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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 10, 2004
Ludlam
"Men marry because they are tired women because they are curious wrote Oscar Wilde, ruining it by adding, Both are disappointed." It took Charles Ludlam the New York off-off-Broadway poet and impresario of the 1970s to take the valid part of this proposition and truly run with it in his penny dreadful monstrosity of a play The Mystery of Irma Vep. He was a man who knew his sexes: perhaps a thousand of them. Ludlam who was not only "gay" but anarchic promiscuous drug-addicted ruthlessly opportunist a pathological liar and a genius is one of my weirder heroes. He had the comic sensibility of a Moli?re and his "theatre of the ridiculous" enjoyed a cult following that will surely be revived some day. In addition to the wrighting of 29 extraordinary plays he was reputed among plausible critics the best character actor of his generation in huge demand for films. He could do anything. He was the man who portrayed the doomed courtesan in Dumas's Camille not en travesti but is if an older actress were playing an ing?nue. To call him a drag queen would be like calling Shakespeare a minor Elizabethan actor. There was nothing in his repertoire not "gay" in every possible sense of that word and he made his own sexual perversity the prism through which to refract a ludicrous but integral human comedy stretching far beyond sex. He died pitifully and pointlessly as most of us die in the mid-1980s of the dreadful scourge of AIDS. He is the person to whom I would have referred the issue of "same-sex marriage" instead of to the Canadian Supreme Court which took it up this last week and is expected to report its predictable findings to Parliament early next year. Alas Ludlam is gone but our high bench is still sitting. Everyone is a creature of his time and I suppose Ludlam must always speak from his. The idea of "gay marriage" was as recently as the 1970s silly enough to merit referral to a "theatre of the ridiculous". I think rather than grimacing in the cloak of judicial reasoning Ludlam would have enjoyed a great belly-laugh about it. No one could have been better placed to mock a politicized "gay" community plotting to make homosexuality bourgeois. Which is not to say he would have passed on the suggestion: for I can easily imagine him dressing as one of our northern female justices and adding her to the play. He was not a man confined by anything resembling political correctness. The idea of marriage itself is not without its depths in the absurd. Out of all the possibilities for human sexual interaction (among which it has been observed chastity is most rare) what emerged through the millennia was "one woman and one man for life". The glory of the institution is bound up in the limitations upon it. It ceases to be anything when it ceases to be strict. A year has passed since I wrote a series of columns on the issue of gay marriage little more than a year since an Ontario court rendered a judgement that -- in Canada -- would make the destruction of the institution of marriage inevitable. I lost friends over those columns I got threats ranging from the quasi-legal to the physical and the only reason I persisted was because everyone else in the media had apparently agreed to shut up. I thought someone had to speak on behalf of the millions in Canada whose views would never be consulted. I did not think then and even less do I now that the juggernaut could be stopped. Not in Canada given the close compact of our "enlightened" ruling classes whose impulse when confronted with anything controversial is to choose the "wave of the future" and stifle all debate. As I wrote at the time the passage of Svend Robinson's private member's bill equating opposition to homosexuality with genocide in the Canadian Criminal Code was the signal to shut discussion down. By now corporate Canada has got on the bandwagon with things like the Royal Bank's new "Safe Space" policy in which employees are instructed to "voluntarily" stick little triangles around their workspaces as a way of showing "that your desk cubicle or office is a 'safe place' for gay men bisexuals transgendered and lesbians". Ah yes a visible, non-threatening way to isolate Christians and any others who may refuse from conscience to display the stickers in question. How I miss Charles Ludlam. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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