Berto_Tony_201307_PhD .pdf - University of Guelph

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conflate his artistic sensibility with being gay, which is then further conflated with
paraphilic desires. In a sense her description calls on and melds two historical constructions
of homosexual men, the Wildean model and the “dangerous” paradigm of the four Ds.
Peter Birnie (of The Vancouver Sun) describes the play as profoundly homocentric
and proposes that the characters’ lack of women in their lives lies at root of their problems.
He refers to characters who suffer “almost to a man” from “absence of wife or mother or
the girlfriend they never had” (Birnie, Shooting). While he identifies Elliot’s “linking his
recently dead mother to a trumpeter swan,” his expansion on this theme propagates an
understanding that heteronormative pairings would solve these characters’ (and perhaps by
extension, all gay men’s) problems. Yet there is no evidence that any character other than
Elliot is without a mother. And nothing appears to be preventing any of the characters from
gaining a girlfriend or wife, other than their sexual orientation. His proposal appears thus a
veiled plea for all men to embrace heteronormative relationships regardless of their
orientation. He does not explain how the presence of “wife or mother or the girlfriend”
could possibly benefit each character or make them suffer less. Birnie also claims the
playwright to have “been all over the gay scene” because of the wide range of character
types seen in the play’s dramatis personae. His comments imply a connection between the
subject of the play and the playwright’s personal life, and sexual history. “All over the gay
scene” may be intended to merely indicate experience in a general gay social group, but has
resonances that imply promiscuity. The comment suggests a correlation between creating a
range of gay characters (and perhaps non-stereotypical ones) and direct experience, as if
imagination is not a factor in MacLennan’s creative process. This reasoning not only limits