Still Withstanding: Wilde About Sappho, A Personal History
Written by John Barton
After a sixteen-year run that concluded in 2007, Wilde About Sappho—Lambda’s pioneering 2SLGBTQIA+ literary gala—returned for one special afternoon on November 9, 2025 to mark Lambda Foundation’s 40th Anniversary as part of ChromaQueer, Ottawa’s new Queer Film + Arts Festival.
As one of the four authors invited to read at Lambda’s anniversary event, John Barton delivered a thoughtful, reflective—at times humours and incisive—personal history about the influence and impact of Wilde About Sappho in Ottawa, across Canada, and on the lives of those who attended and the writers who read from their works. John later read from his newest book of poetry, Compulsory Figures (Cailtlin, 2025). Below is the unabridged version of John’s speech.
Six years after its founding, the Lambda Foundation hosted the first Wilde About Sappho on November 5, 1991, in the auditorium of what is now known as Library and Archives Canada at 395 Wellington Street in downtown Ottawa.
The readers were Gabriella Goliger and Candis J. Graham, both fiction writers, cartoonist and humorist Sean Martin, and myself, a poet.
We were all local writers early on in our vocations, and, looking back, perhaps both emboldened and humbled by the auditorium’s sumptuously beige surroundings. If the National Library of Canada, as it was called then, didn’t exactly offer a note of chic or savoir-faire to this inaugural literary gala, it certainly raised the tone. While we weren’t earning our dues in a basement club suffused with cigarette smoke, we weren’t being made to read to the curious sitting next to the unwary in a church basement either.
Funds raised through ticket sales were to be put toward an awards fund for excellence in the arts, sports, social studies, and human-rights research. In 1993, before the fundraising goal shifted a few years later to scholarships for 2SLGBTQIA+ students at universities across Canada, the first award—for human rights—was conferred on Svend Robinson who five years earlier, as the NDP representative for the BC riding of Burnaby-Kingsway, was the first MP in Canadian history to come out publicly as gay while holding a seat in the House of Commons. I remember attending in 1994 the ceremony for Marie Robertson, the second human-rights award recipient; it was emceed by internationally known, Toronto-based opera singer Maureen Forrester, in front of a crowd assembled around the newly erected Human Rights Tribute on Elgin Street, with a reception in the rotunda of the Regional-Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton building, now Ottawa City Hall. We queers do like our opera divas and our canapes.
Subsequent awards were later given to author and AIDS activist Doug Wilson and activist Jim Egan. Quite apart from any money raised for these awards and the good times that I assume were enjoyed by all, the first Wilde about Sappho must have attracted an audience large enough to encourage the Foundation to recruit a second slate of writers to read for the good of the cause the following year. So began an annual fundraiser that, year building on year, stood on progressively more shapely legs and showcased an enviable list of writers before the final extravaganza was held sixteen years later in 2007.
Wilde About Sappho was the brainchild of my friend, Philip Robert, who sat on the Lambda Foundation board. We’d become friends in 1986 through our jobs with the National Museums of Canada and in the fall of that year both of us joined a gay men’s discussion group, which, led by Barry Deeprose for Pink Triangle Services (now known as Kind Space), would meet weekly at the Gays of Ottawa Centre across the road from the Bible Institute on Lisgar Street. Very soon we also began volunteering for the PTS Library Committee and in order to raise money for the library, we invited Jane Rule and Edward O. Phillips to read at a ticketed event that the Committee hosted in a University of Ottawa lecture theatre in October 1987. Rule had just published her last novel, Memory Board, and Phillips read from Buried on Sunday, the second whodunit in his award-winning series of mysteries investigated by aging gay sleuth, Geoffry Chadwick. Philip—my friend, not the author—buoyed by the success of this well-attended evening, decided four years later to see if Ottawa queers would shell out $5 tickets for another such night of queer literary bonding and intellectual cruising. It couldn’t have hurt that Philip had also won the draw for the first-edition copy of The Desert of the Heart that Rule had donated to the PTS Library Committee as a door prize.
I should admit right here that I was never a member of the Lambda Foundation, nor of Lambda, a group of queer professionals that sometime in the 1980s began meeting informally every month in a variety of hospitable venues large and small across downtown Ottawa. No one should credit me with starting Wilde About Sappho, nor should anyone conclude that I was ever one of the volunteers who took on the task of organizing any of the seventeen galas. If I had ever been successful in selling a ticket to anyone, ever, I would now go back into therapy to see if I could resurrect being so bold and apply it to other aspects of my life.
However, I can claim naming rights. Sometime in the late eighties, over a beer or a glass of wine with Philip, I would daydream about starting a locally based reading series for lesbian and gay-male authors. By then, I was starting to publish my openly queer poems in literary magazines in Canada and the United States; I’d published my first openly queer book of poetry, Hidden Structure, in 1984, and in 1990, I’d included it in a longer book called Great Men, which was later nominated for both the Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award. I had started to feel confident, even validated as a gay-male poet, and I’d hoped to find my place in and nurture a community of queer writers. What better way than to start a reading series, where same-sex-oriented writers could find an audience before whom we could hold up a mirror so they in turn could see something better and more plausible in themselves.
In order to make the series sound intriguing as well as welcoming and even safe—no one described anything as being “inclusive” back then—I combined the names of two iconic queer-identified writers: Sappho, the sixth and seventh century BCE Greek poet whom we know today only through fragments of text, and Oscar Wilde, the fin-de-siècle writer, aesthete, and epigrammist who, crushed by the polished, homophobic boot of British justice, died in 1900, barely two years after he’d been released from Reading Gaol. How darkly prophetic that Reading, pronounced as “Redding,” reads as “reading” on the page. The British hierarchy could destroy Wilde but they couldn’t ultimately stamp out everything he so archly enshrined in his poems, fiction, essays, and witticisms. That kind of immortality on its own was something any queer writer of every persuasion would want to see their name twinned and twined with. Maybe it’s the turning of the proper name “Wilde” into an adjective to suggest a species of over-the-top enthusiasm for boy-besotted Oscar’s ancient Greek, female-identified literary antecedent that has given their two names, when combined, a lasting cachet. For over three decades these paired words have never—at least to me—lost their freshness.
Importantly and maybe even strategically, it was Wilde “for” and not “against” Sappho. As gay men and lesbians, we were in this together, for one another, and today I would say that even then we were for everyone else like us whom society aimed to marginalize on the basis of gender orientation, gender expression, and gender identity. We simply didn’t have the language then, but we did have a sense of the common cause. “Wilde About Sappho” as a name has the pedigree of a successful brand identity, one that inspires positivity, enthusiasm, and even joy. That the name realized its potential truly has very little to do with me, for if Philip hadn’t asked me if he could use it to give an identity to the queer literary gala he had started to organize, Wilde About Sappho as a name would have never seen the light of day or let alone have had the good fortune to cue the lights to go down in the National Library auditorium just before the first reader took to the stage.
I can’t continue this short history without underscoring how potent the positivity that this name possessed was to the organizers and the audiences who came to hear what the writers invited to read had to say about our shared, if varied experience of being queer.
We have to recall what life was like for 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Canada in the early 1990s. Though decriminalization just over two decades before of consensual relations between two people of the same sex had long begun to make our day-to-day lives more tenable, if not any more inventive—don’t forget that three’s a crowd and theoretically still illegal—and though the provinces began enshrining sexual orientation into their human rights codes through the 1970s and 1980s, with Ontario coming late to the party with the necessary protections passed into law in late 1986 (I remember going to a reception celebrating this human-rights win at the National Arts Centre on a cold winter day in early 1987), the HIV pandemic in 1991 was cutting an ever widening, unrelenting swathe through the gay men around us, books by Little Sisters in Vancouver were routinely being seized by Canada Customs, and there were so many more rights left to win.
Wilde About Sappho by its very existence was life-affirming and an oasis; it helped to nurture community simply by bringing people together once a year and by providing a stage for an increasingly more visible and confident queer writing community that was still finding a voice—or should I say voices—that others were open to hearing and ready to move up several more pegs in the literary pantheon in this country. While, starting in 1978, Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre had begun paving the way for evenings like Wilde About Sappho, by the early 1990s endeavours with similar literary ambitions were still a rarity in Canada, especially in provincial cities like the nation’s capital. Reading in a gala named after two of the most mythic queer writers in the western canon, whose lives bracketed millennia of hidden 2SLGBTQIA+ lives, imparted to readers like myself that we were extending a tradition that had at long last come above ground and was worthy of recognition. And we felt worthy. It was from Sappho’s and Oscar Wilde’s complicated legacies that we were building forward.
I read in two more times in Wilde About Sappho—in 1998, with American novelist and activist Sarah Schulman and Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist and children’s writer, Shyam Selvadurai, and in 2007, in a Wilde About Sappho that touched down in Toronto and Montreal as well as in Ottawa to showcase poets gathered in Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, which I coedited with Billeh Nickerson and published as the first comprehensive anthology of its kind in Canada with Arsenal Pulp Press. In the off years, when I wasn’t one of the readers, I was invariably in the audience, surrounded by increasing numbers of, I presume, enraptured ticket holders whose admission was obtained by ticket sellers far more flirtatious than I am even today. Wilde About Sappho soon became the largest literary event that the National Library of Canada hosted each year after the annual Governor General’s Literary Awards gala. By its last year, it was also the National Library’s longest-running literary event. And the GG gala is, today, also long gone, with no one to my knowledge thinking of reviving it—and if they ever do so, they’ll likely stream it solely over Zoom. Being queer, 2SLGBTQIA+ people like the in-person feel of the flesh rather than of flesh adjacent or at a distance.
Philip Robert wisely stepped back after five years of organizing and the late and legendary Gary Sealey took over.
Wilde About Sappho benefited from Gary’s boundless energy, organizational acumen, and ability to inspire and cajole volunteers to get with the program as only he could see it—and the way he saw it was visionary. Wilde about Sappho became a multi-part affair, sometimes spanning the country, with panels and school visits (which were once the scariest venues for LGBTQ artists of any genre to occupy) as well as readings. Writers sometimes travelled from city to city and province to province as if they were in the Ice Capades. And the Lambda Foundation began to secure more scholarships for LGBTQ students across the country. One started at the University of Victoria, where I moved to work in 2004, and it was named in memory of Candis Graham, with whom I’d read in the first Wilde About Sappho and, if I remember correctly, it was endowed by Pat McKenna, Candis’s widow, with whom I worked, alongside Philip, as a volunteer for the PTS library committee two decades before. She and Candis had moved to Victoria in the year 2000 and Candis died unexpectedly in her sleep in 2005. The scholarship is appropriately awarded each year to a student enrolled in either undergraduate or graduate studies in UVic’s Department of Writing—the very department I’d graduated from as a closeted gay poet in 1981, and I attended the ceremony when the first Candis Graham Scholarship was distributed. Here’s the big reveal of this short speech. Philip, Pat, and I were not only queer, we were, are, and will remain librarians for life. That we shall is nature, not nurture.
I alluded to the Wilde About Sappho backlist of readers earlier and, as I said, the backlist is enviable. Where else in Canada at that time could you have, for example, heard the late trans activist, Leslie Feinberg, author of the seminal text, Stone Butch Blues? Or Jamie O’Neill, the Irish author of At Swim Two Boys? Or bought their books, with sales ably handled by David Rimmer, proprietor of Ottawa’s gay and lesbian bookstore, After Stonewall? Philip and I had both belonged to the gay men’s reading group that had met each month at David’s store, where I suspect we first encountered books by many of the authors who’d later read for Wilde About Sappho. David and the role that After Stonewall played as a meeting place and a refuge for 2SLGBTQ+ people in Ottawa are an important part of this story. Other writers of note who read in Wilde About Sappho include Sky Gilbert, Makeda Silvera, Blaine Marchand, Daphne Marlatt, Ivan Coyote, Daniel David Moses, Shani Mootoo, Persimmon Blackbridge, Emma Donohue, Michael V. Smith, Will Aitken, Camilla Gibb, Paul Russell, Dionne Brand, Helen Humphreys, and Jean-Paul Daoust.
The roster of each gala was as much a celebration of the writing published during these years as it was a reflection of the times. If Wilde About Sappho were to start up now rather than thirty-four years ago, it would populate its stage with a maximal range of gender-diverse and QTIBIPOC voices who, alongside their cis and settler peers, would dissent from the heteronormative white supremacy that still imperils what I am loath to call the national dream that has been foisted on us as Canadians, and together we would defame the heterocentrism that’s long been the scourge of the queer dream, which no one should forget is not an agenda.
It is here, with a cautionary note, that I will now conclude these remarks.
Wilde About Sappho came to an end in 2007 because like many volunteer-led endeavours, it suffered from collective burnout, not from a lack of relevance. Even though the queer community at large has now won many of the equality rights it fought for decades to secure, with continuing aspirations to spread them more fairly, we are today witnessing a worrying questioning of those rights or, more pointedly, the threat of their withdrawal from the most vulnerable among us. The move to do so is being abetted by elected officials in our national and provincial legislative assemblies, who threaten to bypass our rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by invoking the notwithstanding clause preemptively.
It’s not been many years since freedom from discrimination on the basis of gender expression and gender identity was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act and to the human rights acts in nearly every province—even the one in Alberta—but, as we all know, already there’re moves to curtail the rights of trans Canadians in various parts of the country under the spurious populist banner of parental rights. Whoever in the Edmonton Public School Board leaked the list of candidate books that could be withdrawn from school libraries were the Alberta government’s criteria for rooting out supposedly unsuitable, sexually explicit materials strictly followed, should be given the Order of Alberta, if such a thing exists, let alone the Order of Canada. That Alberta premier Danielle Smith described the list of “ban-worthy books” as exemplifying “vicious compliance” indicates just how far her pants were down when she and her government were caught out. Margaret Atwood, because of her facility with social media, also deserves some credit in getting Smith and her ilk to rethink just how low their pants should ride before they are in danger of exposing their ill-founded fears let alone their butt cracks. (Atwood’s bona fides are long-standing: in 1965 she and her fellow poet, Dennis Lee, subsidized the publication of Edward O Lacey’s The Forms of Loss, the first openly gay book of poetry to appear in print in Canada.)
While it’s important today to remind ourselves that we have long had our allies, inside the larger literary community and out, but ally-ship is not enough. Wilde About Sappho came into being because we had to stand up for ourselves, declare our stories to be significant enough to be heard and told from our own points of view (the plural here is especially important). We shamed the misnamed mainstream into reconsidering its morals and hypocrisies—and to give us a break. Sadly, we didn’t manage to convince everyone to permanently set aside their misgivings about us. Prejudice is like crotch rot, it comes back. In retrospect, it was foolhardy of us to think we could ever have been irreversibly persuasive or able to find enough available antifungal cream.
So here we are, gathered again, to celebrate our collective love of the written word and the important queer spin we bring to it that sustains us all. Queer writing in Canada has matured and become more diverse and will continue to evolve. While every queer voice may today still sometimes feel like a lonely voice to the writer speaking, that loneliness now has the self-sustaining confidence to reach out to readers and listeners like you and never again feel alone.
November 9, 2025
ChromaQueer—Arts + Film Festival
Arts Court Theatre, Ottawa
