Pod Insights Personally Resurrection, Episode 1: San Francisco, 1979 About this episode Daryl Allen always wanted to be a playwright, but before his art found success, his life was cut short by HIV. Before he dies, he leaves one of his scripts with an ex-boyfriend, asking his ex to do something with the play. 25 years later, the script is given to Dane Stewart, a playwright living in Montreal, and he falls down the rabbit hole.
The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil
des arts de Montréal, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for
the Arts.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
0:06 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
0:19 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
0:26 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
0:31 Speaker 02 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:34 Speaker 03 I'm Dane Stewart, and I spent the past five years trying to learn everything I can about one man.
0:44 Speaker 03 A man who died in 1991, the same year I was born. A man who had sex with men, like I do. But his sexuality came at a cost that mine never did. A man who loved hard, harder than anyone I know. A man named Daryl Allen.
1:04 Speaker 02 Daryl was someone who came into my life at a time when I was just coming out. And he was my mentor, my tutor, just an all-around kind person.
1:18 Speaker 03 Daryl spent his life traveling Canada and the United States, living out of suitcases and writing plays for the theater. But before he had the chance to make it as an artist, before he had the chance to share his writing with the world, he died.
1:32 Speaker 02 For him to die of AIDS, and he fought. He had two different kinds of cancers, and he fought.
1:45 Speaker 03 I started this project to honor that fight, to honor Daryl and all the other queers who died from AIDS, 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. But this project has become about more than the AIDS crisis, because Daryl was more than the AIDS crisis. He was a whole person. He never wrote plays about AIDS. He wrote plays about what came before. For him, that included stories about past relationships, about his mom, and about struggling with his sexuality in the middle of the Vietnam War.
2:26 Speaker 02 He would wake up screaming at night sometimes. To really know what goes on inside somebody's head while they're in it, I mean, it's difficult to comprehend.
2:43 Speaker 03 It is, but I'm gonna try. This is the story, the whole story, about the life and death of Daryl Allen. This is Resurrection, a podcast that tells the stories of ordinary queer people who were lost to HIV.
3:01 Speaker 03 Before I dive into Daryl's story, I'd like to share with you something that I've learned through my research. You see, I'm not a reporter, I'm not a detective, I'm not a genealogist, I'm just a gay kid who likes to nerd out over queer history. This project has taught me the challenges of piecing together the life of someone who died only 30 years ago, a regular man, whose life wasn't preserved by any form of celebrity status or archived through the social media that defines my generation. It's taught me just how quickly our personal histories can be lost to the ages, and just how little we often know about the people around us. I like to call this the great uncle effect.
3:41 Speaker 04 So my great uncle would be a brother of any of my grandparents?
3:49 Speaker 03 I'd like you to think for a moment about your great uncle. If you never knew your great uncle, you can use a great aunt, a great grandparent, a second cousin, but what do you know about that person? Can you tell me their name? Their birthday? Can you picture what they looked like when they were young? I asked a few of my friends about their great uncles.
4:07 Speaker 04 I wasn't close enough with any of my grandparents to know any great uncles.
4:16 Speaker 03 You might know what they did as a career, who they married, how many kids they had, but can you tell me the story of the first person they loved? Do you know what kept them up at night? What made them worry? What pissed them off?
4:28 Speaker 04 I met one of my great uncles. His name was Guy, and one time at a funeral, he gave me a toonie for sitting on his lap.
4:39 Speaker 05 I wish I had something more interesting and less creepy to tell you. He seemed like a nice guy overall, though.
4:45 Speaker 03 During this project, I've come to understand the distance between generations. The great uncle effect. It's just how little we know about the people separated from us by two generations, or even by one.
4:58 Speaker 05 Uh, I can only think of one. I know I probably had more than one, but, uh, great uncle Larry, uh, had a wife named Helga, and I really liked Helga. I don't know much about Larry, to be honest. And she gave me her china, and actually, the pillow I sleep on is also inherited, which means it's probably 50 or 60 years old. I should get a new pillow.
5:31 Speaker 03 The distance between generations is bigger than I knew when I started this journey, but I hope to close that gap, even just a little bit, with this project. So, how did it all start? Before 2016, I'd never heard of Daryl Allen, nor had anyone, really. Only a handful of people alive on the planet today remembered this man whose life was full of friends and vibrance only 30 years ago. That's not that far back. But then, isn't that how it works for most of us? Our story starts in Montreal.
6:08 Speaker 03 I've lived in Montreal for the past 10 years. It's a city like no other, with winters so cold that the winds burn your face when you step outside, and summers filled with park beers and bike lanes and late-night sweaty dancing. It's the city where I fell in love for the first time with a boy who kissed me at midnight in a snowstorm. And it's also one of the gayest cities on the planet with a complicated history of queers living and loving, organizing and resisting. As a small-town queer from Canada's east coast, I felt myself pulled to Montreal like a magnet when I turned 18. It's the closest city where I felt like I could fit in.
6:50 Speaker 03 I'd spent my teenage years wrestling with a darkness inside me that fed off the lack of acceptance in my small town in Nova Scotia, that fed off my own fear of who I was, of my sexuality. I moved to Montreal to get away from that darkness. Fast forward to August 14th, 2016. I've been in Montreal for seven years. I'm 25 and living my gay fantasy in this city. I just marched in my very first Pride parade with thousands of other queers and I was about to meet a man who would change my life.
7:21 Speaker 02 My name is Daniel Wiley. I go by Dan, Danny, and some other asundry names, but that's just a joke there.
7:32 Speaker 03 Our story starts with a chance encounter between me and Dan Wiley.
7:36 Speaker 02 We met at Pride, I think it was 2016.
7:42 Speaker 03 I was wearing a leather harness with a chain and a padlock around my neck and surrounded by my friends. We finished the parade and went to La Gleneuve.
7:51 Speaker 02 Upstairs at La Gleneuve.
7:54 Speaker 03 The Black Eagle, Montreal's gay leather bar, for a drink.
7:58 Speaker 02 We were all pretty happy after Pride. A little intoxicated.
8:04 Speaker 03 The Black Eagle used to be a hardcore leather bar with all sorts of acts happening in the dark corners. Disgusting, or arousing, depending on your perspective. But these days, it's more of a gay sports bar. Crammed onto the second floor, I was chugging pints and throwing shade with my friends.
8:21 Speaker 02 There was a group of your friends you were together, and Michael and I sort of squirmed our way into your little circle of people. And from there, we got to know each other quite well. It's been very nice getting to know you more.
8:39 Speaker 03 Dan is a gray-haired man with a big, bushy, white beard. He might get angry if I say this, but at times, he reminds me of Santa Claus. He has big, vulnerable eyes that crinkle in the corner when he smiles. And he's a generation above me.
8:54 Speaker 02 And I'm 62. I'll be 63 at the end of October.
8:58 Speaker 03 And his face is weathered.
8:59 Speaker 02 It's been a roller coaster of a life.
9:02 Speaker 03 Dan and I got along great the first time we met. Over the course of the next year, we saw each other at events around the city. Gay bars, queer fundraisers, kinky soirees. We would hug, we would chat, we were friends for sure, but not close ones. Almost exactly one year later, I produced a play I'd been working on. I like to write and direct. It was about Montreal's queer community. The play was called "The History of Sexuality," and it was based on interviews I did delving into the queer history of Montreal. The play presented queer people as they are: kinksters, sex workers, grad students. No sensationalizing, just ordinary queer people. I find these sorts of projects help me to understand myself.
9:44 Speaker 03 Hearing the stories of other people's queerness, their struggles, their celebrations, it helps me feel more secure, more justified in my own sexuality. Dan came to see the premiere.
9:55 Speaker 02 We went to one of your plays. In fact, we went to the same play, I think, two or three times. Michael, I think, went three times, and I went twice.
10:05 Speaker 03 A few days after the play closed, I got a text from Dan. Dane, I want to congratulate you on your recent theater success, "Hugs From An Old Dog." I've come across a piece of my history, as well as a play. I dated a man in the late 70s, early 80s. I met him in San Francisco, American. Daryl Allen is his name. He was a playwright. I don't think any of his plays actually got to the stage, but I have a copy of one of his pet projects, and I think it would just be a waste if I just threw it away. Not sure what else I could do with it, and was wondering if you'd be interested in it, at least to read? We met a few weeks later at a café a few blocks from my house. Dan handed me a script, about 80 pages, typed using a typewriter with pen ink scrawled
10:49 Speaker 03 across the papers, marked up with edits. And the first page was missing, the title page.
10:54 Speaker 02 Mustang 01 is Daryl. I mean, it has all kinds of portions of his life in there, and his struggles, and...
11:05 Speaker 02 Some of his family life.
11:06 Speaker 03 Mustang Zero One, I learned, was the title of the play, set in the middle of the Vietnam War. Daryl was a veteran of the war and Dan saw the play as one of Daryl's ways of processing what had happened to him. Though it was fictional, Dan told me, the play had autobiographical elements.
11:25 Speaker 02 This was his way of perhaps being able to put it out there. And he basically told me that that was one of the reasons why he he gave it to me. So I accepted it and I kept them. I mean, it's been a long time. I mean, he passed in 91, so it's a long time.
11:48 Speaker 03 30 years. And now, finally, Dan was doing what he could to preserve Daryl's legacy. I took the script home and dived into it. I asked Dan what to expect, what he remembered from the play.
12:01 Speaker 02 I think I remember the beginning where they're in the control booth, control tower type thing.
12:08 Speaker 06 The operations room of the radar site at Udon Air Force Base, Thailand, takes up the center portion of the stage. The operations board looms up menacingly center front, so most of the audience has to look through the board into the dark room. The main board shows the outline maps of northern Thailand, Laos, and part of North Vietnam. The dark room overpowers the set and has an ominous feel about it. It is like a gigantic, dark womb.
12:36 Speaker 03 Mustang Zero One, or Mustang, as I'll call it, is what drew me into Daryl, to Daryl's life. While I want to share it with you, at this time, I can't. In order to understand Mustang, in order to appreciate it, you need to understand the man behind it. What I can tell you is that Mustang is a play about trauma, the trauma of war and the trauma of sexual repression. The play follows two men in the US Air Force deployed together in Thailand. Through the hardship of the war, the men find solace in one another, romantically, sexually. But as you might expect, in the military at that time, they struggle to accept the love they have for one another, struggle to overcome the shame.
13:19 Speaker 03 Then, one night, one of the men pleads with the other, asks him to overcome his shame to accept his feelings.
13:29 Speaker 03 Felt like he was talking directly to me, to that darkness inside me. This is that man's monologue.
13:39 Speaker 07 I know you're afraid. I am too, way down deep. But I'm more afraid of not discovering who I really am. If what I am means I must go against all, I'll do so. There are many who would be horrified at what we do to each other. There are many who couldn't look us in the eye. There are many who, in the name of their religions, would hate and vilify us. There are those who'd be so insecure with themselves that they would kill us at the most, and rant and rave, and call us names at the least. Yes, our families would probably turn away and feel ashamed and disgraced for a while.
14:18 Speaker 07 And yes, someday, I may have to face my child to explain what I am, but by God, when I feel toward you like I've never felt for any other human being, when I feel like I do when you're not near, when I feel so content and full and real and good after we've made love, those other people are damn wrong. And I wouldn't turn away from you for all the persecution in the world.
14:52 Speaker 03 The reason I go to pride, the reason I was at that parade in 2016, the reason that I met Dan at that gay bar, it's not because I feel proud, it's because I feel shame. We don't celebrate pride out of arrogance. We celebrate it so we have something to hold on to when those voices come at night. Reading this passage from Mustang and hearing those same voices of shame echoing from Daryl from generations before me, all of a sudden, I no longer felt like I was looking at a historical artifact. I felt like I was looking in a mirror. This wasn't the last time Daryl made me feel that way.
15:34 Speaker 03 After I read the play, I have only one question. Who was this man? Who was Daryl Allen?
15:41 Speaker 02 His laughter, okay, would fill a room completely. If he started to laugh, you knew exactly where Daryl was in the room. And it didn't matter if it was five people or 50 people. You could hear his voice and you could hear his laugh anywhere you were. He had such a booming voice. And externally masculine sounding voice, you know? And what's one of the features that sort of attracted me to him? That along with his charm. He's very charming. He was very charming.
16:16 Speaker 03 Dan and Daryl met in the summer of 1979. Dan was young at the time.
16:20 Speaker 02 I was 21, I think, when we met. I don't remember the exact thing. He was 19 years my senior.
16:25 Speaker 03 This is where we depart from Montreal. Dan had been living in Montreal almost his entire life, but that summer, the summer of 79, he decided to take a trip to San Francisco.
16:37 Speaker 02 My first adult trip all by myself. I was terrified.
16:41 Speaker 03 Why were you going on this trip?
16:43 Speaker 02 It was gay Mecca, San Francisco. Every young gay man wants to go to San Francisco and enjoy the gay Mecca, which is exactly what I did.
16:53 Speaker 03 And it's funny how some things don't change.
16:56 Speaker 02 Oh, some things don't ever change.
16:59 Speaker 03 I said that Montreal is one of the gayest cities on the planet, but it has nothing on San Francisco. Looking back through the history books, San Francisco is the epicenter of so much queer history. Gay liberation, Harvey Milk, drag culture, Pride, Polk Street, and the Castro district, institutions of leather and VDSM, Folsom Street Fair, which remains every gangster's dream to this day. And of course, San Francisco is one of the queer communities that had its foundation ripped apart by AIDS. But in the late 70s, AIDS had yet to rear its head. The party was going strong.
17:39 Speaker 02 And we met by chance because we were both waiting for a table in a French restaurant. And I was just ahead of him. And I guess we started chatting with each other. And in San Francisco, and especially in those days, you know, the gaydar goes off, so you know, you just go from there. He was a man slightly shorter than me. Certainly physically, he was bulkier. He was muscled, bald, or baldish, and had an air about himself.
18:18 Speaker 03 Dan, the young Canadian kid out in the gay world of San Francisco, was drawn to Daryl, to his charm, to his personality, and to his-
18:26 Speaker 02 Just confidence. He was so confident in himself, you know? He wasn't afraid to, to experience new things. He had been through so much already in his life that he basically just said, "Fuck it. I'm going to, I'm going to be me completely. And if I meet interesting people on the way, then I meet interesting people on the way. If I don't, I don't."
18:50 Speaker 03 Dan has told me about this moment over and over again. The anxious excitement that comes from being young in a new place. The fear and possibility that comes from being around other gay men in a city where gay love was more accepted than anywhere else in the world. And the flutter in the stomach that comes from that first moment with someone. That knowing glance that shows they're interested.
19:14 Speaker 02 Cruising is a form of, I guess, stare, where you basically make your intentions known. It's eye contact, it's a body language, it's gaydar.
19:29 Speaker 03 Dan knew, and so did Daryl.
19:31 Speaker 02 So I invited him to join me at my table. And from there, it became a torrid love affair for two and a half, three years.
19:41 Speaker 03 Daryl had this effect on Dan. A young kid in his twenties, gay in a world where being gay was wrong. And yet, Daryl had a self-assurance, a self-esteem that could extend beyond himself. It calmed down the darkness that lived inside of the people around him. It calmed down the darkness that lived inside of Dan.
20:03 Speaker 03 Dan tells me a lot about Daryl, about their relationship, about Daryl's work as a playwright. And then, a few months after we'd started discussing Daryl, Dan tells me about the letters. Hundreds of pages of handwritten love letters. A secret archive of Daryl's most intimate thoughts. And we're going to get into those letters in just a moment, right after this break.
20:30 Speaker 01 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
20:37 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading. I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math. I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
21:02 Speaker 03 A few months after Dan had started telling me about Daryl, he tells me about the letters. Hundreds of pages of handwritten love letters that Daryl sent to Dan over the course of their relationship.
21:14 Speaker 02 He was a writer, so it just flowed for him.
21:19 Speaker 02 And he wanted to share his life, whether it was in New York or New Orleans or wherever he was.
21:25 Speaker 03 Beginning the week after Dan left San Francisco and the two lovers were stranded in different cities on opposite corners of the continent, the two began writing letters back and forth.
21:35 Speaker 02 Some of the letters were seven, eight, nine pages long. I had more of the difficulty writing letters, but that was part and parcel. That's how you communicated.
21:44 Speaker 03 The entire course of their relationship is meticulously preserved in these letters. And Dan has held on to every letter Daryl ever sent him, every letter. A few days after telling me this, he gives me a package, hundreds of pages of handwritten love letters. And not just the letters, but Christmas cards, faxes, playbills, photos, a time capsule of Daryl Allen. Dan warns me when he gives me the letters that I might have a bit of trouble reading them. Daryl had been trained in shorthand, and the shorthand had infiltrated his letter writing style. So the words on the page were almost impossible to decipher. When I open the first letter, I see what he's talking about. Daryl's cursive is atrocious.
22:28 Speaker 03 It's a series of scrolling loops, messy lines. In reading the first letter, I have to spend time on each word, analyzing it to figure out what he'd written. The first paragraph takes me about five minutes to put together.
22:40 Speaker 06 August 7th, 1979. Dear Danny, I love you. It was marvelous hearing your voice last night. It seems almost impossible to me that this has actually happened. I had about decided that something wonderful like this would never happen. And just look at us now.
22:59 Speaker 03 But despite the time that it takes, I feel for the first time like I'm hearing from Daryl himself.
23:04 Speaker 06 I apologize for not starting this letter last night, but by the time I had a bite to eat and had unpacked, I was exhausted and crawled in bed.
23:12 Speaker 03 Within two paragraphs, I begin to feel Daryl's everyday life, his normalness.
23:18 Speaker 06 I was so angry last Thursday. My flight to Hollywood was 30 minutes late in boarding, and we could have spent more time together.
23:24 Speaker 03 Well, "normal" except for his newfound affections for Dan, which made him, at 39 years old, sound like a lovestruck teenager.
23:32 Speaker 06 I certainly don't like being in San Francisco without you. What a difference it has made. You've thrown me for a loop, my man. There is simply no way of getting around that.
23:43 Speaker 03 And one other thing stood out to me. Throughout this first letter, he made several references to a woman, a woman named Janet.
23:52 Speaker 06 Janet had to work in Long Beach. Janet and I saw the Muppet Movie Friday night, loved it. Then we had a quiet dinner. Janet may have a new lover. He's in advertising. Sunday, we rehearsed Janet's one-woman show. She is fantastic.
24:07 Speaker 03 Janet is mentioned in these letters more than anyone else, by far. But who was this woman and why was she important to Daryl? Already, in just one letter, I am enthralled. I need to know everything I can about this guy. And so, I do what any amateur gay history nerd would do. I get to work. For months, I spend all my free time transcribing every last word of every last letter.
24:32 Speaker 06 August 14th, 1979. August 20th, 1979. August 30th, 1979.
24:40 Speaker 06 I love you. September 30th, 1979. My dearest Dan. Work has remained very slow here in the accounting department.
24:50 Speaker 03 Reading someone else's letters is illuminating. It feels exciting, even a little bit illicit. Daryl was becoming a bit of a role model to me, but he never agreed to have me read his letters. He never even knew me. In uncovering him, I was finding myself. He was helping me to fight my own darkness. But is it possible that I was crossing a line by looking into his private life? One of the first times I started asking myself this question is when I learned about his style of living.
25:21 Speaker 06 Until I get a paycheck, I am sleeping in a sleeping bag in the theater office. With work going on, the production to all hours and comings and goings and my having to go to work in the mornings, it's far from my deal. Oh, well, I'll get a room as soon as I can.
25:38 Speaker 03 I'd assumed that Daryl would have been more anchored than this, more stable, a military discipline. But he chose to live frugally so he could devote his time and his energy to the people he loved and the art he loved, the theater.
25:52 Speaker 06 Everything involved with the performance, such as sets, props, et cetera, are not working out, and we shall have to do some last-minute improvising with what we have. The three leads are still acting like spoiled children, and the tech crew is almost ready to quit on them. Oh, well, only two more performances, and I won't be involved again with this turkey. I don't know how Janet keeps her cool with these people.
26:15 Speaker 03 At times, living in a sleeping bag on the floor of the Zephyr Theater Office, Daryl throws himself into productions, and the one person who seems to be there for it all is Janet. And then finally, I stumble upon the passage that tells me exactly who she is.
26:31 Speaker 06 My darling, Janet and I, for all practical purposes, are over.
26:39 Speaker 06 She still doesn't want a divorce, but I did get her to admit that she's afraid if we would divorce, I would disappear.
26:47 Speaker 06 Things are very touchy and I really don't know what will happen.
26:51 Speaker 03 Janet, the mystery woman, was Daryl's wife. Dan mentioned to me in his very first message that Daryl had an ex-wife, that she was even a character in Mustang. I hadn't realized that while Dan and Daryl were meeting, falling in love and writing feverish letters back and forth, that all that time, Daryl was still married, still in touch with his wife, still seeing her nearly every day. Janet, I decide, is the key. I spent hours trying to find her online. There's a program slipped into the letters for Janet's one-woman show. It confirms that, at least in 1979, Janet used Daryl's last name, Janet Allen. Google, no. Janet Allen, LinkedIn, no. Janet Allen, Facebook.
27:37 Speaker 03 There are a few Janet Allens living in California. I send some messages. No, no, no. Janet Allen, if she'd been around Daryl's age, she'd be in her 70s or 80s now. It's possible that she might have avoided being on the internet entirely. Or it's possible that she remarried after Daryl and took another name. With no other leads, no other known relatives of Daryl's, I have to abandon the hunt for Janet and return to the only source of information I've got: the letters.
28:06 Speaker 06 What have you done to me? How awful it is to see you. You fill my thoughts constantly. I look at your photos every day. The next time I hold you in my arms, I may never let you go. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
28:17 Speaker 03 Daryl loves with a kind of force that I've never been capable of. Whenever I've gotten close to it, I feel my darkness, something about not being good enough. And now, here, on the pages in front of me, was a man who didn't overthink it. He jumped in with both feet. I wanted that. I find out that Daryl quickly makes plans to visit Dan in Montreal. Just three months after their lovestruck meeting in that French restaurant, the two will be reunited.
28:47 Speaker 03 One of the curious things, learning about Dan and Daryl's relationship through these letters, is that so much happens in the time between letters. The last letter before Daryl's trip is dated October 10, 1979.
29:00 Speaker 06 "I love you. Only two weeks from today. I am just counting time until I can hold you again."
29:08 Speaker 03 And then, we jump forward six weeks. November 20, 1979.
29:13 Speaker 06 "Here it is, already a week and a day after I last held you, and I'm just now writing you."
29:18 Speaker 03 There's so much that lives in that gap. The nature of letters is to fill in the gaps apart, but what I want to know is what happens in that time spent together? When Daryl visits Dan for the first time, he flies to New York first.
29:33 Speaker 02 He took the train from New York to Montreal. And I remember, I remember this. I remember him getting off the train, and basically, we just flew into each other's arms. Couldn't care less who was around. I remember that very vividly. As, as we speak now, okay, him getting off the train and being there, it's just like, you know, the commercial where you have the two people running towards each other and finally, well, that's basically what we did.
30:01 Speaker 03 Two men embracing in the train station. 1979. Dan's nervous, too. He's only met this man once before.
30:10 Speaker 02 You paint a picture in your head from those two or three days. You've had time to correspond, whether by phone or, or by letter. You have a, you have a visual, because I had no pictures of him at this point in time. You had a visual in your mind of, you know, his facial features, but you know, his body features and everything like that.
30:34 Speaker 03 By the end of that trip, though, Dan would have pictures.
30:38 Speaker 02 There was a friend of mine from work, took some beautiful portrait, pictures of, mostly of him, but of us as well.
30:50 Speaker 03 In one picture, the two of them are beaming. Daryl wears a white button up, a salt and pepper beard and thinning hair. His smile's so big that his eyes are almost shut, and I can see a little gap in his front teeth. His arm hangs around Dan's shoulder, with a hand pulling Dan close, protective. And Dan, forty years younger than the Dan I know, is wearing some Canadian flannel with a leather vest on top, oh, to be gay in the seventies. He looks happy, he looks safe. And though his face is younger, I see the same crinkles in the corner of his eyes. The time they spent together was like an accelerant, gasoline poured on a fire.
31:33 Speaker 03 The weeks spent in each other's company ignite big and fast decisions. Everything moves quickly once Daryl returns to California.
31:40 Speaker 06 December 6th, 1979. I will probably stay the winter in San Francisco. I have professionally decided to try New York.
31:48 Speaker 03 Daryl is moving to New York to be closer to Dan. And in March of 1980, he pens his first letter from the Big Apple.
31:56 Speaker 06 March 17th, 1980. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
32:01 Speaker 03 And suddenly, we're in New York, the city of Stonewall. Daryl's letter reads like a map of New York gay history.
32:09 Speaker 06 Yesterday afternoon, I walked over to Greenwich Village, up and down Christopher and West Street. The last one was probably where a lot of cruising was filmed. I went out on Pier 42 for a while and basked in the sun.
32:22 Speaker 03 And here it is, in New York, that a relationship that seemed impossible begins to transform from the intense romance of early lovers fighting to maintain a connection across the continent, to the gentle routine of two boyfriends, living just a train ride away. And it's at this point where the letters turn into a predictable pattern, a comforting, rumbling rhythm. Updates on the boredom of office work, the dingy conditions of Daryl's latest rooming house, playbills from cheap Broadway shows, recountings of nights spent out on the town, all punctuated by gaps of weeks spent together, trading between Montreal and New York.
33:02 Speaker 03 A picture-perfect relationship. Or at least it seems that way. Daryl portrays it that way in the letters. Dan and Daryl spend the Christmas of 1980 together in Montreal. I know this because of a gap in the letters. The previous letter in my collection was dated December 1st, 1980. I finish my transcription, excited to hear about their first Christmas spent together, and then...
33:28 Speaker 06 January 21st, 1981. Dear Danny, I'm starting this letter and I'm not even certain it will ever be mailed. I have a lot of anger deep inside me. It will be a long time before it will go away, if it does. When I look back on the time we've known each other, I really wonder what the fuck were we doing? I question whether you ever really loved me.
33:54 Speaker 03 Maybe, it turns out. Daryl struggled with a darkness of his own.
34:15 Speaker 03 Matthew Rogers is our editor and sound designer and wrote the music in today's episode. Davide Kietseze is the voice of Daryl's letters and scripts. Hannah Sung is our executive producer. Our outro track is called "Easy to Love", written for us by Clara Jones. Fact-checking in this episode by Katie Hill. Special thanks to Caitlin and Natalie Prest, Michelle Switzer, Isabel Deleuze, Katie Hill, Roger Galvez, Amanda Pledgie, and the many others who helped me make this episode. Matthew Karyetsemary is the platonic love of my life and my co-producer. Resurrection is written, researched, and hosted by me, Dane Stewart. The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil
34:56 Speaker 03 d'Isart de Montréal, le Conseil d'Isart d'Électe Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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