Other Men's Sons

Silver Legionnaire's Disease

2008-02-03T11:39:00.000-08:00

I woke up very late this morning (well, two p.m.) but I feel marvelous, with no hangover to darken my door. Last night I had the great pleasure of revisiting my past in a way that I usually don't at the Phi Delta Theta fraternity annual Founder's Day dinner. The dinner took place at Alumni Hall in the stately Victoria College on the University of Toronto campus.

One of the little-known facts about my personal history is that I used to be a frat boy. Yep, a 1980's-style one. I learned to drink beer at our house on St. George Street, just off campus. I had come to U or T after four years at St. John's Cathedral Boy's School, a very rugged Anglican prep school on the Manitoba prairies, and a year of modeling in Paris, Montreal, and Toronto. The cultural schizophrenia of that flight path alone might have been enough of a reason to draw me to a college frat.

I loved those guys, but the business of coming out as a gay man was sort of all-encompassing, and while my friends there were very supportive, there were a couple who were quite nasty. I'll keep their names to myself, but frankly they were reason enough to distance myself from my Phi Delt brothers. The sadness was in the realization that other friendships that had sprung up wouldn't ever evolve because of the distance.

Over the course of the last 25 years since my initiation I've had less contact with them than I would might have liked, but we were all busy making our lives happen, the ones we dreamed of when we were 20. Sitting with these men at the ceremony on Founders Day was an absurdly touching experience for me. The young guys coming up were all uniformly intelligent and decent. I could almost forgive them the fact that the frat house was now booze-free (seriously, I miss the 80s sometimes more than others.) It's another marker of passing time, though unlike some, this was a sweet one.

I don't know how long it'll be before I see these guys again, but seeing them all that night at the ceremony, so dignified now, but still with the sparkle of mischief that true frat boys never lose, I was reminded of what an honour it had been--and still is--to call them "Brothers in the Bond."

Book Launch!

2007-10-03T17:34:00.001-07:00

Other Men's Sons is finally in print! The launch was at Fire on The East Side's Upper East Side nightclub. Below is a photograph of me being introduced by my publisher, Marc Cote of Cormorant Books.

Thanks to the many, many friends and colleagues who made it out to the launch, including Doubleday Canada's Tim Rostron (left) and Q&Q reviewer Robert Meynell (right)

and their wives,

poet Consuelo Jackman and television producer Samantha Linton.

I wish there had been more photographs of this event so that I could remember everyone who came. Book launches for me are a little bit like weddings. If you're the bride or the groom, you remember snapshots of the event, but a good deal of it is a blur. What I do remember is reading an excerpt from the title essay, getting through it in one piece, thunderous applause, then a sequence of hugs and congratulations and a lot of signing.

Altogether an excellent way to spend an evening.

(Photos from Quill and Quire)

Ian Roberts: The Gentleman As Gentle Man, or Why I Occasionally Love My Job Even More Than Usual, Which Is Saying Something

2007-07-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

This past week, shortly after this profile of rugby league superstar turned Hollywood actor, Ian Roberts, hit the stands (my seventh cover story for The Advocate) my dear friend, the illustrious Palm Spring-based writer, director, blogger, and bon vivant extraordinaire Ron Oliver pointed out in an email (a little smugly, in my considered opinion but never without the affection of many years of friendship) that clearly "nothing much has happened at the Farmhouse since 2006."

Ron has a point, though not the one most people would assume he has. He's not referring to an uneventful year, just that I haven't been writing about it on this blog. It isn't that nothing much has happened here; God knows, lots has. Last fall my novella "In October" was published in Triptych of Terror (Alyson Books, 2006) and we finally completed all the edits on my new essay collection, Other Men's Sons, which is due out in late August from Cormorant Books, my new publisher here in Toronto, whose literary taste and reputation is matched only by their generosity in enduring deadlines being stretched by me almost to the breaking point.

I just haven't written about it.

At this point, I'll just claim authorial privilege, and lay it out that writing "In October," the story of a teenager in a small town in southwestern Ontario who turns to the dark arts to even some scores at his highschool was like being trapped inside the head of a 17 year old boy I didn't particularly like, and finishing some of the autobiographical essays in Other Men's Sons was like scooping out the marrow of my own life while keeping up a running editorial commentary in my own voice. Neither of these two endeavours, however creatively satisfying, made me feel much like adding even more of the sound of my own voice to the world. Living life in an upstairs cave, surrounded by empty tins of Red Bull and plastic bottles of Diet Coke isn't conducive to blogging, trust me.

Besides, it's my goddamn blog. Onwards and upwards.

This past June, I flew to Palm Springs enroute to Los Angeles to meet an interview Ian Roberts, who had just co-starred in Ron's new film, Kiss Me Deadly: A Jacob Keane Assignment. I had been in Texas the previous month interviewing Eric Alva, the first serviceman wounded in the Iraq war, another exceptionally powerful story that would make its appearance as a cover story for The Advocate later on that month.

Ian and I met in Los Angeles at his apartment and did our interview. He'd just stepped off a 17 hour flight and gave a remarkably lucid interview, considering.

Ian Roberts has long been a figure of both athletic and social renown as Australia's premier rugby league player even before he came out in the 1990's, shattering some fairly dyed-in-the-wool Australian stereotypes about who gets to be a "real man" along the way. My profile of him in The Advocate was slated to be his big U.S. debut. And what a debut. Aside from having been one of the kindest and most genuine people I've ever interviewed (much like Eric Alva in that sense---this has been my summer for profiling real heroes, it seems) his story was a powerful one. And Eric Schwabel's photographs are incendiary.

When the article was published, I was astonished and delighted to see it being blogged about all over the world, as well as being written about it many mainstream media outlets in countries I'd never been to. All very thrilling, though I'm delighted to say that I am totally OK with the fact that it wasn't my deathless prose that was causing all the ruckus, it was Schwabel's photographs and Ian himself, or rather his story. Granted, his story as told be me, but you always know you've absolutely hit the mark as a journalist when your story affects readers to such an extraordinary degree that they only see your subject, and then feel they know him (or wish they did.)

It also received a few strikingly malevolent (and baseless) swipes from some very bitter queens who likely aren't aware that the sour bitchcraft they practice whenever they're presented with an extraordinarily handsome man they suspect (usually rightly) would never sleep with them sends out a coded "I'm a loser" message to anyone with the insight God gave a wood chip. Rejecting a man before he can reject you is pathetic enough when it happens with people you know. Rejecting a celebrity before, etc, is just beyond embarrassing, but the Internet has provided wondrous cover for an entire subculture of cowards, breeding like toadstools in the darkness of cyber-anonymity, who feel comfortable (as cowards do) lashing out anonymously on public blogs at people they'd normally hide from.

That having been said, the response to the article was overwhelmingly positive, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to tell Ian's very unique and moving story for the first time in its journalistic entirety. I've interviewed a lot of "celebrities" in my day, including athletic celebrities, but Ian Roberts was, and is, a special one.

The word "gentleman" is one of the most abused in the English language, especially these days when it seems to mean less than ever.

Ian Roberts is a gentleman in every sense of the word. I urge you to locate a copy of this issue of The Advocate (it even made its Ebay debut this week) and read about him for yourselves.

Summer, Back In The Saddle

2006-06-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

Summer is upon us in all its sweet green glory, and The Farmhouse looks the way I'd always hoped it would eventually look. The rosebushes outside are unbelievably lovely, the colours bright, singing, and creamy. The yellow clapboard we had painted two years ago has acquired a patina after two years of Canadian weather, and in the most gracious way looks like the century home it is. I never tire of coming along the street and pulling up to the house.

At night, especially, the scent of the roses is poignant and evocative of the rose gardens my mother's gardner maintained outside the villa we lives in when my father was posted to the United Nations in Geneva in my early teens. The cherry tree out front had its sudden flashing moment several months ago, and now the cherries are beginning to swell and hang from the branches. Pretty soon they will fall, and the marauding squirrels will have to duke it out with the neighbours when it comes time to collect them. Let them sort it out.

I was talking with my web designer in Boston this week about some updates to michaelrowe.com. It occured to me as we talked that I hadn't touched this blog since I went into hibernation to write my novella In October which will be published this fall in Triptych of Terror alongside original novellas by David Thomas Lord and John Michael Curlovich. The writing of that was a rather unique experience, one which, I think, will warrant a separate entry at some point about the process of writing fiction versus writing non fiction. Writing that story gutted me in some ways, and in others I'm still recovering from it.

At present, though, my intention is to try to make this more of a regular thing. Having read several blogs in the last few weeks, I'm impressed at the ability of certain people to simply switch on the computer and begin to rattle off events and the minutiae of their life as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I kept a diary well into my thirties, and then stopped rather abruptly. Somehow the daily occurence of reaching for my journal to write in whenever I had a free moment began to seem less natural as I entered into a new phase of my personal evolution. Pity, that. Reading back to how I felt in my twenties and thirties (and even before that) has been invaluable in my writing, and will likely become more so as I turn more and more attention to fiction writing. I don't think a blog will ever be the ideal substitute for that. In a published document, there is a barrier of personal privacy which I instinctively won't breach.

That having been said, perhaps there's a happy medium somewhere between a journal entry and a personal essay, and I'll be able to keep it up more regularly.

Night Writing

2006-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

When I was a very young man, I used to be able to stay up all night writing and feel no aftereffects in the morning. In truth, I have always been fairly nocturnal. It used to drive my parents mad to hear me padding around the house late at night when I was a child. During the early seventies when I was in my "Dracula phase," as my father once called it, my dream was to spend an entire night living the vampire's life (sans the sanguine aspects, naturally) for one entire night. I was never able to stay awake that long, though, and even then I sensed that it would be lonely to be the only one awake at that hour. Also, I loved falling asleep to the sound of adults talking upstairs. It made me feel very safe to know that there would be people to protect me if I drifted off to what I was already beginning to think of as another world, oneI could get to by passing through a secret doorway in my mind. Later, in my teens, when I worked a number of restaurant jobs in the summers when I was home in Ottawa, from boarding school, the nocturnal life became my habit. I would come home from the restaurant at two or three a.m. and it would take me awhile to slow down. I would wake in the late-morning, much to the condescending amusement of my mother's friends who, for whatever reason, didn't see the connection between working all night and sleeping late.

When Brian and I were first married and I was starting my career as a writer in the mid-eighties , I realized that there was an actual distinct advantage to night writing. In our first two apartments, and later, at our house in Milton, I would work generally at night. There is a point just before exhaustion when the mind is pushed to its outermost limits. The tradition of Huichol Indian Shamanism refers to the nierka, the doorway of the mind. For many creative artists and writers—certainly for me—this doorway is most easily slipped through at night. Listening to music on my headphones, secure in the knowledge that I had four or five completely unencumbered hours at my disposal where the phone wouldn't ring, Brian was asleep nearby, and editors who wanted my work right away! wouldn't be heading to their offices for a good twelve hours. Some of my best work from my early years was written this way, and I actually remember the feeling of the words coming out, fluid, not lapidary, like an easy, lovely flow of water in the darkness beyond that doorway. Memories swam back to me, and I was able to say things I might be too reserved to express in the daytime. Words became poetry of a sort and they made a mosaic in my mind that I was then able to impress upon the page.

Now that I'm in my forties, I'm finding that writing late, like drinking and carousing (which I much prefer) isn't something I'm going to be able to do without consequence anymore. Although I still find a glorious release in an all-night flow of words (and now that I'm writing fiction, it's even more enjoyable to have those words flow without reference or responsibility to anything but the story in my mind, as opposed to the facts involved in retelling someone else's story in non-fiction and the responsibility of being accountable to facts when I’m exhausted) there is a cost the next day. One night of working till four or five means that I won't get much done the next day, much less much good writing.

I'm now exploring something that I've been told ever since I first dreamed of being a novelist, that there is portentous use in rolling over to the computer from bed in the morning. Katherine Anne Porter wrote about getting up when the house was silent, not talking to anyone, having black coffee and breakfast, and writing "till the vein ran out." A very apt metaphor, the image of blood draining.

This morning, for instance, Harper woke me at 7:30 a.m. in order to demand I get his breakfast. Who needs an alarm clock when you have a yellow lab? Rather than stumble back to bed after feeding him, I came into my office. The sun was coming though the windows like warm yellow molasses, warming my left shoulder and bathing me in mood-altering light. I switched on the computer, and opened my mind. The nierka was even easier to achieve in the morning sun, the doorway between the world of dreams and the world of consciousness wider and easier to push though. I put the new new James Blunt CD on the stereo and began to write. Before I knew it, two hours had passed, and I had written five pages. They weren't necessarily brilliant, but they were excellent first drafts, and, best of all, I have the rest of the day available to me to do the things necessary to have the life experiences I need for my writing work. Like writing late, living in a tortured poetic vacuum is something that twenty year olds wear vastly better than forty-three year olds do.

These days, in order to produce something I'm going to be happy with, I need sleep the night before, a clean office in the morning, and an excellent moisturizer all day. Like writing late, living in a tortured poetic vacuum is something that twenty year olds wear vastly better than forty-three year olds do.

Instinct For Survival: Summer Memories, 1992

2006-01-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

There is a book on the top shelf of the bookcase in our living room at The Farmhouse called Instinct For Survival. It's one of my favourite books, and one that has influenced me as a nonfiction writer and essayist in ways that I'm only recently discovering. I recommend it to anyone who wants to write essays, or indeed any serious nonfiction.

The author is Pat C. Hoy III, and he's everything I'm not: a straight family man, currently a Professor of English at NYU, retired military, Viet Nam veteran, a graduate of West Point. The photo on the cover of his book shows a quirkily handsome young man with an intelligent face and a crewcut. He's looking at the camera with a young man's wonderful sense of confidence. Although the photo is black and white, and looks like it dates from the late 1960's or early 1970's, the t-shirt is obviously U.S. Army issue, and is likely olive drab.

Pat Hoy was running the summer writing programme at Harvard in 1992 when I was doing the Advanced Fiction Workshop there, studying under novelist Peter Lasalle. Professor Hoy wasn't one of my professors, but he was a ubiquitous and friendly presence on campus, sun-tanned, dressed in khakis and a casual shirt (and even then, crewcut still.) I had the occasion to speak with him once about my course load, and a few other times about life and writing.

In 1992, I was a 29 year old lightly-published magazine journalist. Bluntly, that summer at Harvard, I was a nobody. I had moved into my dorm room at Adams House with my word processer and my notebooks, with the intention of deciding if "being a writer" was what I wanted to do. I went to a barber and had him cut off nearly all my hair. I got a lot of attention from the girls in our residence, and even more attention from the patrons at the Ramrod bar in Boston. However, for me, the symbolic shearing of my hair was a severing of myself from my life in Milton, Ontario, where Brian and I lived then. A temporary severing, of course, but no less effective for its relative brevity. I wanted to exist without reference to anything or anyone I had known before, to strip myself down to my personal and artistic essence in order to see if there was a writer in there, for real. That summer was, for me, in every sense, a vision quest. I bought and devoured books, made friends, and wrote every day, compulsively, addictively.

There was no particular reason for Pat Hoy to take the time to talk to me about life or writing other than the fact that he was a classic southern gentleman to the fingertips, and superbly effective at his job that summer---helping to organize the summer college careers of a few hundred aspiring writers and the like. But he was kind, and he was friendly, and he was a natural teacher: he had the tremendous gift of drawing creative young people out of themselves, into a neutral creative DMZ where the young writers could imagine themselves taken seriously and, in that state, learn a thing or two about writing from the visiting literati who taught them. That was where the learning came from. I was riveted by the fact that this man, who had endured West Point, had served as an officer in Viet Nam, and was now teaching expository writing at Harvard, was willing to talk to me without condescension, and either took me seriously as a writer, or else hid his lack of seriousness with stunning alacrity.

He had published a book of essays called Instinct For Survival. Towards the end of the summer, I purchased a copy of it at a bookstore in Cambridge. As odd as it seems to be in 2006, given the trajectory of my career today, it hadn't really occured to me that a writer's own observations of life---an attempt to marshall the sometimes-dazzling who, what, when, where, and how of life---was a viable literary venue. Pat Hoy's writing was a revelation: elegant, graceful, pellucid, and possessed of a fierce intelligence. Two of the essays in that book, "Soldiering" and "Mosaics of Southern Masculinity," were as beautiful as the best short fiction. The writing was warm, luxurious, accessible. It was as satisfying, ultimately, as one of those magical conversations with a stranger that you never want to end.

Although I was still a little in awe of Pat Hoy, I was able to experience his writing the way the best writing is intended to be experienced: with a sense of shared experience even though there was no actual shared experience.

One afternoon in late August towards the end of my studies, on the golden edge of September, I went to his office and shyly asked him to sign it the book. He did. The inscription is kind and personal, and not for this journal. I can still smell the summer-baked paneling of the walls, the scent of trapped sunlight and dust. And then, with a bright white smile, Pat Hoy handed me the book, and said goodbye and good luck with my writing.

I've re-read the book about every five years just to remind myself of how wonderful writing is supposed to be, how beautiful an essay can be, and how vulnerable and poetic a strong and traditionally masculine man can be in his work if he has the courage to be vulnerable and honest. Perhaps that was an even more important lesson to me as I started out writing seriously, which I did, that fall. I never dodged bullets in Viet Nam, or had to make sense of my life in a macho southern miltary culture. But I've fought my own battles, and can say without blush that I've tried to be vulnerable and honest in my essays.

Although Pat Hoy hasn't been the only writer to show me that, he was certainly the first.

But the most important lesson I've had from meeting him that summer and reading his work is this one: any young person I meet who wants to be a writer is worthy of my respect and worthy of being taken seriously---at least given a chance to be taken seriously.

Sitting in that office at Harvard with Pat C. Hoy III, I never felt small or inconsequential, and it would have been so easy and so unremarkable for someone of his standing to allow me to feel small and inconsequential. We should all be as lucky as I was.

This fall, when my second essay collection, Other Men's Sons, comes out, I will likely read Instinct For Survival again, and silenty thank Pat C. Hoy III for helping me, as a writer, to develop my own.

Instinct For Survival by Pat C. Hoy III (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992)

Friday afternoon on Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

I decided to take the afternoon off and take in the 4:00 p.m. showing of Brokeback Mountain at the Paramount Theater on Richmond Street in downtown Toronto.

Brokeback, based on a short story by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, is one of those films that, it seems, every other gay man in the world but me has seen. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew that whatever I was going to experience from the film, I wanted to experience it in private. I took a seat on the highest row in the theater with no one on either side of me.

In the ninety minutes that followed, my heart and mind were kicked around like footballs.

I'm not going to review the movie, per se, in this journal since my friend and fellow writer, David W. Shelton, has done it wonderfully well on his own blog, which I urge you to visit at www.davidwshelton.blogspot.com, although I think it may warrant an essay by me later on the site, or elsewhere.

That having been said, the overriding afterburn of this powerful, elegant film is the sense of the tragedy of living in a sub-articulate time and place, where the harsh and inviolabe code of the much-fetishized "cowboy" ideal---macho, stoic, silent, and enduring---demands such cruel tribute from the men who live by it, either by choice or circumstance.

I don't know what I expected. There's a part of me, I suppose, that expected to be titillated in some cynical, middle-aged way by the sexy notion of love between rough, handsome young cowboys. The "cowboy thing" has never had particular resonance for me as a fetish, but I'm not immune to the thought of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in a pup tent in Wyoming.

But the tension of the story never let up enough for me forget the fact that even if Jack hadn't died at the end of the film, their love story, forbidden as it was, was already leavened with tragedy by virtue of the fact that it had to remain hidden. The fact that Ennis could literally not imagine a world where two men could live as lovers in ranch country, and in fact didn't have the language available to him to express that tragedy, much less the later tragedy of Jack's murder, broke my heart in a way that was completely free of sentimentality.

Annie Proulx, who has written about her story on her website www.annieproulx.com, has said that the characters of Jack and Ennis came fully from her imagination and were not based on anyone she knew. Who could doubt that from a writer of her consequential talent? If anything, it is a tribute to her gifts that she could create two characters whose lives on the page (and on the screen) so stunningly evoke the truth of what life was like for gay men of that time and background who didn't have words for what they were.

In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a portentously moving meditation, not only on forbidden love, but also on class, region, and era. It's also a searing comment on the fierce cost of masculinity and homophobia, a cost borne most dramatically by the men, but also by the women in whose lives the men are inextricably bound.

When Brian and I were in Los Angeles this past Christmas, we stayed at the Chateau Marmont, quite naturally as a couple. Outside, there were huge billboards along Sunset Boulevard advertising this film that would later sweep the Golden Globes (as it will likely do to the Oscars later. )

My mind roamed back to the year I moved to Toronto, 1982. I was 19. I remember watching Making Love in a nearly empty theater on Yonge Street, then slinking out as unobtrusively as possible. The film died silently, and almost took the careers of the two actors playing the couple, Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, along with it in spite of their significant talent and body of work. They both made comebacks, and the film is due to be released on DVD next month, almost 25 years later.

How times change. In films, and in life.

As I write this, it's again snowing outside our house, and Brian is out at the gym. When he comes home, we'll have dinner, watch tv, and share the news of our day like most of the couples on our street. It's 2006, not 1963. And thank God for that.

As gay men especially, we can afford, now and then, to remember our forbears---the Ennises and Jacks who made lives and love for themselves in the face of constant threat and violence. We can honour them silently, and realize that the lives many of us take for granted today would have been, to them, literally unimaginable.

If Brokeback Mountain has another legacy besides standing tall as Ang Lee's finest work yet, let it be that the film has perhaps touched a harsh, smug corner of middle America, and invited it to look at this epic love story, and ask itself if the pain engendered by those times was really the best manifestation of "traditional values," and if that type of values is what it really wants a retun to.

Rainy Wednesday

2006-01-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

January is a sad, weird month in Toronto.

In many ways, it's the beginning of a new year, which is marvelous, and has been a source of wonderful inspiration for me since I was very young. I've usually preferred New Year's Day to Christmas, because I'm wedded to the notion of new beginnings. If I go back to diary entries from my late teens, I can see that I have recorded a sense of euphoria and cleanness on the eve of a new year.

Outside my office window at the top of my house, wet snow is falling in patchy, uncomitted sheets. When I walk the Harper the yellow lab with my friend Eric down the ravine path down by the river, I suspect that it will be cold enough to warrant a hat and gloves, but not either refreshing or inspiring.

I've been sleeping very badly for the last week or so, and I rose late today with an Advil headache.

The novel I am writing, "Diving Into Blue," which is due at my kind and patient publishers very soon, has been twisting and turning in my head like a fish just pulled from the ocean, spiny and sinewy, shaking saltwater everywhere, and occasionally cutting me on its sharp scales. Generally I dislike writers whose torturous process they describe in dishonest detail---on one hand pretending to solicit sympathy, while in truth hoping for envy at such exotic travails---but I recently discovered first hand what happens when you take a character down a road for 30 or 40 pages, then realize that you've painted him or her into a dead end.

Also, having attended a private boarding school while trying to write a novel about a private boarding school is replete with its own challenges, especially when you're known as a nonfiction writer to begin with. Accessing my own memories while making sure the story reads like the fiction it is, keeps my imagination on its toes.

I'm looking forward to laying it aside for 6 weeks or so while I write the horror novella for Alyson Books that I signed the contract for when Brian and I came back from Los Angeles. The novella is called "In October," and the short version of the description is that it's about a young and isolated boy in a small town who accidentally summons up the answer to most of his prayers one freezing autumn night, then finds out that there is a terrible cost to it. Believe me, after months at my fictitious boarding school of the imagination, this horror novella and its world of demons, lonliness, and dark witchcraft, is going to be a walk in the park.

Other Men's Sons: A Writer's Journal

2006-01-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

My name is Michael Rowe. I am a Canadian author and essayist, and this is my new "blog."

For what it's worth, this is going to be a record of more daily musings about the writing process. My readers and friends have my website, michaelrowe.com, to which they may refer for news about my books and articles. This "blog," on the other hand, is intended as something more immediate, more casual, and weirdly, more personal. The Journal section of my website will be more of a forum for longer pieces, mini-essays and the like. This, on the other hand, is intended to be read more like a diary.

The posts that follow will hopefully offer some insight into the process that goes into my work, and impressions that occur to me on a more spontaneous level, day-to-day level.