LESBIAN & GAY WRITERS GROUP

Another of Charlie's files but getting him to put down the details is impossible so here as in other cases are the bare if somewhat hazy facts as I've extracted them. This was probably circa 1988-90, and the actual name may have been Gay & Lesbian rather than the reverse.

Charlie answered an ad in Xtra (successor to the BP) from someone wanting to start a writers group. This person dropped out soon after the first meeting so Charlie began to look after it. Eventually they decided to contact Ryerson's Gay Studies section to see about getting a writing course started there. John Hunter from Ryerson then came to a meeting and suggested John Grube who was teaching a writing course at OCA. Charlie contacted him and out of this came the Ryerson lesbian and gay writer's course.

Charlie took the the first course and a poem he wrote as part of that was published in Xtra's first Church-Wellesley Review. They even paid him twenty-five bucks and Timothy Findley said nice things in his introduction. Considering all the connections right back to Oct/71, truly a case of Charlie making his own opportunities. He has also had stories published in Storyteller and Draghead, and another story of his was included in Queeries, An Anthology of Gay Male Prose put out by Arsenal Pulp Press of Vancouver. Here's a link to his Charles Dobie: Short Stories homepage.

On his webpage Charlie dedicates his poem to the memory of Ken Hutchinson. Ken and his lover Bob Wright, both from Ottawa, were part of Guerilla and Ken would sometimes write as The Lavender Kid in its pages, circa 1970. On his website Promiscuous Affections, Rick Bebout writes in a couple of places of Ken. He also mentions hanging out at Nightingale, a favourite haunt of mine in those days. A coffee house on St. Joseph St., that gayest of streets, Nightingale shared space with Guerilla, which had its offices in the back. So Charlie, as a Guerilla photographer, was always in and out of there too. But of course we remained totally unaware of each other. There must be thousands of similar stories among Toronto gay libbers of that era. Charlie even has photographic evidence in one case involving him, myself and John Wilson, but perhaps more about that elsewhere.