m big -- that is, I’m six feet tall — but mainly just large, and I don’t mean fat, not now anyways -- but I have a very broad back. And as Iago says… it’s almost as if I am the 'beast with two backs’ -- all by myself, so to speak. My lover once remarked on my braod back, as did a random fellow I met in Vancouver. He was also short and very horny for it because it's massive (well it is, what can I say). And a massage therapist once decided to try and relax it, which means he was literally jumping on my back (‘It’s hard as a rock!’ he said) for quite awhile, but to no avail. Anyway, it is my fantasy — and that’s what this is now, a fantasy — you are in it— that he, Cam (Cameron) is attracted to me, because I am larger than him. Anyway, stranger things have happened. So I walk in and I’m waiting for my coffee and he is talking to a girl. Very irritating. Why would Cameron be talking to a girl? Why? She was obviously flirting with him, obviously desperate to get into his pants -- the pants that I should be in -- and he didn’t really seem interested in her, no, not the same way that he would soon be interested in me. Anyway she finally wandered away, reluctantly (a bit sadly, I thought — Sorry Girl, for horning in!).  And it was my turn and I stepped right up and ordered my latte with two artificial sweeteners. I noticed right away that he proceeded to put actual sugar in. But I didn’t mind, because he himself is natural sugar --  my Cam, my Cameron, boy. So now — the description. He is, as I say short -- a long torso with a low slung rear. He’s in fact all rear end — very much his appeal— a very slight, slim figure otherwise. Tattoos. Died blonde hair; the sweetest handsomest face. And then there is his personality; sweetness itself. I asked him if they would be open during the month-long stay-at-home and he said ‘Yes.’ I said that this particular lockdown (there seem to be so many!) seemed aimed at the big box stores, and so it wouldn’t affect my life at all because I could care less if God destroyed all big box stores in a fit of pique, or if the Jolly Green Gian stomped on them. But I actually didn’t say that, thank God, and he then cheerily said “Well the lockdowns haven’t affected me that much." At which point I decided to be ruthlessly honest with him because he is my little Cameron, my darling Cam, and alright I’ll say it, I'm in love . I told him that I was a very social person and that lockdowns are like death to me. Perhaps I didn’t use the word death. And suddenly Cameron changed, and I realized that he was that kind of person, agreeable, or else he was being agreeable to me because I’m devastatingly fascinating (which is true, because well,  Cameron might be able to see through my false 69 year old mask and actually see what’s inside?). Or — perhaps he was being agreeable because that’s what he is, sweet as sugar. I’m still not sure. But to me a lovely boy who finds me fascinating or is as sweet as sugar is —either way you look at it — something akin to ice cream. Suddenly he spilled: ‘Oh I’m a musician, I was out doing karaoke every night before, so I really miss it, like I mean I really miss it, it’s been really tough for me, but you know, you do the best you can.” Yes you do, Cameron, I mean Cam. This is an ode to Cam. On the way there I noticed a screaming hello hyacinth bush in full bloom and yellow tulips. Is that possible on the 7th of April? Or did I imagine them? Well after I met Cameron I realised the very yellow flowers were in honour of him. So I will go there, every day, and he won’t be there, or perhaps he will, and I will try and make conversation out of nothing, which means out of COVID-19, which is a vast nothing, a vast impenetrable unstoppable unexplainable irretrievable nothing, and I will say something — anything, just to hear him speak, to see his perky little tattooed arms move, to watch him turn around and —- well what is that I see there in my 'rear view' mirror! In my minds I? I am gone for Cam. Cameron gone. And  none of you can stop me. I will be dead soon -- if not from COVID-19, than from depression, or digression. Oh, have you heard? Digression. It’s lethal.

What I have noticed

is an obsessive compulsive aspect in present day culture; it has been creeping in since AIDS, and is now exacerbated by COVID-19. I am particularly susceptible to this. When I was twelve I became obsessed with the idea that I hated God. Yes. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Our family was not particularly religious — we were 'Congregationalist Protestants' from New England (I tried many times to get my parents to explain this to me, and they always said: ‘it has something to do with the congregation being involved in church matters').  I could be obsessed with any idea and go running to my mother with that fear. I would receive absolution from her, as from a priest. It was incredibly calming to know that she would always be there for me and always solve my problems; this became an issue later as I grew up increasingly dependent on her, as my fears and obsessions increased. By the time I was 18 the obsession was with homosexuality. I was plagued with various evil thoughts; I went to a psychiatrist. His name Dr. Gordon Tisdall. I so remember him — he was a very odd man indeed — in his own way very much like the therapist in Miracle on 34th Street who fiddled so much with his eyebrow. Well Dr. Gordon W. Tisdall (was there a ‘W’ in there?) had a shock of long, greasy hair that often dangled coyly over his forehead, and he was always flicking it away. There was something very Jack Nicholson about him, I remember him having Jack Nicholson’s face, and oily smile. He wore wrinkled, ill-fitting suits and coached me in heterosexuality “Do you get erections when you dance with a girl?” I said I did. “That’s a good thing, then isn’t it?” I said I presumed it was. “You want that, then?” It went on like that until he had convinced me that I was heterosexual. The kicker was “You don’t want to be ‘have it done to you’ do you? You want to be the one who ‘does it’ don’t you?” Never having had it 'done to me’ — at that point — the prospect was somewhat intimidating, so I agreed with him. Besides, it made my fear go away. I don’t blame Dr. Gordon W. Tisdall, I’m sure he was doing his best in 1972 to make me healthy under the medical rubric of the time. I have up until now been able to control recurring instances of obsessiveness, having been released — by one of my therapists — from this cycle of confession and absolution, learning that it was tied to my mother’s need for me to be co-dependent on her. But seeing this tendency repeat itself in present day society, in a pathological way, makes me very nervous. I would call it the 'It’s Certainly Possible' tendency.' “It’s certainly possible, that if I walked out the door I might get hit by a truck, or an airplane might fall from the sky and kill me.” That sort of thing. You may substitute pretty much anything for what comes after ‘it’s certainly possible that’… in the above phrase. One can see how easily this obsession might be triggered by COVID-19. I have many friends who will not see me — or apparently anybody — because of the possibility that COVID-19 might be passed on to them, or through them, to an ailing relative. Of course I am not denying that possibility. But what must be remembered is this truism: anything is possible. By that I mean that though we might imagine any number of things might happen, that doesn’t mean we should live our lives in fear of such things, or else we might not ever leave the house. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Perhaps the AIDS connection will bring this all home (as these days we are obsessed with victimhood and oppression). So when AIDS first appeared there was extensive homophobia everywhere, in fact the illness was about homophobia, as no one seemed to care about the victims (unlike with COVID-19 where everyone cares about them). However people did care very much about the horrible, evil, murderous, lecherous, homosexuals who were spreading AIDS willy-nilly -- and with aplomb. In the deep south there was a much publicized court case where three small children were exiled from their school as they were diagnoised as haemophiliac with HIV. The townsfolk -- pitchforks in hand -- crusaded against these innocents --  though they had been reassured over and over again by medical authorities that the 3 siblings could attend school without causing danger to other children. The terrified and enraged hill-folk relentlessly insisted that -- 'There is a still a possibility — I mean doctor, is there not a remote possibility that my children could catch AIDS from these children?” At which point the very scientific doctor would say “Of course there is the remotest possibility…” “Well if there is any possibility at all, I wish to protect my children.” And who could argue with that? The point of this is that when society becomes obsessive compulsive we all become paralysed. But worse than that there are those (like me) — who have some sort of mental illness (most much more extreme than I) who will never rid themselves of nagging doubts that may plague their lives forever. Descartes called nagging doubt a ‘genius malignus' and banished it with: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It’s comforting  that reason helped him; for most of us it will not do the trick. I have many friends who, are or were, mentally ill (one of them committed suicide in November) and I worry about them, especially my friend who is still alive, but obsessive compulsive. I had to stop seeing him and calling him years ago because he would inevitably break down in tears and tell me how little I cared, reminding me that his problems were all my fault; I would try and remind him that I was calling because I cared. He couldn’t leave the house without touching doorknobs 20 times -- and that sort of thing — but he was also one of the kindest, wittiest souls I have ever met. I miss him terribly. His main obsession was death; he regularly lost his will to live in the face of death ('Do you think the spirit lives on? Will I?'). This made him suicidal. As he had a serious chronic physical condition he was quite capable of pulling the plug on his own life, so to speak, at will, and he often tried to. I hope none of us will do so now. For we are not all Descartes, and unfortunately it is the nagging doubts that may kill us, way before we are touched by COVID-19.

I’m not supposed

to write about this; I have offered this discussion to several online platforms to no avail. I know this blog will make you think that I am totally insane — if you don’t think so already — but please give it a chance. One way to look at it is in the context of Illness as Metaphor — Susan Sontag’s book, which --though no one is quoting it presently — nevertheless has enormous relevance to COVID-19. At the very least we must not forget that COVID-19 is as much a metaphor as it is a real illness, which is what I have always said about AIDS. One gets in trouble for saying this, as those affected by any illness take it very seriously (and well they should!). But nevertheless as an artist and a gay man I can't help thinking a thing might very well be serious and real  — as well as very fantastical and unreal — at the same time. Note: if I suggest a particular illness is a metaphor, I am not suggesting said illness does not exist, or that you cannot suffer or die from it. Sontag wrote Illness as metaphor in the context of her own battle with cancer; she objected to the word ‘battle’ -- and generally objected to the notion that she brought cancer on herself because she couldn’t express anger. She wanted  doctors to deal with her cancer simply as an illness, removing  all the metaphors that infect it. I began writing about her book in the context of AIDS after discovering a gay writer named Casper G. Schmidt. Schmidt served as my inspiration for a novel and a play. He was a trained clinical psychologist with significant scientific credentials -- his essay titled "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS" is a cogent and fascinating analysis of hysterical illnesses. Again, calm down. I am not saying AIDS or COVID-19 do not exist, or that they only exist in our brains. What I am suggesting is that the existence of hysterical illness (and‘mass hysteria') helps us to understand that sometimes we are looking at COVID-19 or AIDS through the veil of myth. Schmidt's findings are these. There have been several documented instances of hysterical illnesses that have led to extensive fatalities. Schmidt speaks of two -- one in Japan and one in North Caroline (as I remember). Both instances involved  a number of women who worked at factories in indescribably oppressive conditions — as kind of slave labour. During a period of particular stress nearly all -- or most -- of the workers got sick with a condition for which there was no discernible medical cause. Some even died. In one case the women all believed they had been bitten by an imaginary insect — which they insisted had made them ill. Let me be clear; people fell ill and died and there was no medical cause. What this means is that their symptons were not only real to them, but to their doctors also. It wasn’t all in their heads,  in other words mass hysteria had actually made them physically ill. This sounds incredibly bizarre, but it has been documented. Schmidt thought that AIDS might be just one such a mass hysteria. And before you dismiss him, consider the context. Schmidt’s thesis was that many who died of AIDS could not possibly have ever imagined aging, there was no model of a possible happy or successful future for them as gay men; they had been inculcated with the idea that they were depraved individuals who if they did not end up 'in the gutter' would probably commit suicide. (Remember there was no concept of ‘gay’ -- as we know it -- until 10 years before AIDS). When the Christian Right told these young men that their illness was punishment for egregious sexual sins, they subsequently became seriously ill and died. Of course these young men had been infected with HIV and had weakened immune systems. But many were also on pharmaceutical drugs (popping antibiotics) and street drugs (uppers/hallucinogens) and  also didn't eat much, as their focus was getting drugged up every day for a night on the town. In addition it’s important to note that there was an extremely homophobic anti-gay movement gaining popularity at precisely the same time. Anita Bryant (the ‘orange juice queen’) launched a campaign against homosexuals called ‘Save Our Children’in 1977. (Incidentally this name was recently appropriated by QAnon to support Donald Trump's campaign for president). Whether you buy it or not -- that’s Schmidt’s point of view. So how does this apply to COVID-19? Again, COVID-19 is a real illness which just happens to be accompanied by a potent metaphor. Whereas cancer was thought to be the result of ‘repressed anger’ and AIDS rumoured to be ‘god’s punishment,' COVID-19 is an illness that has a tendency to effect the ‘marginalized' -- more specifically those we care little about and feel guilty for ignoring, i.e. the old (especially those in seniors' homes), people of colour, and the working classes. It is an illness that makes us guilty and demands selflessness, we must necessarily give up so much for others, only because we care. This is not to challenge the idea that the old, non-white and poor are the most seriously affected by the illness;  but rather to say that COVID-19 is about guilt and victimhood as much as it is about anything. If you are not concerned enough about COVID-19 victims to change your lifestyle, then you are anything from socially unaware to fascist -- and any number of epithets may be hurled against you. This is, after all, the time of the victim. We live in fear of everything — measuring our lives in very fragile, silver spoons — everything gets worse by the minute, and we are in a race to outdo each other -- not only in our own victimhood, but in our devotion to those who need help. All of this has not helped us to deal  -- realistically or efficiently -- with COVID-19. We seem to think that by getting vaccinated we will wipe the world clean of injustice, when what is more likely is that we will become a bunch of vaccinated idiots, confident in our moral superiority, but still blithely committing the same atrocities in the name of class, gender, sexuality, age, and everything else. We cannot see the forest for the trees, and frankly, it’s now somewhat of a jungle.

"It couldn’t be

any worse. You can’t imagine it. I’m not going to describe it.” This was Ernest Hemingway attempting to speak about Toronto -- in a letter to Ezra Pound -- in 1923. Nothing has changed; the city is still unbearably dull. I lived in Toronto for most of my adult life, and moved to Hamilton in 2003. Remember that Hemingway wrote this when he was a young reporter, and that he would soon move to Paris — the city of love — a real city, where one could find fun, and where he would write many masterpieces. In 1923 he was a very handsome — and I would imagine quite horny — young man, and there never was, and never will be, much fun to be had in ‘Toronto the Good.’ Toronto has always been a puritan stronghold. And in 1923 Hamilton was the town where everyone went to let go; it had the Mafia, clubs, theatres, an opera house, and illegal booze. At one time there were so many theatres in Hamilton that a network of underground tunnels connected them; one can imagine scantily-clad young ladies scurrying along -- hugging sequins to their magnificent breasts -- while horny musicians raced by -- too preoccupied by making it to the next gig to even notice. No one has ever found these tunnels -- but I love imagining them. The only thing I like about Toronto is that there are so many people there that -- well I am bound to find some of my own kind. Otherwise, I agree with Ernest Hemingway. Toronto is terminally boring (and ugly). So, they’re closing The Brass Rail —Toronto’s most infamous strip club. Many say it is highly unlikely that strip clubs in the post-pandemic period (if they even exist) will resemble strip clubs of the past; after all, everything will have to be disinfected. All well and good. Toronto never liked strip clubs, and never liked sex. The city was founded by uptight Brits and populated by United Empire Loyalists — whiter than white, and yellower than Velveeta Cheeze. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower. This means they were hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating, pious masochists —  too strange even for Early Modern England, where bear baiting and watching human beings get torn apart by horses was mass entertainment. Though my parents were not particularly religious, I somehow learned how to oppress, suppress, and repress my sexuality when I was young, and I have dedicated the second half of my life to attacking puritanism. Toronto’s deadly blandness manifests itself in the embrace of  two modern very anti-sexual movements — ‘wokeness’ and COVID-19. Having been myself  a victim of Toronto wokeness (through my 2018 'cancellation' by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre) I am not at all surprised to see the eagerness with which Toronto residents embrace COVID-19 restrictions. As Katie Hopkins says -- if you see someone riding alone in a car wearing a mask they are undoubtedly out of their mind. You not only see that in Toronto, but also the endless parade of grim little virtue-signalling COVID-19 lay pastors, striding briskly but purposefully down the sidewalk looking at no one (have you heard  —‘looking’ can also be dangerous to your health!) ostentatiously sporting a mask, or a double mask, or a mask with two filters — with nary a soul in sight to infect. If you’d ever been to a real city, then you know, that -- unlike Toronto -- real cities have a passion for pleasure and a passion for passion, which is why people live in them; if they wanted to watch the flowers grow they could be almost anywhere else.  At this point in my blog -- if you are Evelyn Parry, or J. Kelly Nestruck -- or almost any other starchy collared Torontonian, you are liable to sigh, shake your head and say ‘why in heaven's name is Sky going on about sex again?' I learned about Evelyn’s distaste for sex way before she decided to ‘cancel me’ at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. She had invited me into her office to bemoan the fact that my writing was so ‘provocative’ (I think the question she asked me was—‘Why do you always have to be so provocative, Sky?) At which point I told her that what angers me about trans theorists is that they claim to be ‘queer’ and yet wish to shift the locus of the discussion from sex to gender. And Evelyn asked me — ‘Now why do you think sex is so important, Sky?’ (Yeah, she did.) I never know how to answer that question. I think I talked about things like s/m, prostitution, homophobia --  and even more importantly -- the fact that these days  most kids get their education about sex from online porn. If nothing else, that should be reason enough to initiate several good discussions on the topic. But I could have said that people are afraid to talk about sex because they are afraid of death, and sex reminds them of death (the orgasm is a ‘little death’) and everybody knows that death must happen to them at one point or another, and they’d just rather not think about it (see Bataille). Also, sex has to do with the body, and the body is just very frightening. Obviously if you live in Toronto, for instance, you would much rather forget you have a body — by exiling the strip clubs to the suburbs (so the poor can enjoy them), staying six feet away from everyone else's body, and shaking you finger on Facebook at those who don’t agree. There is immense safety in being anti-sexual these days. Contrary to popular misconception, our society does not encourage people to be sexual; Miley Cyrus' twerking is not sex — it’s a grotesque approximation of what a sex-hating society imagines sex to be. I should know. Though I think sex is fun --and try to engage it in as often as I can at my advanced age --  I’m just so damn lousy at it, always was. And as I get older, I really just want to kiss men — all the time — different men, strange men, again and again, and bring them to orgasm. There will be no more Brass Rail, but thank God, girls will still be brassy,  and Sky will still rail against The Puritans. I will be going on about sex until I die -- quite appropriately I would imagine. Perhaps my lifeless body will be found in a bathhouse whirlpool after being suffocated to death -- with some young man's nether regions pressed 'provocatively' into my face.  I mean, there are definitely worse ways to go.

Robert Spergel was

my teacher. Briefly. I want to write about him because no one probably ever will. I have put him into a couple of my novels, and may even have mentioned him in this blog. But here is the real, true, full story. Hah! Or perhaps I should frame this story as: ‘what I perceive to be the truth.’ Oh dear. When I was 16 I imagined I might be a cellist. It was a crazy idea. I was part of a quartet mentored by Robert Spergel at the Real Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He too was a cellist, and I was terrified of him. At that time he appeared — to me — to be very very old — I imagine he was in his 50s, as this would have been 1969. I know that I was a very pretty 16 year old — I’m not bragging, it’s just a part of the story. Anyway he seemed to me to be a particularly nasty old man who had it in for me. He had absolutely no patience. As one of Noel Coward’s characters says of  Toscanini (in Present Laughter), Robert Spergel would get very angry if I ‘played the wrong note.’ But I sensed something else; a deep, fundamental, disapproval -- that he felt it was presumptuous of me to entertain the thought that I might someday be a musician, because I displayed not the slightest sign of  the necessary dedication. A couple of years later I chose to abandon the cello, and to abandon music as a career (I also wanted to compose) which was probably a good thing. And I honestly thank Robert Spergel for precipitating that decision But looking back on it now, his wounding looks might have had their origins elsewhere — for not only was I a pretty 16 year old, but an effeminate one, and quite a privileged one at that, so I was not the least bit self-conscious about displaying my girlyness. (At the time I was in love with a trumpet player named Domenic and a double bass player named Joel; they were both straight and regarded my attention with suspicion, I was blithely unconscious of my attraction to them, but obsessed nevertheless. Though I do remember Domenic asking me, at one point: ‘Don’t you have any other friends?’) The long and short of it is I think Robert Spergel had a love/hate relationship with me, because he was gay. I discovered his sexuality by accident many years later. The second and final part of my story about Robert is this. I was cruising a steambath in Toronto called ‘The Cellar’ about 15 years after he had mentored me. If you’ve never been to The Cellar in needs to be described; no one who ever went there will ever forget it (I think it’s a basement shooting range now). The Cellar was by far the seediest and most depraved bathhouse in Toronto — and that’s saying a lot. Anyway, as I was wending my way through the popper-infused hallways late one evening who should turn a corner but a very very aged Robert Spergel. I remember him grasping the wall with a kind of desperation, and peering at me like a starving man ogling fresh meat. I was terrified and ran away. Suddenly my earlier relationship with him made sense. But it was not until I read his obituary in the Globe and Mail so many years later that it all really came together (he must have been nearly 100 when he died). There was a photo of him at age 16 — my age when I met him — accompanying the article. ‘Bobby Spergel' was beautiful. I was merely pretty at 16, he was, well, kinda transcendent. Blonde curly hair, a princely profile, and a kind of cruel, pouty, very kissable mouth. His bio was fascinating. I had heard rumours that he was once a child prodigy, but hadn’t thought about them much. Here is the complete story. (I may have misremembered some of the facts, but the truth here lies in the general idea.) Robert Spergel was 9 years old when he played the Kol Nidre with the Toronto Symphony orchestra. He toured Canada as Bobby Spergel, boy cellist. He also wrote a quartet and a symphony, went to Paris, and met Leonard Bernstein as a teenager. In other words, he was destined for great things. And then something happened; but exactly what? There is a giant aporia. Or is it just that the child prodigy is no longer a child prodigy anymore but instead morphs into a merely talented adult? I happen to know two ex-concert pianists quite well (not sure how that happened) and one of them told me that at a certain point he was no longer a child prodigy. There is a special training that can only happen to young fingers that are not fully formed — if the prodigy grows up before the training is done then all is for naught. At any rate, the fully grown Robert Spergel was a cellist for many years with the Toronto symphony — which is what he was when I met him, I imagine. The reason I wanted  to talk about Robert Spergel is because I wish to nip in the bud the notion that will now be expanding in your brain: the idea that he had a sad life. He did not. He was blessed with a devotion to beauty. I know this because of his merciless teaching, and because I once saw him at the seediest steambath in Toronto. You may say that the beauty of the human body and the beauty of music are two different things. I beg to disagree; beauty is beauty, although beauty has been given a bad name these days by those that would demand art be useful. Of course art is by definition useless, and if you can use it for anything, if it informs you of anything, if you can find in it a moral code that is useful for conducting your life, than it is no longer art but merely preaching. Oscar Wilde said this, Shakespeare practiced it, Adorno taught it, and I believe it. There is nothing more generous, kind, and just than a devotion to beauty. If you love beauty than you will be cruel, but fair; and most of all you will be fully satisfied by life — as I am — because you have so much to be thankful for — because there is so much beauty, everywhere. Robert Spergel’s lack of patience with my instrumental ineptitude was a gift, and seeing him at the bathhouse was a gift too. And it is not simply the fact that if every man was obsessed with beauty then there would be no war (although this is true) but that the recognition of beauty always ennobles us. In that way beauty might be said to be useful; but no please, no, it must not be, and is not. When you use beauty you kill it. Just let it be; love it, let it love you. That bliss is its own reward.