“You can Google something you couldn't do in 1984. You know, you can find that shit out.”
David discusses his writing, focusing on authentic queer narratives while navigating his own personal story.
Chapter 2 |5 min read | October 5, 2021
I'm just, you know, gonna just lay it out there. I'm a lazy writer. So the the dirty secret of writing for theater, for example, and writing for film is many fewer words, many fewer words. So I am was able to be more productive and was able to put stuff out more quickly writing, you know, for theater and for film and for television than for any other medium. I mean, I suppose I could have opted for poetry. Short of that, you know, many fewer words.
I wrote a play that I was particularly proud of, and it was structured in a series of monologues, it was called The Thimble Factory. And several friends said, No, it really should be a book, you should do this as a book, this will be a great book, over and over.
And finally, I went to one friend in particular, who was published and I said, could you talk to your publisher about taking a look at this, and seeing whether they be interested? He agreed to advocate on my behalf, they took a look at it, and they were like, yeah, this would be great, we would love to do this. And then two weeks later, they’re like, where's the rest of it?
Of course, it was only 25,000 words long, and they wanted at least 50,000 words. So I had to double the amount of the book. And I did that I took a slightly different approach to the new material that I was adding. And it worked out. It was nominated for a number of major awards, which was really delightful. And that made me think, oh, maybe I could be doing more. And so I wrote a second book. And it was based on a previous play that had been shelved that I had just stuck in a drawer and that one's called Red X.
“Creating a monster that's running around allows you to pay more attention to the realism of the rest of the story.\”
David D
[Red X is about] a number of men who have been disappearing from Toronto's gay village, and nobody knows what or who is responsible. Turns out, the surviving people come together and realize that there is a creature of ancient myth who has emerged in Canada in Toronto, has been here for at least a few 100 years, and is taking marginalized gay men one by one here and there and, and is effectively consuming them. So that's the large part of the book, it takes place from 1984 to the present in sort of eight-year episodes.
And then in between, those are essays from me about my queerness my relationship with horror as a genre, my fears, my anxieties, a particular unusual medical disability that I have, and how that relates to my fears, and my anxieties around my body around my sexuality around queerness in general, and then also includes some information about Toronto's early history and how that connects to the story that I'm telling. So there's this whole sort of, you know, fiction, nonfiction interleaving going on through the book. And part of that was, in my way, trying to create a realistic, in so far as that there's a monster running around.
Creating a monster that's running around actually allows you to pay more attention to the realism of the rest of the story. I did a lot to invest the story with, you know, the textures of queer life in the mid-80s, the early 90s, the turn of the century, the mid-2000s, to give a sense of how our community and our spaces have changed over that period, how gentrification has affected those changes, and also how other kinds of gentrification occur not just physically but also gentrification, of our culture, and the straight expectations, that we need to fulfill, in order to sort of get along with them.
In order to have pride, in order to have parades, in order to have our own spaces. That feeling that we have to allow a certain amount of co-opting to occur was very important for me to document in the book, as well also as the richness of queer community, and the richness of queer relationships, queer friendships, and the diversity that exists within the queer community. Not necessarily always comfortably, but that is very much present there.
I have been careful to pick and choose what it is that I share. And, and any confidence is absolutely true. But it's confidence. First of all, it's confidence in my writing, which isn't always necessarily been coordinated with the confidence in myself, I have often been much more confident about my writing than myself. And but also it's confidence about the veracity of the stories that I am telling the veracity of the aspects of my life that I am sharing. No one can question that as far as I'm concerned, no one can take those things from me.
But I, you know, in turn, recognize that I am making myself vulnerable, I am putting things out there that, that I know other people find challenging just because we don't even have that experience as queer people of just going this is how I live my life. This is what my relationship looks like, this is this is what my friendships look like, this is how, you know, this is how what kind of sex I have and who I have it with those kinds of conversations are not conversations that you will find very often in the mainstream. And, and yet they're essential conversations for us to have there's no understanding unless that information is shared.
See More from David
Chapter 1: A Whole Person
For us, these are like, major milestones. And they shouldn't be. But it makes a huge difference.
Chapter 3: Finding Your Voice
Nothing is instantaneous. Everything takes some time, and it's important to be patient with yourself. I think, experimenting within yourself, asking those questions within yourself sort of creates a self discourse in order to explore stuff.