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rfmcdonaldTORONTO — Controversial gay writer Scott Symons, whose scandalous life and 1967 novel "Place d'Armes" rocked Canada's literary world, has died at age 75.
The Toronto-born author passed away at a Toronto nursing home on Monday after several years of poor health, his lawyer Marian Hebb said Wednesday.
She remembered Symons as a bold personality who never shied away from strong views on politics, love and literature, at times to the detriment of his personal relationships.
Symons' cultural impact was significant despite having published only a handful of books, adds his friend and literary executor Christopher Elson.
They included "Place d'Armes," which shed light on a marginalized gay community, and "Heritage," which celebrated early Canadian furniture and was published while Symons was a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum.
"One of the terms that he used about himself would have been as a liberator of love and as a loyal Canadian and as a dissident voice in Canadian culture, standing for things that might have otherwise been forgotten or have fallen into unpopularity," Elson said from his office in Halifax, where he is a professor of Canadian studies and French at the University of King's College.
"The works of the '60s and '70s will stand as a kind of an accomplishment of an odd intersection of the Canadian Tory spirit with the hippie era and the sexual revolution. And I think that his vast diaries, only some of which have been published, will be a mine for people interested in the life of Canada in the 40-plus years that he kept diaries."
"Place d'Armes" featured a gay protagonist, a sympathetic male prostitute and an unusual stream-of-consciousness style. It was published at a time when homosexuality was still considered a crime in Canada, and followed a scandalous tryst in which Symons left his wife and young son for a 17-year-old male lover, with whom he ran away to Mexico.
I have a copy of Place d'Armes, a third- or fourth- or fifth-hand copy that I bought in Kingston, the sort that has pages and groups of pages detached from the worn binding and ready to slide loose. One of these days I should really set to reading it.
