That spring I made my stage debut as Gollum. You came to opening night but Clyde and Wole managed all three nights of the run, even taking me out once afterwards to their “favourite gay trattoria” downtown where they bought me a flute of champagne to celebrate. They were thrilled to have a little budding theatre fag in their midst — not that they would have ever called me that to my face, of course. They started taking me out to see shows with them at the Ottawa Fringe Festival, dance recitals of former colleagues of Clyde’s, even the odd ballet at the National Arts Centre, though I always got the sense the latter was a bit out of their price range. Wole once asked me if you might be willing to go halves on my ticket with them. On another occasion, Clyde mentioned offhandedly that he used to get free tickets from time to time, but “not since the new administration.”

The next year, when it was announced the school play would be The Enchantment of Beauty and the Beast, they encouraged me to try out for both of the titular roles. I even met with Clyde after school at a Starbucks downtown where he coached me through my audition song, which I sang for him sotto voce in the hallway leading to the washrooms. When I found out I had landed the role of the Beast, I called him from the school’s lobby pay phone. Ana was palpably crushed not to have been cast as Beauty but later threw herself so completely into her portrayal of the Clock as to upstage everyone. The production turned out to be a seventies-styled adaptation in which I wore Gene Simmons–style KISS makeup and stuck out my tongue a lot. The next year I landed the role of Oberon, opposite Ana’s Titania, in a more traditional rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By the third and final night of playing the king of the faeries, I had more or less decided I would be coming out in high school the first chance I got.

Clyde once joked he was my “gateway drug” to a life in the arts, to which you offered up a pained smile. Did it ever occur to him that he was everything you never wanted me to become? A poor gay artist with unrealized ambitions? And if so, was he wounded by this? You would never have admitted this aloud, but I know a part of you saw Art as being linked to some inexorable corruption of the Self. Not that you would have ever used the word corruption. Or perversion. Or deviation.