Bill:So my first question is about the time period when you used the space at the farm.
Evergon: About '73 to early 80s...'80, '81 I think. When the house burned.
Did you live there the whole time, or part time?
The first year I didn't live there, I had an apartment in Ottawa. I had an apartment for about three years...I went to teach at Ottawa U in '73 and then met Ken [Hillis] shortly after that and I was sorta the farmer's wife.
You were connected to the farm through Ken...?
Yes, yes, I think Ken had been there a year, and then I arrived.
How did you divide your time?
I taught in town two, sometimes three days a week, the teaching contracts were always one day after the other. Initially I had an apartment and I would go to the farm, then when the relationship with Ken was a commitment, I gave up the apartment and lived out on the farm. Sometimes we would have an apartment in the city. Toward the end he drove taxi to raise money for The Tower.
His house?
That's what I said.
So you had a studio in Ottawa?
No. Oh, I did have a studio in Ottawa, but initially no, I think I got the studio in Ottawa after I left the farm.
I'm trying to understand how one can live at the farm and have a career...
OK well I can show you...[takes out slides] so this is the house before it burned, and this is the studio...
It's called "the lounge" now ... that door there, the main entrance, is gone, moved around to the other side...
These big doors were just hung there for getting big things in and out, stoves and tables etc. We didn't use them much. And then this is the inside of the studio [a slide of the walls covered in images and interesting bits of fabric, etc.] there's the [wood] stove, it was built for a midget, and there's the bed [a loft arrangement draped in pink satin] and the guest bed.
Did you shoot in there?
Yeah, I shot in there, and all the collage material was in there, [the walls were] all corkboard.
Ah, so that's why the cork. It all came down when the building was last renovated...the glue was coming off.
So this was self-contained. When we weren't getting along, I could just retreat there. And then there's another building back here [indicates the Bunkhouse, another part of the complex of buildings].
That part is fully insulated now....
It was then, too [slides of interior of Bunkhouse, looking much as it does today]. That was the darkroom. The electrical ran off the generator.
And there's the same woodstove still in there. So what year would those slides have been?
Those would have been a couple of years after we got the darkroom and the studio together. The studio and the darkroom were a priority if I was going to stay and [work] there.
So you used the generator for electricity and what did you do for running water?
Water. For what?
Don't you need running water for washing prints, etc.?
In the summer you could go down to the creek if you wanted, but a lot of stuff was printed and then re-washed at the university. Just do a big batch of washing at the university. The prints were never about making photographs per se; they were about making photos to be used in the collages. That work was done at the Farm [looks in book Evergon 1971-1987 points out Terry and Big Muffin] and this work was done before the farm [1 Boy with Ingrown Tattoo]. This one, Diane and the Horse, Diane had a whole history with the farm.
What was her involvement?
She came to live with us, and then she brought a boyfriend.
So who were some of the other people involved?
Well, there's the big log house in the valley, and that was moved there by a childhood friend of Ken's, and he came to live there...and at some point he abandoned the place and [then two other people moved in -- a woman, and a guy who] now lives in Killaloe. They lived there for a long time. And they were living there when I left.
Do you have a sense of what happened, with the house burning down?
There are LOTS of stories about that.
What's yours?
Mine is...one, the neighbours hated us, partly because I'd been on TV, I didn't realize they watched TV that late at night. There are all sorts of funny stories about having been on TV, and coming home, and [my having upset things.] And there were lots of farm burnings at that point, up the valley. Renfrew, Arnprior, up in there, there'd been a whole set of the gay farms burned down.
So it was definitely a queer thing?
No, there are several stories. But Michael Balser [later a well-known Toronto artist, and artist Andy Fabo's partner] had a farm in Nova Scotia, which was one of the farms we wrote to, and we tried to keep in touch with gay farms, trying to be supportive, to be a hub. So we were supporting the gays up the valley, organizing bees trying to keep everyone going...like, having a support system. So Michael and his partner Andrew, in Nova Scotia, were getting their goatherd to the point where they could make a living and someone came and shot all the legs out from under the goats, and left them there alive. At which point Andrew and Michael came to Toronto and their lives went off in different directions. So there were horror stories all across this country about faggots living in the country. So yeah, that's a possibility. What else can I tell you about? There could have been an accident there. There's lots of truth to all sides of things. Next question?
The farm continued to be a kind of nexus for queer farmers across Canada & the US. Do you know [the Faery periodical] RFD?
Oh yes, RFD! RFD was supposed to come and do an issue, we brought the crops in early, we got all the canning done, and at the last minute they never showed up. I mean, if you're going to choose a farm, and do an issue, and it's all political, and our climates are very different and we have to get everything in before you can do this, which we did, and you don't have the wherewithal to get here, as far as I'm concerned, no more. I ceased to read RFD and correspond with them.
In terms of your involvement with the Faeries, were you into that?
Ken was connected to a lot of the gay leftists in Toronto. I had, again, trouble with the politic, but I was connected with Doug Wilson, and the Saskatoon group. The first gay liberation reunion in Canada, in Saskatoon, and I went to run a sissy workshop. Greg Spurgeon was living at the collective in New Edinburgh with Charlie Hill, all the art fags. Well, there was a house with seven gay men, it was the old Rankin Hardware estate, they rented the house together, so they could afford it, and they had this fabulous house. Charlie Hill was part of Gays of Ottawa, and Ken and I actually met at Gays of Ottawa. One thing, there were always lots of clothes at the dump. We were all very fond of second-hand clothes and there was a huge collection at the farm. Used to be, on the weekend, we'd have these parties.
[points to slide] Who did you say that was?
Might be David Rasmus...David Rasmus was a gay artist here [in Toronto]. This [other person] was also a David, I think I saw an obituary for him a couple of years ago. He was part of the gay movement from out west and here. So there'd be 20-30 people at the farm on most weekends and there'd be this kind of silliness.
Did you see The Cockettes, the movie? Interesting for me, to compare that to early Faery stuff, because you know there's this myth that it all started with Harry Hay and one specific gathering, but no.
No, it was happening all over the place! And there was a folk festival that still goes on...it was up the highway from Perth. Blue Skies?
Blue Skies Music Festival [happens in Clarendon].
We used to get a huge Faery contingent to go to Blue Skies every year. And then they'd all stay at the farm.
So you were into the Faery thing?
Oh I was a big Faery! But it was a matter of politics and responsibilities. And what drove me nuts was that there were people who were very hard workers, very solid workers, and then there was this, dare I say, frou-frou fringe, that just sort of didn't do much.
That remains an issue...a few people do all the work and...
...the rest just sort of run around in dresses. So yeah, I still think I'm a Faery, but the networking, I can't do. And there was a point shortly after I moved up to the farm, because I used to do all the posters for Gays of Ottawa. I was really involved in Gays of Ottawa, and there was a point when I realized that my art was the politic and that's where I was going to place the emphasis, and I was going to be a strong Canadian artist who was gay. My agenda was to keep the Gay Agenda on the table. So I could no longer arrange dances, and potlucks, and all that business...
I notice that right from the beginning, you put yourself, images of yourself, into your work. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to do that?
Cheapest model in town! Self-exploration. A lot of the other people in the photographs are lovers or close friends. I've always worked with the people who are closest to me. We get into pieces like this [The Artist and His Mother]. My mom's in a lot of work, more so now, we just did a shoot two days ago...for instance the Broken Egg Collection is from when a relationship was disintegrating, it's about the loss of the beloved, Duck over Pierre, again. This one [Untitled, p. 44 of Evergon, 1971 to 1987] is when I thought I'd lost the relationship with my third lover, which then went on to last another 20 years...so they're all pretty well about my life, what's going on.
In the slideshow lecture you gave at Hart House [The University of Toronto] the other day, you mentioned that everyone was doing pictures of their mother...what was that about?
I don't know, it was just the time, and the liberation, the freedom...[stops at Untitled 1971-72 in "Evergon 1971-1987"]
Was that up at the farm?
No, this was at Jordan, between St. Catherines and Grimsby. There's an old beach there, there's a burned-out pirate's boat there now, but that used to be a public beach before they redid the highways, and so you could pull down in there and it was all picnic tables, it was quite a beautiful spot, and some of the richer people rode horses through there. And we happened to go down there...I don't know who this guy is, it was just this guy wandering through the mist in a big black cape.
Can we talk about some of your recent work?
Well I guess....Early in the 90s I started the Ramboys series, which was a whole sort of mythology about promiscuous boys, and at the same time I started going to cruising grounds and doing the Manscapes series, which still goes on, that's not terminated, although it has slowed down. I bought a building about four years ago in Montreal, and I guess the other night I talked about having a "homo collection" of objects and relics and things that, over the years, have caught my eye so they've been purchased. I've started to document that work, put it in tandem with portraits of myself, and portraits of boys. Young men! I have to watch that terminology. Anyone under fifty is a boy as far as I'm concerned! And I've shot a large series of work on mom, we just shot a new piece a couple of days ago where she's on the chair.
The series of dip/triptychs you showed the other day?
Yeah. It was funny because I came home with a giant...I bought it because it was so amazing...a giant Chinese cabbage, but I put it in this trophy vase, I guess it was the champagne bucket, and my mother was going, Hail Caesar! and going on about the size of his penis. So anyway we're building dialogues between the collection and myself and the people around me.
You showed a couple of explicit pieces, The Piccolo Lesson, The Tuba Lesson...
It's a homage to Monet amongst the water-lilies and Michelangelo's David...if you look at the David...those poses are very specific to the David.
I'm thinking about why you might be doing that now, and I think about the huge conservative backlash...for instance a service bureau refused to print a series of AA Bronson's work recently because it had naked men in it.
Is that here?
Yes, Toronto.
I'm surprised with that, because the States is more fucked up...but then again it doesn't surprise me. But no, I've been thinking about those images for a long time. My mother was on a TV show a couple of years ago, and she was on with a young girl who'd been a rich hooker in Paris and managed to put herself through school. The other was the chief at Artforum, she kept having affairs all the time-it's right there in her biography-and then they had my mother on, just because she'd modeled nude at 80 years old, and so they said to her, "When did you stop feeling sexy?" and she caught me off guard because I thought, we expected her to say, "I'm still sexy." Because if I'd said that to her, that's what her response would have been, but she didn't say that, and I asked her about it, and she said, "Well I am still sexy, but I didn't think they'd believe me, so I pictured a point in my life where it was credible." There's something about still being desirable, still being sexy, as I'm becoming an aging man, more heavyset.
Has the "bear" thing impinged on your consciousness?
Yeah, I know what you're talking about, yeah. I guess I think of myself as a polar bear. Again, I guess it's, I just can't play the club games. I had a lot of fun, people from a bear club came as a group to a recent opening in Rome.Epicentro Urso. I ask because I wonder how much of your putting yourself out there as you do, how much of that might be around body image issues, that politics? Or is that part of your programme at all?
Well I remember the Ottawa Citizen asked me for a portrait, and I said, "Oh I'm going to do it nude!" and Kathleen Walker was the writer at the time, so I sent her off a portrait of me in my underwear with a bag over my head. And they wouldn't publish it! Because of the nudity.
So different that would look today, with the Abu Ghraib pictures.
Yeah. I know. But no, most of it has just been, that's the work I'm doing, the caring and the romances, working from myself rather than a sort of, another agenda.
How much was radical feminism thinking of the 1970s and 1980s a part of your work?
Well I still think I'm a feminist but I don't know how radical. I wasn't into all the reading; I just hung out with women who were feminists.
What does drag mean to you?
[Points to his all-black boy-clothes]...well this is one drag, the drag for today, but I couldn't really relate to that drag. When I went for the job in Ottawa, my mother (I wasn't sure that I wanted the job)-my mother is sometimes really quite amazing-she said, "Oh just wear drag, they'll never hire you in drag." So I just got dressed up in some of my finest drag and went off to the job interview. And they hired me! So I thought, if I got hired in drag, I can now work in drag, so for the first few years that I taught at the University of Ottawa I was in drag every day. And knock wood I never got the shit kicked out of me. I'm a big man, so people didn't quite know what to do with a big man with a beard in a dress.
They never do.
So I got the job and I found out years later that I was the only candidate. I mean they could still have freaked out and refused to hire me, but the recommendations about my work and my teaching methods were so sound that there was no question of my ability.
How long had you been teaching at that point?
Only a year. That was in '71. Charlie Hill-there were 27 of us initially, who worked professionally in drag. And in the end it came down to Charlie and me, and we're looking at each other thinking, we're dinosaurs, that's why we're not getting it on lately. That was '77-'78-'79, which was when we stopped doing it because it took so much energy.
Have you ever crossed paths with General Idea?
Yeah, our paths had crossed but not...not solidly.
How about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?
I never worked with them, although I was always enamored of them.
I think it's time the Sisters reactivated. Many of the same problems are coming back that they addressed.
And The Body Politic is gone, so there's no national network. Not a strong one anyway. In Montreal when the raids happened last year, EGALE...just sorta said, "Fine! We won't do anything." In the old days there just would have been hell to pay. But they did nothing, didn't even call a rally.
Do you think that's just a matter of the membership of EGALE having aged...?
There are no radicals left in there.
Do you see the fringe organizing anywhere now? Where are those people today?
No, I don't see it...a lot of the [queer] kids at school think they have all the rights they'll ever need. And you say to them...if you were in such and such a country you'd be dead.
I don't see much of your work being specifically about AIDS or loss related to AIDS, although I'm sure that has impacted your life too.
There's work that was specifically NOT made because of AIDS. But I thought other people were addressing that effectively, and that was fine. There were a few pieces, but no, generally no.
Back to the farm for a moment; what was there in the neighbourhood in terms of gay farms, or co-ops?
Where we lived? Nothing. There were hippy farms.
Did you feel connected with that?
Yeah. Well some of it. There were a lot of art people in Brooke. We used to go up to Killaloe, they would have big reunions and get-togethers. And I was living a double life 'cause I spent two or three days a week in town during the academic year. During the summer I was always out on the farm. So I had this other world I was going to. A lot of them who were out there all the time, I think they were going nuts. It's very isolating. That's why I'd never do it again. I decided after that I was always going to have a thermostat and running water!
There's a story of you being chased down the road by a bear.
Which time? There are two. The first one is, well I I was coming home, well we used to have German neighbours, I say that because everyone else was Scottish and they still referred to them after decades as "the Germans". And I'd gone up to their farm to get milk and eggs, and I'd stayed late, she needed to talk cause she was so isolated, and it was quite late, I was coming home and there was a full moon, are there still hives?
Ian Moffat used to look after beehives. So anyway I go down by the beehives and there was this bear. This bear sort of challenged me, and I crouched down. You know, you're sort of panicked and you're not acting too smart, I crouched down and tried to get by her. I knew it was a brown bear with a beige nose. There was enough moonlight to see that. When I got by her I probably should have just slowed down, but at one point I ran. I was wearing a leather jacket, and when the jacket slid off she shredded the jacket. I know that if she hadn't shredded the jacket I never would have made it to the house. I still had all these eggs and I still had two gallons of milk. So that was the one story.
The other story is that when Ken's and my relationship was falling apart, Pierre was there and my parents had come up, for the weekend to be with Pierre and I. And I was joking with my father, he had seriously damaged his feet. I was joking with him and I said, oh just look out across the meadow and you'll see a little black bear on his belly come down to the hives to have a little lunch. And look out and there it was! So we had two guns, one of them had sights and the other one was older, and didn't, it was an old blunderbuss. So I said to him, I'm going to put you up on the hill, he always retreats that way, you take the good gun and I'll take the old gun and scare him and when he runs by you, you can shoot him. Anyway so I got down there, but he didn't retreat, just crouched down in the grass, maybe he knew there was someone up by the hill. When I got close enough he stood up, and they'd always told me to aim, lower the gun and pull the trigger, and that's exactly what I did, and he lunged for me. But I'd hit him very badly, wounded him seriously, he ran off.
They brought in the dogs and within five minutes the dogs were back - they'll stay with a wounded bear but not with a dead bear. But it was probably the only time in my life I'd done something my father really wanted to brag about but I happened to be wearing long rhinestone earrings, my hair up to here, a housedress and sensible shoes ... the vision was bittersweet. It was sorta Annie Get Your Gun and I shot the bear.
Evergon currently lives and teaches in Montreal. His next shows will be in April at Vu in Quebec City and in September for Montreal's Le Mois de la Photo, consecutively showing at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia U and at Galerie Trois Points.
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