Club Friday Q&A: A Playwright and Podcaster on Resurrecting Queer History
By Stacy lee kong
Image: Courtesy of Dane Stewart
On a summer day seven years ago, a friend gave playwright and artist Dane Stewart the perfect gift—for him, anyway. It was the script for a play by Daryl Allen, an unknown playwright who had died of AIDS in 1991. The script (and perhaps more importantly, Allen himself) sparked inspiration for Stewart, whose artistic approach has often been focused on telling ordinary queer people’s stories. He spent the next five years researching what would become Resurrection, an eight-episode podcast that delves into queer history through the hyper-specific lens of one man’s life. Ahead of World AIDS Day and what would have been Allen’s 85th birthday (November 29), Stewart and I discussed the artistic and historical value of an ordinary life, the ethics of representation and why Daryl’s story is particularly important right now. Read on for our chat.
How did you come across Daryl’s story?
It started in a gay bar in Montreal in August 2016. I had just marched in my very first Pride Parade and I was out at the Black Eagle, a gay leather bar here, having a beer with my friends. I ended up meeting this older gay man named Dan Wiley. We got along great and became acquaintances—we saw each other around the city over the next year, and he came to see a play that I had written and directed, which was based on queer people and ordinary queer stories. Afterwards, he contacted me and wanted to meet to give me something. He and Dan dated almost 40 years earlier in San Francisco, and Daryl had left one of his scripts with Dan. It was the play he had spent the most time working on; it's called Mustang Zero-One. So after Dan saw my play, he said, ‘Look, do you want to just read this play, and see how it makes you feel, and if there's anything you want to do with it?’ And it kind of snowballed from there. Dan had also conveniently saved hundreds of pages of handwritten love letters that Daryl had sent to him over the course of their long-distance relationship. I became super intrigued with who Daryl was as a person, so I started assembling this personal archive of his materials and just piecing his life together.
That made me a little bit emotional—someone saving evidence of a lost love for decades. It's hard not to feel struck by that.
Yeah, it's really sweet. I've gotten to know Dan quite well over the years and he saves a lot of things from a lot of different relationships and people who were important to him over the course of his life. I can't know for sure why he does that, but I do think that for gay men who lived through the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and 90s, who saw all of their friends dying constantly, it might be nice to be able to exert a modicum of control over the history, and if and how these people will be remembered.
Totally. And this is not exactly the same thing, but I wonder if it could also be a reminder that the relationship was real? Like, this was a real person who really existed in the world, and Dan has this physical proof.
That is definitely related. You're kind of getting at one of the values that underpins my artistic practice, which comes back to this idea that every person, even if their life may seem ordinary, has lived extraordinary moments, and there's value in all of our lives, so it's worthwhile to dive deep into the past. That’s one reason why we spent eight episodes creating a series just on Daryl, rather than saying, ‘We're gonna retell the history of queer people in the AIDS epidemic in Canada and the U.S.’ Instead, we said, ‘No, let's tell one person's whole life story.’ Through that, you get a feel for these different historical moments, but it's all through the lens of this one complex individual.
Did you always intend to turn Daryl’s story into a podcast?
We were initially thinking of turning it into a play. I was a playwright and I wrote documentary-slash-verbatim theatre pieces based on interviews that I was doing with queer folks. During the pandemic, I was already working on the story that became Resurrection, but with the closure of theatres and [the uncertainty] about what was going to happen with the theatrical world, we thought maybe we should transform it into some sort of digital media. Podcasting just seemed like the obvious choice, since we were already recording all of these interviews and podcasting has a pretty low barrier for entry. My producer, Matt, and I had some technical skills, and it was pretty easy to self-teach the other skills we needed for the project.
When you're thinking about telling a real person's story—and especially a ‘regular’ person, or someone who’s not a public figure—how do you make sure that you're telling that story responsibly? I think a lot about this from a journalism perspective, because we’re balancing our editorial need to make someone’s story readable or listenable with the needs of an actual human being, but this situation feels potentially even more fraught because Daryl is not here. I know you've done so much careful reporting, but at the same time, he doesn't get a say in how you tell his story.
I did my MFA at Concordia, and my thesis was on the ethics of representation, and specifically on how you can ethically represent someone who's outside of your own subject position, so I've thought about this a lot. I think there are a lot of ways that you can do this. It can be achieved through very careful research, that objective journalism approach. But that's not usually my method—I prefer to integrate some sort of collaborative or feedback process into my storytelling. So, with Resurrection, we ended up working with Daryl’s ex-wife, Janet, and his ex-boyfriend, Dan, who gave me the letters in the first place. We would have them read through a draft of the script for each episode before we went into production, and if there was anything where they said, ‘We feel like Daryl wouldn't want this told,’ or ‘We feel like if he would want this context added,’ we obliged their changes. I don't think there was a single instance where they asked us to change something and we said no. That way, I think we were doing our best to take into account what Daryl himself would have wanted. There are some philosophical questions about the ethics of representation, and when it is someone who's dead, because like you said, we don't actually ever know and we can’t ask him, but I think we did our due diligence.
But you're right, you’re walking the edge between representing people in as authentic a way as possible, while also producing a story that is engaging. You want to tell the story without sensationalizing. But you still want to make it an interesting story.
The other thing that we did in the story, which you wouldn't normally see in something that's produced by an investigative journalist, is that I really inserted myself into the narrative. Rather than attempting objective journalism, it's very much like, ‘Okay, I'm here and these are my biases.’
I mean, I could talk for hours about the fallacy of objectivity! And when I was asking that question, it wasn’t necessarily about upholding journalism over other types of storytelling. I was just so fascinated at the sense of responsibility you must have felt. Switching gears a little bit, what did it mean for you personally to tell this story? Why was it so powerful?
There are a few reasons. The first thing that spoke to me was seeing emotions that Daryl experienced that paralleled things from my own life experience. The most simple example of that is shame and internalized homophobia. In reading Daryl’s letters and his theatrical scripts, it was clear that he had struggled to come to terms with his bisexuality, and [with] coming out and living authentically, despite the fact that people in his hometown, a small town in Kansas, might not understand or might fling homophobic insults at him. He worked through that throughout his whole life. I'm from a small town in Nova Scotia and I was a teenager in the early oughts, so there was still a lot of homophobia there. I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia, but especially then. So I saw the shame paralleled between us. So, I felt like, not only did I have the tools to finish what he had started, which was to share his artistic work with the world, I also thought he might be able to teach me how to deal with that shame. And the other important piece here is the historical context. I've never really taken the time to sit with the impact that HIV and AIDS had on the queer community. I was born in ‘91, so I realized I was gay after effective medical interventions for treating HIV were developed, which means I've never really had to think about it. An it's such an important part of queer history to understand what the community went through, and how that continues to impact us to this day. This felt like a good opportunity to force myself to pause and reflect.
Do you feel like Daryl helped you navigate those feelings of shame?
He did for sure. Not to make it extremely reductive, but when I started this project, I had this trouble with emotional intimacy, where whenever I got into a relationship, if the other once the other person was interested, I would just shut down and run away. And now, I just celebrated my one-year anniversary with my boyfriend. I still feel really scary emotions that make me want to run away, but instead of running, I'm like, ‘No, Dane, you have to express them!’ Caveat: this creative process is also parallel to me doing a ton of therapy. So, you know, does one do more than the other? Who knows? But why detangle them? [laughs]
Why do you think it’s so important to tell this story right now?
It comes back to this idea of sharing complex stories of people who are imperfect and messy and make mistakes and have conflicting viewpoints and conflicting things in their lives. I think if we can sit with a story for a long time and really understand the complexity of a person, we’ll be more open-minded to different policy decisions that will enable people to access the services they need. And I'm now just explicitly talking about all trans issues in Canada. So yeah—listen to the complex stories about queer and trans people, and then understand that they are more than the headline that you're reading about on Twitter.
What do you want people to take away from Resurrection?
Look, I'm gonna sound like a bit of a broken record here, but I want people to take away this idea of viewing people as complex, contradictory and messy, and that being okay. For queer people, I would also love for them to take away some of the messages that Daryl has to offer, especially in the later episodes of our show, around shame. Your life could be long and prosperous, or shorter than you thought it was gonna be, but no matter what sort of hand you've been dealt, if you can overcome your shame, really find the value in loving others and experiencing the everyday pleasures of life on this earth, there's a lot of power in that.
Listen to Resurrection at resurrectionpodcast.com, and follow the podcast (@resurrection.pod) and Dane (@dane.mtl) on Instagram.
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