Scott Symons

Writer

  • Born: July 13, 1933
  • Birthplace: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Died: February 23, 2009
  • Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Biography

Hugh Brennan Scott Symons was born into a wealthy family of English, Irish, and German heritage on July 13, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of Harry L. Symons, and the grandson of lawyer, writer, breeder, lumberman, and Canadian land baron William Perkins Bull (1870-1948), author of the Perkins Bull Historical Series. Symons was educated privately at two elite schools, and gravitated toward writing and fine art before earning a B.A. from the University of Toronto (1955). He later received an M.A. from King’s College, Cambridge University, and took postgraduate courses at the Sorbonne, University of Paris.

Symons married and embarked on a career in journalism. He worked for the Toronto Telegram (1957-1958), the Quebec City Chronicle-Telegraph (1958-1959), and La Presse (1960-1961) while contributing editorials to various Canadian journals. From 1960 to 1965, Symons was professor of fine art at the University of Toronto. He also served as curator of the Sigmund Samuel Canadiana Collection and the Canadiana Gallery of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and was a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution.

In the mid-1960’s, Symons threw his conventional, respectable, upwardly mobile, scion-of-Anglo-Canadian-society life away. He left his wife and job and moved to Montreal to write.

Symons stepped boldly out of the closet in 1967 with the publication of his first novel, Combat Journal for Place d’Armes. A fictionalized autobiographical story—creatively told in stream-of-consciousness prose and supplemented with diary entries, newspaper clippings, maps, phone numbers and memos—Combat Journal is a book-within-a-book. The narrator, Hugh Anderson (a stand-in for Scott Symons) is writing about a character, Andrew Harrison, who is a surrogate for Anderson. Each of the three personas apparently relished soliciting male prostitutes: Trysts are vividly and lovingly described, describing acts that were against Canadian law at the time. The trio of males excoriates the bland Anglo-Canadian “Cube Man.”

Combat Journal became an underground cult favorite and received the Beta Sigma Phi Award for Best First Novel by a Canadian Author. However, it also drew the ire of the establishment, and the book was critically shredded in conservative newspapers.

Symons didn’t care: he was already off on a six-year jaunt with his then-seventeen- year-old male lover. Together they traveled from Newfoundland to Mexico to British Columbia.

Along the way, Symons completed his second novel, the limited edition, Civic Square. Published unbound in a blue box, the book consisted of a series of letters addressed directly to the reader, describing the author’s attempt to achieve mental and physical harmony in Toronto, where the bland lead the bland. Symons also published the nonfiction, illustrated coffee-table book, Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture, examining the vigorous culture of his native land in terms of its furnishings.

In the early 1970’s, Symons returned to Mexico on his way to Morocco. His third novel, Helmet of Flesh, is a homoerotic sex tourist fantasy set in the author’s adopted homeland. It is the first volume of an intended trilogy, now thirty years in the making.

Symons most recently came to notice when he was the subject of the documentary film, God’s Fool (1998), directed by Nik Sheehan, who made an early documentary about AIDS, No Sad Songs. A new anthology of the author’s writings, Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons appeared the same year.

Sill an expatriate, Scott Symons currently lives in Essaouira, a small town on the Morocco coast.