QUILLBLOG

R.I.P. Scott Symons, 1933-2009

Author Scott Symons died Monday at the age of 75. He was best known for his debut novel, Place d’Armes. Originally published in 1967 by McClelland & Stewart, the novel is remembered for its groundbreaking gay themes and experimental style – and for the circumstances of Symon’s life. From a 1998 Q&Q profile of Symons:

“I had to bear witness to the time I was living in,” he says now. For him that meant writing Place d’Armes, a novel featuring a stream-of-consciousness narrative and, among other things, trysting male prostitutes and an acid scorn for what he saw as an oppressively staid Anglo-Canadian society.

By the time McClelland & Stewart published the book in 1967, Symons, then in his early 30s, had left his wife and their young son and gone to Mexico with his 17-year-old male lover. They were soon on the run, pursued by the Mexican police at the instigation of their families (Symons maintains he was also wanted as the author of a “pornographic novel”).

Symons had been living in Canada since 2000 after a long stay in Morocco, and Insomniac Press reissued Place d’Armes in 2006. Insomniac publisher Mike O’Connor could not be reached for comment on Monday. Another publisher who knew Symons, Cormorant Books owner Marc Côté, admits that the author’s legacy “will be more for the life he lived than the the work he produced,” though Côté adds, “At a time when Toronto was still stiff and very narrow in its focus, he blew the doors open…. He deserves a lot of credit because in the late 1960s, before Pearson and Trudeau legalized homosexuality, he came bounding out of the closet.”

Comments are closed.