Labour of Love: Boys Like Us Trilogy, #3

By Doug Wilson

Boys Like Us Trilogy, Book 3 – Sometimes the muse has the last word. Peter McGehee's acclaimed two novels, Boys Like Us and Sweetheart, introduced us to Zero MacNoo and his wonderfully zany circle of friends, family, lovers, and ex-lovers as they struggle to get through life (and death) in the age of AIDS. Peter McGehee died shortly after finishing the manuscript of Sweetheart. But Doug Wilson, his long-time lover, companion, editor and, yes, muse, carries on in Labour of Love for a final installment of the remarkable trilogy.

 

Labour of Love is a testimony to living bravely. Wilson uncannily matches much of McGehee's light-hearted, but not shallow, tone and temperament. Though primarily a romantic farce, it is as wise, and a little darker, than the first installments. It covers the adventures of dying lovers, anti-gay-bashing demonstrations in the streets of Toronto, the obnoxious attentions of Zero's Arkansas kinfolk, tumbles in the sack, triumphs of a drag queen in a courtroom, and wild cross-border journeys (such as in a "borrowed" courier van driven by a competent and lusty lesbian pal).

 

Labour of Love is the title, and the achievement, of Wilson's first and final novel; it, too, was published posthumously. This new edition is accompanied by introductions from Dr Raymond-Jean Frontain and long-time friend and fellow-artist Jeffrey Canton.

 

"A genuinely delightful gay domestic comedy so full of tangy dialogue and wacky situations that it screams for the stage or, better yet, the screen." – Booklist

"Labour of Love is more a testimony to living bravely than a cry of despair. Wilson uncannily matches much of McGehee's light-hearted, but not shallow, tone and temperament." — Stan Persky

"Accomplishes what may seem impossible: a humorous romp in the face of widespread death." – Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReQueered Tales
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951092757

Book preview

LABOUR OF LOVE

by Doug Wilson

based on characters created by Peter McGehee

Foreword by Dr Raymond-Jean Frontain

Introduction by Jeffrey Canton

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ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2022

Labour of Love

Boys Like Us Trilogy, Book 3

by Doug Wilson

Copyright © 1993 by Doug Wilson.

Foreword: copyright © 2022 by Dr Raymond-Jean Frontain.

Introduction: copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Canton.

Photo Doug Wilson: courtesy Maggie Leighton.

Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs

First American edition: 1993

This edition: ReQueered Tales, September 2022

ReQueered Tales version 1.26

Kindle edition ASIN: B0BFNYXLW5

Epub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-75-7

Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-76-4

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By DOUG WILSON

Labour of Love (1993)

By PETER MCGEHEE

Beyond Happiness (1985)

Boys Like Us (1991)

The I.Q. Zoo (1991)

Sweetheart (1992)

Critical Praise for Boys Like Us Trilogy

An utterly delightful book. I enjoyed every word of it!

— Quentin Crisp

A genuinely delightful gay domestic comedy so full of tangy dialogue and wacky situations that it screams for the stage or, better yet, the screen.

— Booklist

"… a gem of a novel. Boys Like Us is funny, sexy, tender, and touching – often in the same sentence."

— Larry Duplechan

"As it celebrates the strength and staying power of gay friendships, Peter McGehee’s Boys Like Us goes out of its way to show you a good time – and you won’t hate yourself in the morning."

— New York Native

"Boys Like Us is an affable, enjoyable story … McGehee has the ability, through an ingratiating style and witty observations, to transform Zero’s everyday life into something we care about."

— Michael Bronski

Accomplishes what may seem impossible: a humorous romp in the face of widespread death.

— Library Journal

"Peter McGehee has a deceptively light touch. Boys Like Us pulls us into a world we recognize instantly and travel through effortlessly. The surprise is how well McGehee uses the ordinary details of our daily lives to evoke the demons we all struggle with: sex and love, friendship and family, life and death."

— Helen Eisenbach

"Labour of Love is more a testimony to living bravely than a cry of despair. Wilson uncannily matches much of McGehee’s light-hearted, but not shallow, tone and temperament."

— Stan Persky

Doug-Wilson-1500px

DOUG WILSON

Doug Wilson (1950-1992) was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. He first gained prominence in September 1975 in a fight for gay rights at the University of Saskatchewan. The dean of the University’s College of Education refused to allow Wilson, a postgraduate student in the Department of Educational Foundations, to go into the school system to supervise practice teachers because of his public involvement with the gay liberation movement. Although qualified to do the job, Wilson was disqualified solely on the basis of his sexual orientation. When the decision was upheld by the president of the University of Saskatchewan, the Committee to Support Doug Wilson was formed and generated much support for him across Canada. His appeal to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission was ultimately unsuccessful, and by 1976 Wilson and the Committee had abandoned the case.

Wilson subsequently launched Stumblejumper Press in 1977, a small press publishing works by Canadian lesbians and gay men; served from 1978 to 1983 as executive director of the Saskatchewan Association on Human Rights; acted as an advisor in the Toronto Board of Education’s Race Relations and Equal Opportunity Office; co-founded the Rites Collective, publishers of the newsmagazine Rites: For Lesbian and Gay Liberation, in 1984; and stood for Parliament as an NDP candidate for the Toronto riding of Rosedale.

Wilson met American singer, songwriter, and writer Peter McGehee at an event in San Francisco in 1978 and became life-long partners. McGehee followed Wilson to Saskatchewan; the couple later settled in Toronto. Wilson spent the rest of his life as an indefatigable AIDS activist, co-founded AIDS Action Now! in 1988, and served as founding chairperson of the Canadian Network of Organizations for People Living With AIDS.

McGehee was the author of Boys Like Us, a tragicomic novel tracing a group of gay male Toronto friends during the AIDS crisis; McGehee succumbed to the disease in 1991. During his own illness Wilson edited McGehee’s posthumous novel Sweetheart (1992), and one month before his death completed his first novel (based on McGehee’s notes), Labour of Love (1993), the third volume of the Boys Like Us trilogy.

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LABOUR OF LOVE

by Doug Wilson

The Camaraderie of the Front Lines

I lose people. Friends, family, lovers. Sometimes they come back; sometimes not, Zero MacNoo reflects in the opening lines of Boys Like Us, sounding one of the most haunting notes heard in gay letters at the height of the AIDS pandemic. And in that bittersweet qualification (sometimes … sometimes not), author Peter McGehee gives witness to the ambivalent hope that characterizes the two novels that he lived to complete of a planned trilogy that valiantly hold out the possibility of renewal even in the face of the most excruciating loss.

It is difficult to imagine what kind of writer McGehee would have been had he not been caught in the maelstrom of AIDS. His earlier works, while promising, did not yet reach the heights of comic madness nor pathos of his later work. Beyond Happiness: The Intimate Memoirs of Billy Lee Belle (1985) is a series of vignettes about growing up in the homophobic, hypocritical, religious fundamentalist wilds of McGehee’s native Arkansas that he performed as a one-man show in gay venues across Canada and in New York City. Even while anticipating some of the comic outrageousness of the Zero MacNoo novels, Beyond Happiness was eclipsed by the horde of other coming-out stories written in the wake of Stonewall. Conversely, the short stories collected in The I. Q. Zoo (1991) – nearly all of which had first been published in magazines and anthologies in the 1980s – treat the pain of adolescence, or of a gay adult living in a homophobic environment, but generally lack the emotional depth and singularity of voice he found in later work that allowed him to transcend melodrama.

Only in Boys Like Us (1991) and Sweetheart (1992) did McGehee find an authentic voice and a significant purpose. In their mix of heartbreaking pathos and wry comedy the novels allow the reader to confront the tragedy of so many lives lost to AIDS without being overwhelmed by that loss; they encourage the reader to find a way to cherish life and to go on loving (to fight back with nothing but affection, in Zero’s words). Much of the novels’ effect is accomplished through the shrewd maneuver of juxtaposing Zero and his family of friends in Toronto who share the camaraderie of the front lines in the battle against AIDS, with his narrow-minded, self-indulgent birth family in Little Rock, Arkansas. McGehee’s extraordinary success in balancing between pathos and comedy is highlighted by the radical change in tone and narrative pace that occurs after Peter’s lover, the gay political activist Doug Wilson, worked from Peter’s notes to complete the trilogy in Labour of Love (1993) following Peter’s death. In the final novel, Zero and his Toronto comrades risk sinking into mordant self-pity, while Zero’s family in Arkansas is denied any redemptive qualities whatsoever. As David (who succeeds Zero as narrator in Labour) observes, In my view, Zero was very kind to them [his family in Arkansas] in his writing. For the most part, they really are just a bunch of greedy, mean-spirited drunks, and he transformed them into crazy, interesting characters. They should be forever grateful, because without his tales they’re a dull and disagreeable lot.

In Wilson’s defense, one may wonder how McGehee himself might have held out the hope of comic redemption in the final novel as the effects on the gay community of the AIDS pandemic became more apparent. The strain to find the strength to carry on against increasingly overwhelming odds intensifies across the three novels. In Boys, Zero and his friends go about their daily affairs and negotiate personal crises as they care for Zero’s former lover, Randy, who, as the novel opens, has recently been released from the hospital following a bout of pneumonia. By end of the first novel, Randy, an actor, is well enough to leave town to make a movie, allowing the reader to skirt the threat of AIDS and feel that the impending danger’s been averted. But as Sweetheart opens, the reader learns that not only did Randy die of AIDS complications shortly after completing his movie, but that Zero, Zero’s former lover David, and Zero’s current lover Jeff have all been diagnosed as HIV-positive. The comic goings-on in Sweetheart are undercut by anxiety about falling T-cell counts and anger at the medical establishment’s lack of knowledge about HIV and the government’s indifference to the rising gay death toll. Sweetheart climaxes as Zero attends the assisted suicide of his cousin and boyhood lover, who’d gone on to become a gay porn star, and who is in the final stages of an AIDS-related illness.

The increasingly fragile raft of humor is finally swamped by the torrent unleashed by AIDS in the concluding volume of the trilogy. As Labour of Love opens, the reader learns that Jeff is now dead and that Zero has moved back in with his former lover, David, so that they may support one another as their health continues to decline. Drawing upon the metaphor advanced in the 1991 novel Spontaneous Combustion by David Feinberg (According to Ray Bradbury, books undergo spontaneous combustion at Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps humans do at a lower temperature, I thought, given the AIDS crisis), characters are mysteriously no longer there, as though suddenly evaporated or disintegrated. (Jeff, for example, dies in a flash of light and billow of smoke while sitting playing the piano.) Having assumed control of the narrative after McGehee’s death, Wilson is able to memorialize the actual circumstances of McGehee’s own death from AIDS-related toxoplasmosis under the guise of narrating the death of Zero. The trilogy anticipates that David himself does not have long to live, which proved only too true: much as McGehee died shortly after submitting Sweetheart to his editor at St. Martin’s Press, Wilson did not live to see Labour of Love in print.

I lose people. Friends, family, lovers. Sometimes they come back; sometimes not. The Boys Like Us Trilogy constitutes a bittersweet celebration of the comrades who fought on the front lines against AIDS, in particular their ability to appreciate what has been found even in the midst of so much loss. Zero articulates the paradox in Sweetheart: I’ve never felt more alive than I’ve felt in this last year. I don’t know if it’s age or AIDS, but something in me is just burning. Loss permits reinvention, making for the kaleidoscopic movement of the plot. Searcy loses his drag club, but finds a career in local politics. Zero’s father disappears into the fog of bipolar disorder, yet periodically reappears when needed by his children, most crucially when he summons Stellrita to restore order following the infamous MacNoo Family Capital Hotel Shoot-out. Lance seems to have been forgotten when Zero must hurriedly return to Toronto after receiving word of Randy’s death, only to be rediscovered as Stellrita’s grandson and David’s new lover. Female impersonator Jesus de Las Vegas not only artfully transitions from Carol Channing to Marilyn Monroe while performing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend on stage, but reappears so many times in the most unexpected fashion in the course of the novels that he might be a gay Houdini, refashioning himself chameleon-like in order to survive. And although Zero’s cousin and boyhood lover seemed to disappear entirely from Zero’s life when Trebreh found his escape from Arkansas (where nobody smart stays), he is perpetually on the verge of reappearing, only to actually do so just before he dies. In similar fashion, in Labour, David – who’d lost Zero to another lover years earlier – reunites with him only to lose him again to AIDS.

In the face of crippling loss, one perseveres for as long as one can, supported by one’s comrades on the front line. Sweetheart closes with the image of Zero and Jeff dancing in the moonlight, an image that Wilson repeats in Labour of Love. Laboring under what was at the time the death threat of AIDS, such perfect moments may grow fewer and further between as the illness progresses. But in McGehee’s and Wilson’s world, one savors the dance as long as one can.

Dr Raymond-Jean Frontain

June, 2022

Raymond-Jean Frontain is an independent scholar who has published eight books and over 100 scholarly articles on the Bible as literature, gay literature, Renaissance poetry, the Indian novel, and modern drama. His most recent publication is Conversations with Terrence McNally, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.

Introduction

I remember well the first time I met Doug Wilson – it was the fall of 1990 and I was doing an interview with his partner Peter McGehee at their apartment on Maitland Street in Toronto’s Gay Village just before the launch of an exciting anthology of new voices in Canlit, Canadian Brash. Even more exciting was that in early 1991, Peter was launching two books – a volume of short stories, The I.Q. Zoo, published by Coteau Books, and, even more exciting, HarperCollins was publishing the first book in a projected trilogy about Toronto’s queer community and the way it was dealing with the AIDS crisis, Boys Like Us. I was doing a cover story for Xtra! and the boys were pretty pumped about Peter’s writing career taking off. Doug had published Peter’s Beyond Happiness: The Intimate Memoirs of Billy Lee Belle, through his micro press, Stubblejumper Press, but this was Peter’s entree into mainstream Canlit! I didn’t know much about Peter or Doug but that afternoon, I entered a magical world that’s enriched my life ever since.

There was a delicious Southern charm about Peter – he had the most delightful Arkansas twang and an absolutely beguiling personality – but it was so clear that Doug wasn’t just his partner. That afternoon, I discovered that he was Peter’s muse, first reader, editor and collaborator. Star-crossed love at first sight lead to an amazing partnership where Doug nurtured Pete’s literary gifts and Peter stood behind Doug’s work as a publisher – he was one of the founders Rites: for lesbian ad gay liberation; and his community activism – Doug was the first openly gay candidate to stand for a major political party and one of the founders of AIDS Action Now!

I didn’t know when I walked through their door that Peter and Doug were both HIV positive and that Pete was racing against time to finish the second book in his trilogy. But most importantly I learned that Doug was Pete’s rock – that was made perfectly clear to me. Doug made sure that I didn’t tire Peter out, gave me all the background on Peter’s creative life before Boys Like Us and The I.Q. Zoo. I also left their home that day with a signed copy of Beyond Happiness: The Intimate Memoirs of Billy Lee Belle, Peter’s novella, which he had published in 1985 and which Coteau would re-issue in 1993.

And we became friends, Doug and I, a friendship based on my admiration and attempts to get the word out there about Pete’s marvellous writing. And I embraced that challenge – it was a joy to help spread the word.

I saw the boys at Pride and once that last summer I had dinner with them but it was all too clear that Peter was failing and, while he finished Sweetheart the summer of 1991, he didn’t live to see it published. Doug very quietly decided to pick up where Peter left off and finish the trilogy.

Early on in 1992, he called and asked me to read the book as it slowly began taking shape – Peter had a left only a few scribbled notes about the third book on a page of loose-leaf paper, five or six bullet points in total so, if Doug was going to continue the work that his partner-in-love-and-literature had started, he was really on his own.

It’s key to remember that he’d lived with and was part of the inspiration of Peter’s world so he grandly went his own way knowing it would be just right. It had to be just right. It was that world that they’d built together and he was going to do Pete proud.

Every few weeks I read a little bit more until he went to Saskatchewan during that summer of 1992 to finish the book. I remember his calling me some time at the beginning of August to come read the hand-written manuscript of Labour of Love. I sat on the couch in their living room on Maitland, Doug puttering around behind me as I laughed and cried as I followed Doug’s story and I knew he’d created something that meshed perfectly with Peter’s vision and Doug’s unique voice.

Doug had a lot to get done that fall – launching Sweetheart at the 519 and finding a publisher for Labour. He also asked me to be his literary executor should he die before he received news whether the book had found a home. I was at Sunnybrook with him the night before his death, part of the care team that his friends had formed to take care of him, reading him poems by his friend Patrick Lane.

Getting the book published became a more complex affair than either Doug or I expected. Pete’s Canadian publisher, HarperCollins decided that as much as they admired Pete’s writing, with neither Peter or Doug alive to promote it, they weren’t interested in publishing the final volume of the trilogy.

But Peter’s agent Norman Laurila and St Martin’s Press editor extraordinaire Michael Denneny embraced Doug’s book and Labour of Love was finally published in 1993 and launched at the 519. As Stan Persky wrote in his Globe and Mail review, Labour of Love is more a testimony to living bravely than a cry of despair. Thirty years later, like Boys Like Us and Sweetheart, Labour of Love is as powerfully poignant and potent to me as it was on that late summer afternoon in 1992 when I first read the finished book. Bringing these three books back into print, brings Peter and Doug back too – their love, their laughter, the devastating world that was AIDS in the 90s – it really was the best and worst of times. But I’m real glad to see ’em again and can’t wait for you to meet ’em too!

Jeffrey Canton

August, 2022

Jeffrey Canton’s diverse background in arts, academics, activism and books includes lecturing at York University, more than three decades of professional storytelling and writing and reviewing in national publications including Xtra!, Books in Canada and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Nancy Wilson, Gail van Varseveld,

Bruce Martin, Jeanette Lavigne, Darien Taylor,

and Elizabeth Philips, the first readers of the work;

to Jeffrey for his constant confidence in this dream;

and to all of the loved ones, everywhere,

who have seen me through this terrible and wonderful time.

Thanks also to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Colony for retreat time.

Author’s Note

Peter McGehee, my lover and longtime companion, died from complications related to AIDS in September 1991. His novel Boys Like Us had appeared earlier that year. The second book of what he had always envisioned as a trilogy, Sweetheart, was in the publishing process when he died. It was released in the spring of 1992.

Shortly after Peter’s death, I discovered a brief note outlining the time period of an unnamed third novel – a novel he would never write.

As editor of all Peter’s published work, his literary executor, and his creative collaborator for more than twelve years, I have undertaken to write that third book. Finish the trilogy he dreamed of. Complete the circle.

To do so, I have used many of the characters developed in the first two books. And have added others. I have also shifted the narrative voice. Zero MacNoo’s longtime friend and companion, David, takes up the tale.

Labour of Love, like the other two novels, may be read independently, in sequence, or out of sequence, with its companion titles.

PERFORMING WITHOUT A NET

I t’s seven in the morning. I hear the first sounds of activity upstairs.

He’s been getting up earlier and earlier, since Jeff died. Since his own health really started to slide. Since he started the second novel.

He begins tapping at his laptop. I finish my crossword, then put on the coffee. Five minutes later, two steaming mugs in hand, I slowly climb the stairs to his flat. Zero, I call, you ready for java?

Come on in, he says. Don’t leave the door open. I find it chilly in here lately. I’ll have to speak to the landlord.

I am your landlord.

Precisely, he replies, grinning weakly. He’s sprawled in front of his desk in his robe, unshaven, unshowered. He doesn’t look well.

Bad night?

Yeah, high fever again. Headache. How about you?

I groan. I was up most of the night with this damn diarrhea. I’m wasted. No wonder cryptosporidium is often fatal. I’ve lost fifty pounds over the course of a year and a half. It’s too much and I just can’t stop it. It’s like my body is eating itself. I’m disappearing.

He rummages among the papers on his desk. Well, there’s something here in Project Inform you might want to show to Dr. Fieldstone when you’re out to the hospital next. It’s called Humatin and they say it’s worked against crypto for some people. Very experimental, though.

I take the newsletter. Thanks. I turn to go. I know his work pattern. Several hours of solid writing first thing every morning. Except for this coffee.

David, can you sit down with me for a while?

"Sure,