I Am Kasper Klotz

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former Assistant Director of
Libraries (Collection Management & Budget) University of Saskatchewan
Library and Dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

Sky Gilbert, a self-described “drag queen extraordinaire,” cofounded
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and was its artistic director for 18 years.
He has written a number of controversial plays produced for that venue
and is also the author of a growing number of gay novels.

With I Am Kasper Klotz, Gilbert makes a serious bid to join the ranks
of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain as this laugh-out-loud novella spares
no jabs of its satirical needle. The anti-hero/narrator of the tale is a
Death-by-AIDS Quasimodo who has his lethal way with everyone venturing
into his path and sweaty clutches. In the process, he thumbs his nose at
“constipated gummy doctor brains” as his garrulous narrative gushes
forth with “kinks … always explicit.” It is a bizarre courtroom
drama, complete with profiles of the tortuous inner lives of the jurors
and an obsessively forgiving letter writer providing the narrator with
fodder for his more savage blows.

Oddly enough, I Am Kasper Klotz hammers out a cautionary tale for
practising gays while at the same time carrying through its objective of
“scaring wholesome families.” There is enough of the outrageous to
provide Rev. Fred Phelps and company with decades’ worth of diatribe
and several fatal coronaries. In the end, the accused makes a startling
plea directly to the jurors (and the reader): “I do not believe that
my semen, in and of itself, is lethal. I do not believe, ladies and
gentlemen, that AIDS is a purely physical disease.” Gilbert takes us
on a genuinely hilarious roller-coaster ride to arrive at the
melancholy, thought-provoking conclusion that the current AIDS agendas
are as much about mass hysteria and scapegoating as about science.