1 In the fall of 1980 Tennessee Williams was offered the prestigious appointment of Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia. Although the pressures of giving multiple university lectures soon overwhelmed him, Williams’s time in Canada was made significantly more attractive by the Vancouver Playhouse, which was preparing to stage a new version of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign. Directed by Roger Hodgman, the revised and considerably shortened version of Red Devil ran for a month. Reviews were mixed and the production proved as unsuccessful as previous attempts in Boston (1975), Vienna (1976), and London (1977). 2 While Red Devil failed to make a lasting impression on Canadian audiences and critics, the legacy of Williams’s visit inspired a number of colourful stories, some of which paint an unflattering picture of the playwright. On one occasion he apparently gave an endless, alcohol-inspired rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” at a party; on another night he lost one of his socks in a restaurant; and during a preview of Red Devil he proceeded to fall asleep (Lederman R1). However, several people who met Williams at the time have shared their fond memories of him. Among others, these include a volunteer at Vancouver’s gay TV station, GaybleVision, who interviewed the famous visitor (Rowe) and a second young man, an aspiring playwright, who received a letter of encouragement from Williams (Emberly). The Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse recalled that Williams was “the easiest writer I’ve ever worked with” (qtd. in Page 94), and one of the actors in Red Devil remembered how Williams, despite some occasionally odd behaviour and comments, “was great in rehearsal, [. . .] very funny and charming” (qtd. in Lederman R1) and willing to rewrite dialogue that did not work. One story in particular, however, has had a significant impact on English-Canadian theatre history. This story recalls how, on several occasions, Williams invited young men to his hotel room and asked them to read from the Bible in nothing but their underwear. Told and re-told countless times in queer circles, this story would eventually inspire two playwrights to write plays based on Williams’s 1980 stay in Vancouver: My Night with Tennessee by Sky Gilbert (first produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto in 1992) and His Greatness by Daniel MacIvor (first produced at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver in 2007).

2 While Williams’s influence on American playwrights is well- documented (see Kolin) and Louise Ladouceur has outlined his impact on Quebec theatre, 3 this essay attends to Williams’s legacy on English queer theatre north of the 49 ^th parallel. I specifically reflect on how the gossip surrounding the playwright’s visit to Vancouver has influenced the narratives of gay communities and in so doing contributed to queer theatre history in Canada. I argue that Gilbert and MacIvor, influenced by their respective agendas, transcend the localized specificity of the initial piece of gossip to convey more general insights on the human condition and to create a narrative about sexual longing, success and failure, and fear of loneliness. Moreover, my reading of the plays sheds light on how both authors deploy gossip as a tool to articulate a process of sexual and cultural ostracism, thereby fostering a dialogue with the past. This dialogue across time marks a crucial and pedagogical task in gay and queer theatre as a means to address the ongoing needs of an ever-changing community and to remind its members of previous generations’ political struggles to overcome their state of marginalization.

3 As Rosalind Kerr reminds us in the introduction to her volume on Queer Theatre in Canada (2007), the history of queer theatre in Canada, despite important pioneering efforts, is largely untold. One of the most striking gaps, I posit, is the lack of published scholarship on Gilbert and MacIvor, both of whom have established themselves as key figures in English-Canadian theatre. 4 Their plays, which frequently incorporate queer charac- ters, have received international attention and have won multiple awards. Moreover, they are a testimony to the strength and independence of gay and queer theatre in Canada, which, in the last thirty years, has clearly come into its own. At the same time, the scarcity of scholarly attention on their work is symptomatic of a need for further investigations.

4 Although the two plays discussed here are primarily concerned with the narratives of the gay male community, I suggest that My Night with Tennessee and His Greatness invite us to apply a broader queer perspective to Canadian theatre history. Following David Halperin’s evocative suggestion that we understand queer as “a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance” and that queer “is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (62), I argue that the plays, as well as the gossip that inspired them, are subversively queer inasmuch as they promote an alternative understanding of theatre history by first, placing the historical marginalization of queers centre-stage and second, by keeping the respective plots outrageously sexual. While the notion of community is often contested (not least for being dominated by gay men and for its hegemonic whiteness), I agree with Tim Miller and David Román that the importance of queer theatre, which is historically rooted in the need to unite audiences and artists in their political struggle against heterosexism, should not be easily dismissed. Not only does queer theatre forge “energies to simulate and enact a sense of queer history and queer community,” but it also offers the possibility of a shared and safe social space that makes possible the staging of subcultural concerns and stories (Miller and Román 173).

5 The essay begins with a theoretical framework that outlines the intersections between gossip, theatre, and queer communities, which then informs my exegesis of, first, My Night with Tennessee and, thereafter, His Greatness. In those detailed analyses I discern similarities and differences between the two works and explain how they relate to each playwright’s respective agenda and oeuvre as well as to similar biographically inspired performances about Williams. In the last section, I discuss the broader cultural implications at stake and demonstrate how Gilbert’s and MacIvor’s plays allow for the exploration of three queer temporalities that range from the age of the closet to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the contemporary moment characterized by queer rights on the one hand and new forms of social pressure on the other.

David Ramsden as Tennessee and Peter Lynch as Crummy in Sky Gilbert’s production of My Night with Tennessee, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto, 1992. Photo: © Rob Allen, 1992

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6 Anecdote and gossip are two phenomena that are particularly unreliable sources of evidence, yet they have become legitimate areas of interest for the humanities in general and for theatre and performance studies in particular. Scholars are increasingly directing their attention to gossip and anecdotal evidence as potential source material for theatre historiography, and as a dramaturgical device to fuel dramatic action in countless plays. In a special issue of Modern Drama on the relationship between gossip and theatre, Joseph Roach claims that gossip works in a similar way to myth in ancient tragedy, that is, as a structuring narratological facet as much as a repertoire of easily recognizable characters. Roach further notes how gossip resembles myth in its potential to create communities and draw attention to questions of normativity versus subversion: “Gossip, like myth, brings secrets into the public light, charming audiences with the socially cohesive pleasures of other people’s pain. Gossip, like myth, unites communities against deviance in the cause of normality or, with equal efficiency, against normality on behalf of popular subversion” (297). While Roach makes these observations as a starting point to explore the symbiosis between the exchange of gossip and the rise of bourgeois capitalism, my interest here lies in the potential of gossip to engender subversively gay and queer community narratives, which in turn invite us to discover and reclaim absent and neglected remnants of theatre history in Canada. Gossip as a form of unofficial and undocumented knowledge offers valuable material to approach the historical marginalization of queers, because it “serves a crucial purpose in the survival of subcultural identity within an oppressive society” (Becker et al. 31); this approach to gossip is especially useful when it concerns a canonical playwright whose entire body of work dramatizes the tension “between the need to reveal and the urge to conceal” his own homosexuality (Paller 11).

7 Well aware of their dubious status as source material, Thomas Postlewait discusses how anecdotes about famous playwrights and actors may “provide interesting, fascinating, bizarre, and sometimes definitive details about theatrical lives and events” (50) and as such have the power to invade and influence theatre historiography. Moreover, “many anecdotes not only contain a kernel of factuality but also express representative truths” (65). Similarly, Jacky Bratton notes the entertainment value of a theatre anecdote, but also asserts that “its instructive dimension is more overt. It purports to reveal the truths of the society, but not necessarily directly: its inner truth, its truth to some ineffable ‘essence’, rather than to proven facts, is what matters most—hence its mythmaking dimension” (103). Bratton further stresses that, in theatre circles, the anecdote is intimately related to “collective memory, the formation and perpetuation of group identities, and the formation of the individual within that” (104). As we will see, Gilbert first heard the anecdote about Williams in 1983, but did not produce My Night With Tennessee until 1992. After that it would be another fifteen years before MacIvor wrote His Greatness. The story about Williams’s visit to Vancouver has thus been circulating in Canadian theatre communities for decades; in some ways, it has served both as an entertaining cautionary tale and as a means to create bonds between performing artists. However, what makes this anecdote even more relevant to the formation of group identity is that its explicitly sexual content served as a source of gossip for the gay community (which in this instance overlapped with the theatre community), which used it to affirm its visibility and reassure itself of its own historical presence.

8 A number of scholars have outlined the potential connections between gossip and queerness. Chad Bennett reminds us that gossip is not always a queer phenomenon, but argues that “all gossip, by virtue of its constitutive interest in the non-normative, potentially entails queer effects” (313). This non-normativity manifests itself not least through the association of gossip with “bodies that are gendered (whether women’s talk or masculine shoptalk or scuttlebutt), classed (from servants’ tittle-tattle to society chatter), and sexualized (as in old wives’ tales, the homosexual’s camp dish, or the nosy spinster’s gab)” (314). Exploring the historical links between gossip and male homosexuality in particular, art historian Gavin Butt suggests that gossip, given its deviant and marginalized status as a reliable source in academic writing, has a “decidedly queer epistemic status” (6; original emphasis). As a result he suggests a double approach to the use of gossip as a discursive practice that produces meaning and knowledge. The first use stresses “gossip’s role in history, approaching it as an important mode of communication for disseminating queer meanings” (9). As such, it played a crucial part in an age before gay liberation; it served to disseminate unofficial knowledge and thereby make visible an historically marginalized position and identity. Indeed, gossip about Williams’s sexuality informed the reception of his plays since his heyday in the immediate post-war era, in the U.S. and beyond. 5 Of greater relevance for our context is Butt’s second use of gossip, which suggests “a consideration of how gossip’s narratives might operate as history, and how such unverified forms of knowledge might come to queer the very practice of historical accounting itself” (9).

9 My analysis is influenced by these arguments on the community-building power of gossip, its subversive potential, and the challenge it poses to normative historiography. I wish to stress that My Night with Tennessee and His Greatness are far from being the only stage works inspired by the life and work of the American Southern playwright. Williams’s life story, including his decline and fall from grace, is documented in a growing number of plays and performances, whose dialogue and plot are often assembled from various published sources such as memoirs, notebooks, letters, and interviews, and insert quotations from Williams’s dramatic characters that interested audiences can easily recognize and appreciate (LaRocque). 6 Gilbert’s and MacIvor’s plays form part of this larger phenomenon, but importantly take their inspiration from a locally specific episode and create two stage works that, despite some intertextual moments and references to Williams and his work, are independent creations that reveal important functions of queer gossip and, by extension, inseparable threads woven into the development of English-Canadian gay and queer theatre history.

22 Biographical information, dramatic fiction, anecdote, and gossip are conflated not only in Gilbert’s and MacIvor’s plays, but also in the general reception and perception of Williams. The two assistants and the two young men are characters that can be traced back to the omnipresent, yet interchangeable personnel that populated Williams’s life. Crummy and the Assistant are variations of the various paid “traveling companions” that Williams hired and who, according to his friend Maria St. Just, first appeared in 1962, when his relationship with Merlo started deteriorating and he needed an assistant to pack and carry the luggage (181). Rasky recalls: “There was always a Robert or Victor, some blond young man of twenty-five or so, with wide shoulders and not much to say, who was introduced more or less as Tennessee’s ‘secretary’ or ‘companion’” (13; see also Spoto 244). 11 Stories of Williams inviting young men to his hotel room or hiring male prostitutes to stay with him until he fell asleep have been repeated or alluded to in various forums. The playwright himself contributed to his reputation as an enfant terrible by openly discussing his idiosyncratic habits with journalists during his “confessional decade” (Bray 68), which stretched from Williams’s public coming out on the David Frost Show in 1970 to his death in 1983. In 1973 Williams stated in an infamous interview with Playboy:

Author and journalist Dotson Rader expresses things in a more vulgar way: “[Williams] often would call an escort service and have a male hooker sent over, not for sex but just to keep him company. He always thought he would die in his sleep, alone, so he never wanted to be alone when he took his pill and closed his eyes” (119). Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers includes an unflattering satire of a once successful Southern playwright who lives with his dogs in a dirty hotel room, hires callboys, and suffers from paranoia and hypochondria. In a biography that offers little insight into Williams’s work and is primarily interested in detailing his sexual escapades and growing dependency on alcohol and chemicals, Ronald Hayman insists that Truman’s caricature is an accurate portrait of the aging Williams and his “most repulsive traits” (211). All these accounts are variations of the same core theme, but their qualitative implications and vested motivations vary greatly, ranging from pure spite to a desperate attempt to sensationalize Williams. 12 Many Williams biographies are riddled with inaccuracies, factual errors or exaggerations, contaminated by (deliberate) misrepresentations and unreliable statements, and spiced with sensationalizing details about Williams’s sex life, mental health, and substance abuse to increase their commercial potential. 13

23 Though at first sight, My Night with Tennessee and His Greatness seem to follow the same pattern, they differ significantly from most of these sensation-mongering accounts. While they are undeniably informed by rumour and gossip, they do not use those accounts for self-promotion or commercial interests, but as narrative elements in a larger scheme. Here, I wish to recall the etymological origin of the word gossip, which the Oxford English Dictionary traces back to the Old English godsibb, meaning “godfather or godmother,” with whom one has a “spiritual affinity.” It is not too bold to claim that Williams ranks as one of the most influential representatives of gay and queer drama, a godfather if you will. While Gilbert and MacIvor pay homage through affinity, it is worth noting that they do not write a play about Williams at the height of his success, popularity, and artistic powers. Rather than casting him as a representation or embodiment of gay pride, they explore the downfall and decline of a once celebrated playwright who was marked and ravaged by alcohol, prolonged substance abuse, grief, loneliness, lack of success, and constant critical ridicule and homophobic attacks by the American theatre establishment. Williams’s own cultural and critical marginalization at that this point in his life offers a crucial source of identification and serves as a reminder for a community that was and, to some extent, continues to be shamed and ostracized.

24 As the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick cogently pointed out, every generation of gays and queers need to rediscover their own cultural history and “patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance” (81). Williams’s stay in Vancouver represents such a fragment, which is distinguished by its impressive longevity. This fragment demonstrates how gossip proves to be a useful tool in the process of rediscovering and preserving a sense of history and thereby help to foster community narrative. Moreover, it illustrates how gossip can make the move from the margins to the centre of official culture. In the words of Leigh Woods, “gossip seems oddly to appropriate a greater authority to itself once it is written down. And the more often it is written, the greater the weight of the authority it assumes” (235). Indeed, as long as the story of Williams’s stay in Vancouver was passed along from mouth-to- mouth in Canadian theatre circles, it remained in the realm of unofficial knowledge. Once written down, whether in a play or a theatre memoir, this gossip assumed a new dimension of cultural authority and was made available to people outside of the group or community of origin.

25 The various incarnations of the Vancouver story invite us to take a closer look at three layers of queer temporality. First, Williams’s visit to British Columbia in 1980 inspired the initial anecdote. In the wake of lesbian and gay liberation that was unfolding across North America, and spurred by the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969, the Canadian queer community was becoming increasingly politically organized and gaining visibility, at least in urban centres such as Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto (Kinsman 288-329). Despite these advances, the community continued to face multiple challenges and forms of discrimination, which lasted well until the 1980s, including the Cold War perception of queers as potential risks to national security (Kinsman and Gentile 221-335). Moreover, queers were subjected to organized harassment by police who regularly raided queer social spaces including bars, book stores, and, not least, bathhouses, charged people for frequenting “bawdy-houses” and placed them on trial (Kinsman 330-374; Warner, Never Going Back 99-118).

26 The idle gossip about Williams in the early 1980s was thus still very much imbricated with the realities of the proverbial closet; it served to disseminate unofficial knowledge, reaffirm a marginalized identity and presence, and strengthen the idea of community. It is also set at a liminal point, on the eve of the bathhouse riots in February 1981 in Toronto (see Hannon) and only a few months before the emergence of a mysterious and initially unidentified disease that would soon decimate the queer community (among others) and unleash a renewed wave of homophobia. When My Night with Tennessee premiered, which is the second historical moment here, the function of the gossip about Williams in Vancouver had already altered; it now offered a way to preserve a past before communal memories and recollec- tions were erased. 14 Gilbert’s play indirectly alludes to the community’s mourning at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the published version of His Greatness, MacIvor points to the significance of the time frame of his play that depicts “three gay men living fully and openly in the world of the early 80s, just before everything was about to change forever” (“Foreword” iii). This aspect is pronounced more clearly in the 2011 revival in Toronto. In the concluding monologue the Assistant now informs audiences that the Young Man will eventually get HIV, thereby offering them “a glimpse into a future—a future which from the perspective of 2011 is in fact now a ghosting past” (High et al. 72).

27 This brings us to the third moment at stake here, that is, the twenty-first century. When His Greatness opened in 2007 and again in 2011, lesbians and gay men and, to a lesser extent trans-gendered persons, had gained significant social and political rights, most notably legal recognition of same-sex marriage since 2003 (see Rayside 92-125) in addition to a larger cultural visibility. Today, queer theatre is “no longer confined to a cultural ghetto” (Miller and Román 174). 15 The queer gossip about Williams has, by now, truly come out of the closet, but this piece of chitchat originally told at a party in 1983 still proves to be of interest three decades later, even if it no longer addresses an exclusively gay or queer audience. According to Roach, “[t]he value of gossip [. . .] increases with its circulation, at least during the inflationary period before everyone who wants to hear it has heard it already” (298). Judging from the success of His Greatness, the inflation has yet to hit its peak. The next chapter is about to unfold in Montreal, where Sa Grandeur will open in the 2013/14 season at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert, in a translation by Michel Tremblay. This raises the question: why is there still a need for the dissemination of the story of Williams in Vancouver? The answer, I believe, is to be found in the articulation of cultural and sexual marginalization through theatre and idle gossip.

28 Despite undeniable political progress, we should not be blind to the multiple forms of discrimination that queers in the twenty-first century continue to experience, sometimes on a daily basis; these range from hate crimes motivated by homophobia or trans- phobia to various political and religious movements and/or parties set on implementing a neo-conservative social agenda and revoking basic human rights for both women and queers (see Warner Losing Control). While the regime of the closet has loosened over the last forty years, the main beneficiaries of these changes are largely white, middle-class, gay men, a part of the community which Gary Kinsman has identified as the “professional/managerial stratum;” these men value “an association of lesbian and gay progress with the continuation of capitalist social relations” and “want to achieve social ‘respectability’ in a social order still based on oppression and exploitation” (299). Such respectability is achieved not least through downplaying sexual outspokenness and promiscuity, but also through a disassociation with political activism and queer solidarity in order to be assimilated into neoliberal consumer culture and individualism. This process, which Lisa Duggan identifies as homonormativity leads to “a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture” (50). These developments make it even more urgent to write and document our own history. Even in the age of pride festivals, political rights, and greater visibility, we need reminders of our historical marginalization, of the realities of the closet, and of less media-friendly queer characters. Queer communities, just like queer theatre audiences, are not static and homogeneous entities, but diverse and dynamic, sometimes even internally conflicted groups (Miller and Román 176-77). 16 Just as the queer community continues to evolve, so too do the meanings and functions of queer gossip change over time. Queer gossip, originally and exclusively a product of the closet, fulfils different, if related needs today and helps fostering community and preserving narratives about our (theatrical) past.