[REVIEW] Coal from Hades, Nuit Rose

[rfmcdonald]

I learned of the existence of Les Mouches Fantastiques, a zine published in Montréal between 1918 and 1920 that was about as out and proud as a zine could be at that time, via a column last year by Daily Xtra's historian Michael Lyons.

In the autumn of 1917, a young woman named Elsie Alice Gidlow (later known as Elsa) was living with her large family in Montreal. She made a meagre living doing office work but longed for travel and the bohemian life. She published a letter in the Montreal Daily Star under a pseudonym, asking if there were any organizations of artists or writers in the city. A second letter published under her own name appeared a couple of weeks later, suggesting that the original inquirer (herself) and others interested should meet at her apartment.

Only a few among the motley crew had any real promise. Most of the men who showed up were middle-aged and looking to pick up, given the female name signed with the second letter, and left disappointed. The only man who really stood out to Gidlow was the “most astonishing, elegant being . . . a beautiful, willowy blond” named Roswell George Mills, a financial-page editor at the Star who also wrote a pseudonymous female advice column — possibly Jessie Roberts’s What Girls May Do.

Mills was unabashedly, flamboyantly homosexual. “Roswell confided his personal crusade to me,” Gidlow wrote in her autobiography. “He wanted people to understand that it was beautiful, not evil, to love others of one’s own sex and make love with them. Roswell had divined my lesbian temperament and was happy to proselytize; the veil of self-ignorance began to lift.” Mills introduced her to the work of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Verlaine and modern psychologists who described homosexuality in more concrete medical — rather than condemnatory moralistic — terms. She built on his reading list and began to find her own authors to venerate. He nicknamed her Sappho, and they became lifelong friends.

Early in their writing careers, Gidlow and Mills were very involved in the amateur journalist community in North America, a loose network of organizations and self-publishers. Canada was well into a bloody war, which Mills had escaped as a 4F — “physically, mentally, emotionally and morally incompetent for the glory of killing,” he said — and this, along with their sexual radicalism and their weakening tolerance for Christian patriarchy, coalesced into Les Mouches Fantastiques (originally titled Coal from Hades).

The publication consisted mostly of poetry by Gidlow about women, with translations, allegorical stories, dramatic writing and “articles on ‘the intermediate sex’” by Mills, as well as contributions that satirized society or panned the ongoing war. Gidlow assumed the publication went out to only a hundred of their fellow underground writers, but she eventually received a letter from a woman in Havana who was impressed with the work. [Graeme Davis, a] priest and writer from South Dakota read Les Mouches, fell in love with Mills and moved to Montreal in the hopes of being with him.

There is a fair bit about Elsie Gidlow, a pioneering lesbian writer who made her life and loves in the United States. The author who got her start in Les Mouches Fantastiques with her poem "To Regina" achieved some kind of fulfillment.



There is rather less known about Roswell George Mills. We know some of his relationships, we know that he spent part of his life in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis and that he spent most of his life in New York City as a freelance journalist, but we know little of Mills' interior life. We know surprisingly little about the man who may well be the first out gay man in Canada.

Mills' life, and that of his lover Davis, was brought to life for Nuit Rose by Jeffrey Canton and Marcus Peterson in the cellar of Glad Day Bookshop on Yonge. In Coals of Hades, Canton as Davis and Peterson as Mills enacted an imaginary exchange of letters between the two in the early 1940s before the United States got involved in the Second World War. They remember their life together in Montréal, they talked about their very experiences as gay men--Davis the older, Mills the more cosmopolitan--and each wonders what went wrong. How did the promise of Les Mouches Fantastiques, the printed imagining of the possibility that being gay was not wrong, fail to come about?

Canton and Peterson's performances were good, one character's letter smoothly following another. Coal from Hades had been presented before at the Toronto Storytellling Festival, but the two men are clearly practiced and skilled performers. The story that they told together was a powerful one, one that has preoccupied me a bit over the past month. Why did it take so long for gay rights to take off as a movement? Was there any hope? Could the bravery of Les Mouches Fantastiques have seen some fulfillment earlier in the 20th century? Coal from Hades has made me think a lot about the issues it explores, and I'm grateful to it for that.