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by Jonathan Wilson, directed by Mark McGrinder

Studio 180 with Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

March 28-April 20, 2025

Jonathan: “I’m a relic”

Jonathan Wilson’s latest play, A Public Display of Affection, is a look back at 1979, the year when the newly out Wilson fled Oshawa at age 15 to live in the big, bad city of Toronto. The play is an autobiographic account, a history of what gay life in Toronto was once like and an appraisal of what gay life in Toronto has become. Because of its perspective, both personal and historical, the show is a must-see for all Torontonians, gay and straight.

The frame for Wilson’s show is that he has been asked now that he is a “gay elder” at age 62 to speak about finding “queer joy” at a forum for gay elders. Wilson, playing himself, has hardly got used to the idea of thinking of himself as a gay elder and is not sure what the forum leaders mean when they speak of “queer joy”. He knows he is supposed to avoid the topic of past trauma, but he wonders how that is possible for anyone who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s.

After he came out to his parents, he for Toronto. There he met another teenager named Tommy who became his first boyfriend. The rooming house where they lived was presided over by Orchid, a trans man from a reserve, who acted as a mother to the two boys.

Toronto at that time was a place of both wonder and repression. It was full of wonder because of all the possibilities it provided for gay men to meet each other. It was full of repression because in 1977 a 12-year-old boy had been murder by three homosexuals. This led the police and the general public to link homosexuality and paedophilia and caused the police focus on crack down on gay activity, eventually leading to the bathhouse raids of 1981. Halloween became a time when thuggish crowds felt they were given licence to assault gays dressed for parties in clubs. Then in 1982 the first cases of AIDS were reported in Canada. Gay men noticed how it took an unconscionably long time for finding a cure for a disease that disproportionately killed men from a despised minority to become a priority.

Nevertheless, this surrounding atmosphere of hatred does not eclipse Wilson’s memories of joy and abandon. Living in the moment meant living life to the fullest while you could. Wilson notes that he could be dancing next to someone one night, only to find that person had become sick the next.

The main thing Wilson highlights that the 1970s and ’80s had that seems so lacking in Toronto now is the feeling of community. As Wilson says, a dance floor would gather young and old, Black and White, rich and poor, all celebrating together. Now, with the internet, physical meeting places have been dying out. Wilson gives a long list of the clubs, bars, restaurants and bathhouses that once were. For anyone who lived in Toronto in the 1970s and ’80s, this recital will bring on a heavy case of nostalgia. People born this century may not fully realize that meeting F2F was the norm and how that norm shaped people’s lives. A person put himself out into the real world not just a two-dimensional image. As Wilson puts it, “‘Coming out’ was one thing, ‘going in’ was more important”, “going in” meaning going to a club.

Wilson expands on the disappearance of gay meeting places to the general disappearance of landmarks in Toronto, a city, he says, that is constantly, “erasing itself”. He calls Toronto’s predilection for façadism, i.e., notion of preserving only the façade of a building while the rest is completely replaced, a type of “architectural taxidermy”. He says, “Toronto was always ugly. Now it’s just taller”. At the same time, when places important to gay history in the city are presented as landmarks, it also means they’ve lost the vitality that made them important in the first place.

Building from his personal story to the history of homosexuality in Toronto to the changes that have erased its past, Wilson inevitably reflects on ageing itself. Young gay people now have so many more possibilities and rights, so much more acceptance, so many more known out people in the real world that if two guys hold hands in a coffee shop, their public display of affection is simply ignored by everyone else. It’s not the political act that would have attracted notice 40 years ago. “Indifference, that’s what we wanted, isn’t it?” Wilson wonders.

Yet, happy as Wilson may be for young gay people today, one also senses that he thinks that one can only truly relish this indifference if one is aware of all the struggle for it that has gone before. It is this awareness of the struggle and the sacrifices that gives him any feeling “queer joy” as a gay elder. Yet, having seen repression before, he is especially sensitive to the signs of its return that appear to be increasingly prevalent. Rights won can also be taken away.

Wilson brings the gay Toronto of the 1970s and ’80s to life through his wit and supremely well chosen words. He takes on at least 15 different voices in playing characters from the past and the present which makes this solo show aurally very rich. The show is staged on a triangular platform against Denyse Karn’s backdrop of 12 computer monitors that can display everything from stills or movies of what Toronto looked like 50 years ago to montages of newspaper articles or signs, all reflecting whatever topic Wilson is discussing and enhanced by André du Toit’s wide array of lighting.

Given that Wilson is so uncomfortable with the term “gay elder”, I expected some direct discussion of ageism in the queer community. That aside, A Public Display of Affection is a public display of affection for all the friends he has lost over the years, for the feeling of community that once existed in Toronto and for the community that gathers each night to hear him tell his story.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Jonathan Wilson in A Public Display of Affection. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.