"Writing for Queer as Folk was the best job I ever had" photo: Courtesy Factory Theatre

So last week I asked Brad if the rumours are true.

"No - that's a popular myth!" Brad laughed. "Yeah, I had my fun. But once I got my public profile, you never know who's out there. [Starfuckers] can get kind of creepy."

Ah, yes, starfuckers. Brad's literary hero growing up, the legendary Felice Picano, once jokingly told me, "I don't mind starfuckers. If people stop me in the street and ask if I'm Felice Picano, I'll ask them 'What's in it for me?'"

But why "bad boy" Brad?

Well, take the time Brad walked along Ste-Catherine St. from the downtown Montreal Black & Blue circuit party - that was the year 3,500 hot boys paid $14 per head (!) to attend B&B at Métropolis in 1992 - all the way to the Village wearing nothing but a jockstrap and army boots.

"I'd never been so high in my life and ended up [leaving] with four guys," Brad recalls. "When I came to [my hotel room] in the morning, I was naked on the bed. There was this giant bottle of lube and it's empty and I'm like, 'What the fuck did I do?' I'm sore all over and I thought, 'Well, I'm in Montreal, no one will know!' A year later, a New York Times reporter was interviewing me and said, 'I saw you dancing on a speaker at Black & Blue last year!'"

Brad continues, "That's why I love Montreal. I have nothing but those [kinds of] stories."

The Edmonton native famously burst onto the theatre scene with his internationally acclaimed play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, which premiered at the Alberta Theatre Projects PlayRites Festival back in 1989.

Twenty years later, Unidentified Human Remains has just wrapped up a run in Vancouver, while the musical adaptation of Fraser's play Wolfboy (its 1984 Toronto production introduced Keanu Reeves to the world) has just finished in Edinburgh. Brad calls David McMillan, the character who drives the narrative in both of those plays and returns in Fraser's much-anticipated new play True Love Lies, his "literary doppelganger."

True Love Lies premiered in Manchester last February to great acclaim ("It's a comedy with a lot of heart," Brad says), and Fraser is directing its North American debut next week at Toronto's Factory Theatre.

But true to form, Brad doesn't have a problem biting the hand that feeds him - in this case, the theatre world in general - reinforcing Brad's old "bad boy" image.

That's because we discuss what famed NYC playwright Sarah Schulman told me last November, that "theatre is [actually] the most conservative art form in America. The real problem isn't conservatives, it's mostly liberals - they are our cultural gatekeepers. Even though they see themselves as progressive, because of their fear [of conservatives], they are reinforcing the dominant culture. This happened during McCarthyism as well."

Then, this past April, when I did an Hour cover story on Bryden MacDonald's play With Bated Breath, Bryden told me, "I don't know if it's the nudity or the queer subject matter, but if you look at mainstream theatres across the country [these days], our stories are not being presented."

Brad couldn't agree more.

"Sarah and Bryden are brilliant people and what they say is absolutely true," Fraser says. "If Unidentified Human Remains was written today, it would not be produced. With True Love Lies, some people didn't want to produce it because [the play says] it's just as good to be gay as it is to be straight. People I know and care for had problems with that! My first response was, 'So what? Why not put forward a challenging proposition?'"

In this climate, Brad's fuck-you attitude has, ultimately, served him well, a brand as iconic as Chanel.

"When Unidentified Human Remains was huge [it was picked as one of the Top 10 plays of 1992 by Time Magazine], I literally didn't give a fuck then. As far as I was concerned I had AIDS - everybody had AIDS! I lived my life like I was going to die tomorrow. It was one of the freest, least conflicted times in my life."

But Brad is 50 now. "When I turned 40 I stopped going to gay bars, drinking and fucking around every night of the week."

Then he got spinal stenosis. "I was in excruciating pain and was miserable for three years. Nothing will make you feel more middle-aged than going into the medical system. I was taking pills like candy and not wanting people to know that I was sick."

There were operations and Fraser got better. And with True Love Lies, Brad is living proof you can't keep a good bitch down.

"And I'm working out again!" Brad says happily. "Fifty is fucking fantastic! And I'm having better sex now than I ever have!"

Essential buttplugs True Love Lies runs Oct. 1 to Nov. 1 at Toronto's Factory Theatre. Surf to www.factorytheatre.ca.

Also, on Sept. 28, fab Montreal writers Daniel Allen Cox, Christopher DiRaddo and Mark Ambrose Harris will read their stories at the Montreal launch of the anthology I Like It Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire (Arsenal Pulp Press), at Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent) at 7 p.m.
 
 

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