Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former assistant director of
libraries at the University of Saskatchewan Library. He is also
dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

Terry Goldie teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures at York
University. He is author of Fear and Temptation : The Image of the
Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures and editor
of In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context
as well as co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in
English.

In Pink Snow, Goldie studies 11 Canadian texts ranging from John
Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) to Tomson Highway’s The Kiss of the Fur
Queen (1998). He concludes with briefer comments on an “arbitrary
selection of texts” by Peter McGehee, Stan Persky, Sky Gilbert, and
Dennis Denisoff. His premise is that, lacking early models or
forefathers like Whitman, Canadian fiction is of too recent a vintage to
support the assertion of a gay tradition.

He begins by excavating the homosocially informed context of several
classic Canadian works: Wacousta, As For Me and My House, Who Has Seen
the Wind, Beautiful Losers, and Fifth Business. “Homotextual
possibilities” come more clearly into focus when he turns painstaking
attention to works by acknowledged gay writers Timothy Findley, David
Watmough, Shyam Selvadurai, and inevitably Scott Symons. Nevertheless,
Goldie insists that “the issue here is where a homosexual identity is
enacted in the existence of the text. The homotextual is not what the
homosexual writes but what the homosexual reads.” His study is finely
researched and footnoted, but it must be stated that frequently his
citation of previous studies (particularly the work of Eve Kososky)
overwhelms his own reading. At other times he merely recounts the plot
from a “homotextual” perspective. He notes the danger of the
“common use of [overtly gay] fiction as anthropological data,” yet
he himself wastes several pages justifying his white critic’s approach
to Native Tomson Highway’s semi-autobiographical novel rather than
relegating the apology to a footnote and getting on with his primary
illustration.

While Goldie casts a particularly discerning eye on works that have
been more or less fixed in their mainstream critical assessment, this
collection of studies will be of interest primarily to universities and
colleges developing programs of gay and lesbian studies.