Long regarded as Canada’s greatest playwright, Michel Tremblay has been openly gay since the early 1970’s. His stage successes began in 1968 when his early work Les Belles-Soeurs was produced on a Montréal stage. This one-act play set off a major controversy: like his counterparts in Britain with their “kitchen sink” dramas, Tremblay had dared to represent Québec’s working class onstage, something that until then had, for all practical purposes, never before been done. The show has since been produced around the world in dozens of languages.
Since this initial success, Tremblay has produced a body of work that is simply staggering, encompassing 26 plays, a dozen novels, plus short stories, memoirs, essays, screenplays, and an opera. Never far from his creative vision is an ensemble of characters, some gay, some straight, some in drag. His play Hosanna, for example, has a drag queen doing Liz Taylor as Cleopatra, serving as a metaphor for French-speaking Québec’s own identity crisis. He’s regarded as Québec’s literary godfather, a man who still says he wishes the province had separated from Canada many years ago.
I sat down with Michael Tremblay in his Montréal East-end office to discuss his body of work and how being gay has influenced it.
Matthew Hays: In English-speaking Canada, it seems there’s a much greater stigma around homosexuality than in Québec. What is it about Québécois society that has made it so accepting of homosexuality?
Michel Tremblay: What’s interesting about Québec, and I don’t know why, when we’re sick of something, we just get rid of it. We decided we were sick of the Catholic religion, so we got rid of it. We’re the only place in the world that got rid of the Catholic religion without a war. In 1975 I went on television to say that I was gay. Once I had a problem on a flight, and that’s it in 29 years. I wrote Hosanna, a play about a drag queen, so don’t tell me you didn’t know I was gay! I felt at the time that the only thing that would change was that the person who wrote Hosanna was now officially gay. Maybe it’s because we were so closed, like a press, for so long, that when we opened, we opened up wide.
There is something I found odd, and it is that, because we live in a very cold country, we live in houses where our rooms are small and our windows are tiny. The moment that we discovered ourselves and opened up and exploded, all of a sudden we opened our houses, got rid of our walls, and got big spaces. All of a sudden we needed air and space. What saved us in Québec is that we have a big monster living to the south, but we have our own language. We don’t get the pressure the rest of Canada does constantly from the American culture.
MH: Some writers are uncomfortable making too great an association between their sexuality and their creative work. Would you say that being gay has greatly influenced your work?
MT: It made me a writer first. When you’re twelve and you sit and write something, it’s often about something you have to hide from the rest of society. I don’t know if you have this expression in English, but in French we say that we have to confide to the white sheet. The first thing you get when you’re a young boy or girl is a diary, and on it there’s a little lock. So before any of us becomes a writer, society tells you that what you’re going to put in your diary is a secret. If you read my first book, Tales for Late Night Drinkers—I wrote that when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen—half of the stories are about homosexuality. I was naïve enough to disguise the subject as part of fantastic tales. But it’s clear that those stories were about my being gay, as hard as I tried to disguise them.
MH: So it was the reason you started. How would you say that your homosexuality has shaped your work?
MT: The people who have read everything I’ve written could probably comment on that better than I could. My first gay characters weren’t really about being gay; rather, they were transvestites and transsexuals. In 1968, the transsexual was the perfect character to reflect an identity crisis. These people were gay, but the thing that made them the most interesting for the stage was the fact that they were men dressed as women. Hosanna was like a strip tease. At the beginning what you see is Liz Taylor as Cleopatra. And by the end you have a man in his underwear. So the play is about opening up and talking about these layers. I used that as a symbol of a country with identity problems. When you read Hosanna now, the socio-political thing has disappeared, and it’s become a play about gender roles. It’s not a play about a national identity crisis any more.
MH: So much of the work of someone like Tennessee Williams is about the oppression he felt in terms of his own sexuality and societal attitudes towards homosexuality. Your experience must have been so different.
MT: In the early years of my career I used to say that I wrote Les Belles-Soeurs because the other playwrights did not. Then I realized that if they had already written about those characters in that way, I wouldn’t have done so. Williams wrote about transvestites a long time ago. But perhaps he would have been less good if it weren’t for the oppression. Because what’s really interesting is whether Brick really did sleep with his friend [in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], or what Sebastian was doing with those boys [in Suddenly Last Summer]. Williams would have been more liberated himself, but his works may well have been less interesting.
MH: There was some criticism of you in the 1980’s about the fact that you held off on writing about AIDS.
MT: It took until 1992. But I now have the proof that I was right. I didn’t want to talk about AIDS until it was clearer. We didn’t know enough about it then to be objective. I feel like we need time to reflect on things before writing about them. When you look at a play like The Normal Heart today, the first act is okay, but the second act—well, I don’t think much of it. When they get married before he dies, I mean, really, that’s very bad theatre. Everybody cries, but it’s horrible theatre. I was too scared about writing about AIDS. You can’t write out of fear. I had brain surgery six years ago, and I wrote a book very quickly about it. I needed to get it out of my system, so I did it two years later. It relieved me of all that problem, but it’s not a very good book. It’s called The Man Who Heard the Kettle Whistle, because that’s the sound I still have in my ears.
Ten years after AIDS I wrote about it. Key West, where I spend my winters, is where people were going to die when they had AIDS. I wrote a book about Key West at that time. I hadn’t talked about AIDS before then, and I don’t think I would have been able to do so.
MH: Do you have a favorite work?
MT: Albertine, in Five Times is the best, but I love them all. Like any good mother, I like the misfits, the ones that didn’t do so well critically. A less well-known play is Remember Me, the last play written just before AIDS became the big thing. My director wants to do it again. It’s a play about a gay couple, and it’s very interesting. A few months after I wrote that play, AIDS came about. It is remarkably prescient. There’s a lot about the danger of making love to anyone at any time. The reviews were some of the worst I’d ever had in my life! It was a conversation piece, and the critics just weren’t expecting that from me, because that’s not what my work usually is.
MH: What are your thoughts on the fight for gay marriage?
MT: I’m against marriage generally. What’s lovely about the idea of it is having the right to do something if you wish to. But I don’t think men are faithful. If they get married, they have to accept being in a cage.
MH: So it should just be lesbians who get married?
MT: Well, lesbians are more faithful. It’s a cliché, but a true one.
Matthew Hays teaches journalism and film studies at Concordia University in Montréal.
