Pedagogy and Citizenship in Persky's Polis
A reflection on mentorship
One of my first conversations with Stan Persky provided a valuable lesson about learning. This was in Vancouver on a Sunday afternoon during the fall of 1990, shortly after I joined a West End writers group of which Stan was a leading member. The group’s monthly meetings took place at a well-preserved heritage home in a leafy section of downtown’s Bute Street. As I recall, the meeting hadn’t yet begun when the two of us were discussing the importance of education to adult success, and Stan lay this on me: as a young student in the 1950s and 60s, he had always chosen the best teachers and professors available—not by accident but deliberately, with an intuitive sense of who would draw the most out of him. As an adult, he had proven their worth by applying their lessons out in the world, both as a writer and as a teacher himself.
This was a revelation. At age 27, I had never considered the possibility—much less the value—of choosing one’s own teachers. As an undergraduate I had chosen only my elective courses, placing a higher priority on when they were taught than on who was teaching them: professor by calendar convenience. It was not that I lacked the confidence to intentionally choose my instructors—you know, do a little research and ask around, at least for anecdotal evidence of who might be best. The harsher truth was that, at this stage of my life, I lacked sufficient respect for the teacher’s role in learning and was thus indifferent to their quality, one way or the other.
Having been stung by a few bad teachers in grade school and first-year college—all of them men, all of them macho, ‘A’-type personalities with whom I had butted heads and therefore regarded with typically youthful arrogance as egotistical blowhards despite whatever wisdom they might have imparted—I was impervious to the influence of good teachers. By the time I arrived at UVic and began my BA program, I saw the professorial role more as oppressive, authoritarian intervention than as a potential source of mentorship. I assumed that the course material would be all I needed to work with; that the instructor served no other purpose than that of robotic functionary: an emotionally indifferent, morally neutral dispenser of useful information to be cast aside at semester’s end without so much as a backward glance. (This was a shame, since I did have some good profs at UVic, and later at King’s College in Halifax. Just no one who saw enough potential to take me under their wing. And why would they have done this, given my general attitude and passivity?)
Not surprisingly in retrospect, I muddled through my BA. Graduating with a mediocre grade point average, I completed my undergrad degree without having established any deep or lasting connections with my instructors. Now, hearing Stan recall the wisdom of his professors—some of whom he’d kept in touch with for decades—I felt like a fool. Stan had no idea that he had just rocked my world. Ever the philosopher, he thought he was merely stating the obvious: that true education comes from human interactions (not merely from the passages between one’s existing body of knowledge and previously unexplored material), and that choosing one’s own mentor is the first deliberate act of an independent mind.
I first heard of Stan Persky in 1985 while studying English lit and political science at the University of Victoria. In a course on B.C. politics taught by Norman Ruff (one of my luckier non-choices), two of Stan’s books were on the reading list: Son of Socred (New Star, 1979) and Bennett II (New Star, 1983), both thoughtful chronicles of the right wing Social Credit mini-dynasty that ruled British Columbia for 30 years, interrupted only by Dave Barrett’s social democratic interlude between 1972 and 1975. Soon after, I read another Persky book, America: The Last Domino (New Star, 1984), a more even-handed critique of U.S. imperialism from the left than what Noam Chomsky, then coming into vogue across North American campuses, was offering. But it was Buddy’s: Meditations on Desire (New Star, 1989) that had the biggest impact.
In the spring of 1989, I was living in the Fraser Valley town of Hope, about a two-hour drive east of Vancouver. I had gone there the previous fall to work as the reporter and photographer for the weekly Standard, but now the walls were closing in: at age 25, I still hadn’t come out as gay. In a place like Hope, this was proving to be as emotionally unsustainable as it was a losing strategy for self-knowledge and social engagement. Although I had grown up in the working class town of Nanaimo—hardly the cutting edge of progressive thought—Hope presented a far more desolate closet because of its smaller size and location at the end of the Valley’s bible belt. Flanked by mountains at the confluence of the Fraser and Coquihalla rivers, it was a frontier town built for the 1850s gold rush that remained resource-dependent a century and a half later. With its cheap housing and outdoor recreational opportunities, which made it an attractive place for young families, Hope was a small town whose inhabitants were mostly white, socially conventional, and devoutly Christian. In such a place, there was nowhere to hide for the openly gay. One day in a local bank lineup, I noticed a teenaged boy wearing a baseball cap, its slogan a satirical take-off on a popular insect repellent: “AIDS: KILLS FAGS DEAD”.
Then I read Buddy’s. To my surprise, the same writer whose earlier books had helped shape my political values also happened to share my sexual orientation—except that Persky was open about his. In Buddy’s, the first-person narrator’s gaze captured the internalized recognition of gay desire in a simple image or moment. I had long known such moments from my own closet, but had yet to express them in writing—or out in the world. For instance, Persky’s thoughts on the “shimmel”—a T-shirt then popular with male athletes, cut off just below the breast to reveal the naked abdomen—reassured me that I was not alone in deriving pleasure from even the most fleeting glimpse of male beauty:
Used by football players during summer practice scrimmages (I had seen them on TV sports clips), they were meant to prevent chafing by the shoulder pads and to provide a bit of cool relief in the preseason heat. But worn in the bar or on the streets, the shimmel’s function is purely mannerist, permanently displaying the flesh that in ordinary movement is only momentarily and seductively revealed. I point out several boys on the street wearing them. “There,” I say excitedly, like an explorer in the Great Plains of Semiotica, locating a long-sought species of fauna. (pp. 26-27)
With passages like this, Persky established a sense of inquisitive humour in the Buddy’s eroto-scape that instantly demystified homo sex, making its physical and emotional manifestations more matter-of-fact, less threatening—even to gay readers like me who were gingerly taking their first steps toward experience. In Buddy’s, too, the sensual and the cerebral were not mutually exclusive: as a reader I found myself contemplating the meaning of existence even as Persky was mapping out a highly erotic tableau. More importantly, Buddy’s was an effective advertisement for uncloseted living. Persky’s vignettes, set in the bars and streets of Vancouver’s West End, revealed a gritty but believable universe in which “out” gay men pursued uninhibited lives, even at a time when AIDS hysteria was leading some gay men to simply stop having sex—or, as in my case, delaying their introduction to it.
When I finally met Persky at a meeting of the West End writers group in 1990, about a year after I moved to Vancouver, it was through a tangled web of gay community connections: a queer network that, long before social media, took several months of dinner parties, club hopping, and art ‘happenings’ to establish. It was Daniel Collins, a dance and art photographer I’d met at one of these dinner parties, who invited me to his rented house on Bute Street for one of the writers group meetings, which he’d been hosting for quite some time. As a young journalist lacking in literary chops, I was intimidated by this group. Some members were unknown or hadn’t published yet, but others were among the West Coast contributors to The Body Politic, Canada’s first gay political journal, or were already established authors. The group included UBC art gallery director Scott Watson, who had just published his award-winning biography of Jack Shadbolt; the poet George Stanley (who, along with Stan and Robin Blaser, were part of the San Francisco Renaissance movement of poets and had hung out with the likes of Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg), the playwright and Georgia Straight theatre critic Colin Thomas, the novelist David Watmough, and Stan.
Three-and-a-half decades later, I still recall my anticipation at meeting Stan for the first time. Thanks to the playful narrative voice of Buddy’s, the book’s explicit depictions of sex and its winking nods to pop cultural trends-of-the-moment, I was expecting someone far younger than the man who actually wrote it. At that first meeting, I was also struck by the easygoing manner with which Stan commanded the room. Once he got going on a topic—whether it was politics, philosophy, writing, art, sex, pop culture, or even sports—he spoke in complete, grammatical sentences—and, often, in lengthy paragraphs. When others spoke, he listened intently. But it was clear, in many cases, that he had read, thought, or written more than the rest of us about the subject under discussion. And so, within a few of these meetings, I quietly “chose” Stan as my teacher.
Pedagogy
What did it mean for a young writer in 1990, to suddenly find himself in Stan Persky’s orbit? In his memoir, City Boy (Bloomsbury, 2009), gay novelist Edmund White sums up my own good fortune quite nicely while recounting his own maturation as a writer. White recalls how New York City and the circle of authors he met there fed his insatiable ambition and became critical to his later success. The importance of milieu in a writer’s development, he said, cannot be overstated:
One was only as good as one’s circle, and a superior, stimulating milieu could raise the general level of conversation, of sophistication, even of moral discrimination and esthetic refinement, certainly of ambition and accomplishment. (p. 27)
For a middle-class suburbanite from Vancouver Island, the West End writers group was a privileged milieu. It was there that I gained access to what Stan and the others knew about politics, literature, writing, and life; it was there that my cerebral fitness got a serious reboot with new awareness of what it meant not only to be a thinking, accountable adult but also a discerning, out-of-the-closet gay man. The first order of business was to learn how to discriminate: how to be ruthless with one’s intellectual choices, filter out the pop cultural noise, and lay the foundations for independent thought that make one worthy of (and not simply entitled to) one’s own opinions.
The unspoken deal with Stan was this: for all the wisdom he would impart—and for all the references, contacts and career tips he would generously throw my way—it would be my responsibility to wise up, and fast. I had to get smarter on my own steam. A lot smarter. For starters, this meant expanding my reading life significantly. It meant devouring the works of writers who had not been on my undergrad lists, those whose books were steeped in philosophy or aesthetics and whose writing deliberately telegraphed a particular, original point of view. It meant reading all the “B”s (Barthes, Berger, Borges), gay lit from Isherwood to White (including the “G”s, Gide and Genet), smart contemporary novelists (Coetzee, Kundera, Saramago, Semprun, Pamuk) thinkers on society (Rorty, Sontag, Ralston Saul, Judt, Buruma), bibliophiles like Manguel, and the uncategorizable Naipaul. It also meant reducing my dependence on daily newspapers for fact gathering and increasing my reliance on sources like The New York Review of Books for insight and analysis. (“Saves you lots of time,” said Stan.)
My final task was to learn how to write what I knew. Stan sniffed out every false note: every lazy adjective, every poorly constructed phrase, every bad idea. One of the first pieces I read to the writer’s group was a short story about a solitary man who gets arrested at a playground near Stanley Park. Mistaken for a paedophile, he spends a night in jail where he is violently raped by his cellmate. I had pitched this short story at the group meeting as a Kafkaesque nightmare of wrong place/wrong time misfortune: the first-person narrator is ‘guilty’ of nothing more than being a brooding loner who is oblivious to his surroundings. But the story, framed by the narrator’s reflections on his predicament, was laced with righteous indignation and solipsistic navel-gazing—even subconscious, internalized homophobia about the narrator’s having “bottomed,” unwillingly, for a stranger. It was all too earnest by half.
After I finished reading, my fellow writers responded with stony silence. Stan took a long drag on his cigarette. “I think you should toss it out,” he said. “It’s completely improbable. In this city, no one would get arrested at a playground for no reason, and then spend a night in jail. Even if it were possible, the narrator is not sympathetic. He’s completely to blame for everything that happens to him, and yet he thinks his victimhood is somehow worse than anyone else’s. I was rooting for the rapist.”
The last comment was so disarmingly funny that even I had to laugh. “Write about something you know,” added Stan, softening the blow to my ego. “There are heaps of real stories out there you can tell in an interesting way. Try doing that.”
With Stan in the lead, from my perspective, the writer’s group became the de facto workshop, the creative writing clinic I had missed in my formal education. On the surface it was playful, but also serious: a milieu unforgiving of bad writing. Almost as important was its focus on the civic possibilities of writing—writing that had something to say about the society in which we lived.
Stan was the happy enabler of this solemn but liberating mission.
Two years before I joined the group, a fundamentalist Christian sect in the Fraser Valley had tried to spark debate about the upcoming Gay Games in Vancouver. In a bid to draw more faithful to its pews (and, not incidentally, to make a political casualty of Member of Parliament Svend Robinson, who had recently come out of the closet, by blaming him for the event), the sect published a newspaper with the banner front-page headline: “SODOMITE INVASION PLANNED FOR 1990.” Writer’s group member Don Larventz saw an opportunity. In response to the aggrieved Christians, he suggested, the group should produce a literary magazine and call it Sodomite Invasion Review (SIR). Stan liked the idea, and so did the others. By the time I joined the group—just before the Gay Games—the first edition of SIR was being planned for publication as an insert to Angles, Vancouver’s gay and lesbian monthly. Edited and published by Larventz, SIR produced six stand-alone issues over the next four years.
Despite his frequent work as a political pundit and literary reviewer in mainstream media, including a regular byline in the Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun, Stan devoted a significant portion of his energies to Sodomite Invasion Review. SIR was always a marginal publication—its name guaranteed that—but Stan treated it as equal to any of Vancouver’s art journals. In addition to the writer’s group’s collective pursuit of better writing, he saw in the magazine a civic-minded purpose, a chance to make a statement about the world from a homo perspective. A Robin Blaser poem about U.S. homophobia would appear beside a Carel Moiseiwitsch cartoon on AIDS paranoia or a Daniel Collins photo spread celebrating gay athletes. Stan himself would use the pages of SIR to publish the first excerpts of what was to become Book Two in his “Boyopolis” trilogy, Then We Take Berlin (Knopf, 1995).
Citizenship
In Stan’s understanding, consistent with Plato’s Republic, the Greek notion of the polis, or “city”, carries deeper significance than the physical trappings of urban reality. More broadly, the polis represents the political embodiment of the City itself; the people who make up the City, and their collective sense of responsibility for it. In such a polis, “citizenship” denotes far more than what country you’re from, its responsibilities greater than the mere act of voting every few years. If Stan could be said to have retained a sense of idealism into his senior years, I think it lay in his concept of what the polis can or should be, what “citizenship” means, and how the citizenry should carry out the duties implied.
Much of Stan’s writing, particularly after Buddy’s, placed the writer at the centre of the polis. Our citizenly duty? Nothing less than to bear witness to and make sense of the times in which we live. For most writers who have paid attention to political affairs since the mid-twentieth century, the exemplar of global citizenship has been George Orwell, whose defining moment was the Spanish Civil War. In an essay from Topic Sentence: A Writer’s Education (2007), Stan quotes a generous helping of author-citizens—the “unacknowledged legislators,” as Christopher Hitchens, quoting Shelley, referred to writers—who have pronounced judgment on Orwell’s legacy as a truth-teller in the fight against totalitarianism. After reviewing Hitchens, Richard Rorty, Timothy Garton Ash, Benjamin Barber, and others on why we should still read Orwell, Stan offers this:
Orwell’s nightmare, I think, is not so much the imagination of the future portrayed in 1984, but rather the eradication of the past, the erasure of memory….Orwell still matters because his nightmare about the erasure of the past continues to be relevant.…Whether we’re talking about our young people hanging out in the mall, engrossed in the virtual destruction provided by video games, or their young people indoctrinated in fundamentalist schools and sometimes persuaded to engage in the self-and-other destruction of suicide bombing, the possibility of a truthfully described past has been devoured by ideologies of utter indifference and misguided passion. (pp. 274, 276-7)
In Reading the 21st Century (2011), Stan offers no less bleak a vision in exploring the dramatic decline in serious book reading by young people in recent years. The dumbing down of education in today’s multi-tasking world of “killer apps” and social media, in which the average attention span hasn’t got a hope in hell against the distractions of Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, was easy fodder for Stan’s riffs on the erasure of memory. But as he makes clear, that only makes our work as writers all the more urgent. And it’s not all about despair, either: even as reading rates decline and the public sphere is devoured by advertising and new media, Stan notes that the literary world continues to produce first-rate writing across various languages and cultures, and that it’s available to anyone who’s interested.
One contemporary equivalent of “Orwell’s nightmare” that Stan explores in Reading the 21st Century is Orhan Pamuk’s Turkey, through his novel Snow (2003). Stan captures Snow’s relevance both to current events and to its historical context. “Snow is a book of conversions and apostasies,” he writes:
Within a few pages, Pamuk has immersed us in a world that is like a children’s snow globe, and yet simultaneously presents a grimly realistic panorama of the various contradictions and circumstances—secularism versus faith, ethnic minorities, poverty and backwardness, a society of surveillance, gossip, and violence—that engulf contemporary Turkey and beyond, the whole played out in a remote crossroads of the world’s troubles. (p. 69)
Stan enters the world of both the protagonist, Kar, an exiled Turkish poet returning home from Frankfurt, and the narrator “Orhan,” who maps out for the reader how a search for a book of poems called Snow manages to morph into a novel of the same name. Stan sees the literary device of snow as a defining metaphor that captures Pamuk’s major themes: elusive purity (devotion to Islam) and the covering up of things (the suppression of truth in the interests of religious orthodoxy and state security), the complexity of each individual snowflake representing Turkish society in all its tapestry. He even invokes Spicer and Blaser to ponder the origins of interlinked poems of the kind that Kar proposes. And, without giving too much away, he notes that Pamuk’s Orwellian plot twist—after Kar is informed by a newspaper editor that he will attend a revolutionary art performance that same evening, where he will recite an as-yet unwritten poem called “Snow”—will be resolved in a manner that requires both Kar and “Orhan” to demonstrate their citizenship as writers, to take a stand that just might put them on the wrong side of history. Or not.
So where does all this leave the rest of us, as writer-citizens? Particularly those of us living in Canada, comfortably cocooned as we are from the gruesome daily realities of, say, aerial bombardment or violent sectarian conflict? A country in which few take seriously the consequences of finding oneself on the wrong side of history? A country with some of the same provincialism and petty insecurities of which Orwell complained regarding his native England, after his return from Spain in the mid-1930s? In Stan’s democratic literary universe, it means that we must do, and not simply, the best we can. It means finding truthful stories, telling them honestly and, in so doing, enriching the polis. To this end, Stan was always generous in helping other writers find an audience—writers whose subject matter was aimed at contributing to civic discourse.
I know this from experience, as Stan had a direct role in getting my first three books published. All three, in different ways, challenged official policy or mainstream media perspectives on contentious public issues. The first was a biography of Peter Jepson-Young, a doctor with AIDS who educated the public about HIV issues through weekly broadcasts on the CBC Evening News; the second, an account of the moderate social democratic government of NDP Premier Mike Harcourt in British Columbia; and the third, a call for action to save a threatened forest ecosystem. In the first case, Stan directed me to an independent publisher when a larger firm turned down my book proposal. In the second, he enlisted me for the bulk of the research and some of the writing before turning over the whole project. And in the third, he used his influence on the publications committee of an environmental foundation to get me recruited as the writer-for-hire on a project about boreal forests.
Stan was not involved in getting my fourth book published. But, as with the first three, he was more than happy to assist in making it better written. For the first time, I was attempting a form of writing that went beyond reportorial journalism. This book would be a long-form narrative of literary non-fiction that required more depth in reflection on a larger, politically problematic subject. For some years, I had been scribbling notes about my disproportionate attraction to East Asian men: why I found them attractive (and why the attraction was so often mutual), how this sexual interest began, and what it meant socially and politically. After dating and/or bedding an assortment of young adult Asian males from throughout the Pacific Rim, I was partway through a manuscript when I realized that my perspective and analysis were limited by geography: all of these sexual adventures had taken place in Vancouver, London, and other North American or European cities. Having never been to Asia, I decided to spend three months in Thailand and Vietnam. Once I got there and was confronted by an onslaught of mutual attractions, I discovered that I was poorly prepared to navigate cultural protocols that weren’t my own. To figure it all out, I ended up getting a job and moving to Bangkok.
Before going to Asia, I was planning on turning the book into a novel about a hapless white narrator who suffers some horrible fate as a result of his obsessions. But experience in Thailand changed my mind—as did Stan, who convinced me to write the book as memoir. During the three years I lived in Bangkok, he visited me twice. In between these visits, he reviewed bits of manuscript I sent him in Vancouver or Berlin—offering suggestions, probing my thoughts for more, demanding depth. In the process he introduced me to Brian Fawcett, whose Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Talonbooks, 1986) I had enjoyed at the same time I was first reading Stan. Fawcett, in addition to posting excerpts of the manuscript on dooneyscafe.com, applied his surgical knife to a couple of chapters.
When The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005) was published, its dust jacket bearing an effusive blurb from Stan, it felt like a debut. Thanks to the subject matter and first-person narrative, I had made myself vulnerable in ways that hadn’t been an issue with the earlier books. Shortly before its release, a small group of left-wing activists began an e-mail campaign condemning it. Apparently, they had collectively decided—without having read it—that the book was racist because it was called The Rice Queen Diaries, because its author was white, and because an article in the local gay newspaper had raised alarm bells by focusing exclusively on a section I had ironically entitled “I, Sex Tourist.” Protesters showed up outside the launch, handing out leaflets and urging people not to go inside.
Just as the PR flak in me was considering calling the media in a cynical bid to boost sales, Stan went outside to talk with the demonstrators. According to witnesses—I was already inside so missed the exchange—he began by asking, in his usual Socratic style, how they could boycott a book they hadn’t read, what they actually knew about The Rice Queen Diaries, and why they would object to a book that encouraged better understanding between people of different cultures. Within a few minutes, a few of the protesters stepped inside to hear me read. I don’t think any of them bought copies of RQD, but I would like to think they walked away more enlightened. Stan, for his part, gave them every benefit of the doubt—as was his custom.
In Persky’s polis, anyone could gain wisdom.