Take a journey through queer history as it was lived by one man and pieced together by another

Queeries is a column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. 

Playwright Daryl Allen's life was cut short by complications from HIV/AIDS in 1991 — which just so happens to be the same year Dane Stewart was born.

Stewart, a queer oral history enthusiast and a playwright himself, spent most of his life unaware of Allen's existence. But that would change dramatically thanks to a fateful evening at Montreal Pride seven years ago.

"I decided to march in my very first Pride parade in 2016," Stewart says. "After the parade, I went to have a drink with my friends at Montreal's leather bar, l'Aigle Noir. Riding high off the endorphins of the parade (and a few tequila shots), I ended up befriending a man at the bar. His name was Dan Wylie, he was in his early 60s, and he's the reason that this project happened."

Wylie introduced Stewart to the work of Allen, a man he had dated in the 1970s and 80s. He gave Stewart an old unproduced script of Allen's that had been written with a typewriter, thinking that perhaps Stewart could do something with it.

What neither of them expected was that this exchange would lead Stewart to a half-decade of research that would ultimately become an eight-part podcast about Allen's life.

The podcast, Resurrection, has been released weekly over the course of this summer, and it is a truly extraordinary journey through queer history as it was lived by one man (Allen) and pieced together by another (Stewart), some 30 years later.

"I started this project to help my generation understand how — whether we realize it or not — our queer communities, our sexual identities, are shaped by what Daryl went through," Stewart narrates in its first episode. "But this project has become about more than the AIDS crisis because Daryl was more than the AIDS crisis. He was a whole person."

The script that Wylie had given Stewart was for a play called Mustang Zero-One, a semi-autobiographical story about Allen's time serving in Thailand with the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War.

"While in Thailand, Daryl fell in love with a pilot — a man — and the two struggled with their feelings amidst the backdrop of the war," Stewart says.

Reading the script led Stewart to become fascinated by Allen's life, wanting to know everything he could about him. So he asked Wylie if he had anything else.

"That's when he revealed he had hundreds of pages of handwritten love letters Daryl wrote to him during the course of their relationship," Stewart says. "Daryl had been living in San Francisco, Dan in Montreal, so their relationship was long distance. He gave me the love letters and I read them all, hungrily."

"With the script and the letters, I became obsessed with Daryl Allen. I wanted to learn everything I could, and I wanted to give Daryl's artistic work the platform he never got when his life was cut short."

Using the letters, Stewart tracked down Allen's surviving family and his loved ones, travelling to Kansas and San Francisco.

"We found more of his scripts along the way," he says. "We even hired a group of professional voice actors to bring some of his theatrical work to life. It's been a long, long journey, but I feel we really honoured Daryl through this project."

Through that long, long journey, Stewart also discovered a lot about himself. 

"Despite all his struggles, Daryl still found joy in his life," he says. "He would love with a reckless abandon, always jumping in with both feet, never afraid. By the time the 80s rolled around, he lived openly as a bisexual man, always unabashedly himself. He knew he had limited time on this earth and he wasn't going to waste it trying to be something that he wasn't, just because certain people in society were going to judge him."

"If I can learn to embody just a little bit of Daryl's joy and self-assurance and ability to love, then I'll have learned some invaluable lessons from telling his story. And, I think I have, especially when it comes to love."

"I learned from Daryl that it's often worth it to push through the scary, vulnerable parts of love; not to run away, but to push through it. I try to bring that to my relationships now."

As the podcast's final episode makes its way out in to the world, Stewart hopes that its audience also finds themselves learning from Allen's story.

"I hope that audiences are able to empathize with Daryl's complexity and to carry this empathy beyond his story," he says. "We live in a moment where people are often reduced to headlines, where identities are often deployed as political weapons. I hope that this story reminds people that behind each headline is a person as complex as Daryl; behind each identity is an individual just as deserving of love and comfort."

Stewart says he has an additional hope specifically for Resurrection's queer listeners.  

"I hope they're able to learn from Daryl the same lessons I did: embrace this messy, difficult, beautiful, queer life," he says. "Embrace who you are, live authentically, and love as deeply as you can."

You can now listen to all eight episodes of Resurrection in their entirety.