Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario.

Pleasures of Time is presented as a history of a “committed gay
relationship,” but this connection serves only as a loose framework.
The book’s complex and fragmented narrative focuses on the life of
Paul Bouissac. Born in 1934, Bouissac was a professor at the University
of Toronto for more than 30 years and is a specialist on the circus.
Stephen Riggins compares his relationship with Bouissac to James
Boswell’s relationship with Samuel Johnson. In a meandering stroll
through Bouissac’s life, Riggins touches on numerous themes through a
variety of narrative interventions. Each chapter treats a general theme,
mostly devoted to Bouissac. However, Riggins devotes one chapter to his
own early life in Indiana and he inserts himself into the narrative
throughout the book in the postmodern fashion.

While few Canadian academics have had the honour of a biography in
monograph form, this volume is likely to attract attention more for its
anecdotes about the cultural celebrities who appear in these pages (not
always, it must be said, in the most favourable light) than for
Bouissac’s achievements. Name-dropping assumes an important role, as
Allan Bloom, John Cage, Michel Foucault, and Claude Lévi-Strauss make
an appearance. In this atmosphere, Riggins’s short discussion of
Bouissac’s semiotics of the circus is unlikely to excite readers. Gay
life from the 1960s to the present is touched on, and there are nuggets
here for researchers of Canada’s gay history. However, there is no
systematic treatment of anything gay, not even the relationship between
Riggins and Bouissac, which pops in and out of each chapter in odd
tidbits.

There are meticulous footnotes at the end of each chapter, but it would
have been helpful to have a complete list of Bouissac’s publications
as an appendix. The volume has an index, but it focuses exclusively on
individuals, making it easy to find out about Allan Bloom’s taste in
young men, but harder to discover Riggins’s history of Indiana glory
holes or his description of Toronto’s St. Charles Tavern, an important
gay meeting place in the 1960s and 1970s. Indexing this potpourri must
have been a challenge, but it is hard to agree with the publisher that
“HM” (for “Sociology” in the Library of Congress classification
system) truly reflects this work’s place on the shelves.