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— 6 — A Sharp Eye on the World of Entertainment, 1964–1967

Canadians think like people who want, usually in vain, all international sayings to end with a point about Canadians.

— Peter Gzowski, “The Global Village Has Everything but Surprises,” Saturday Night, December 1968

Ron McEachern, a man of few compliments, got it right when he called Borden Spears distinguished, professional, and intelligent.¹ Soon after taking command of Maclean’s, Spears hired Peter as his television reviewer. No doubt Spears had noted Peter’s interest in television, beginning when he was the Quebec editor for Maclean’s. On January 27, 1962, Peter had examined a new technique that allowed Hungarian-born cartoonist George Feyer to draw cartoons from behind a screen, which allowed him to be invisible. His cartoons appeared to create themselves. In the entertainment section of Maclean’s on March 10, 1962, Peter was vexed at the Canadian-content regulations imposed by the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG). Because Canadian television was forced to show a certain number of hours of Canadian content, networks simply created mind-numbing quiz shows. Again, in the February 23, 1963, issue of Maclean’s, in a review called “The Carnies on the Picture Tube,”² Peter blamed the BBG for the fact that much of the Canadian content on television was junk. In 1962, even Radio-Canada, Peter pointed out, was following BBG regulations with silly game shows such as La Poule aux oeufs d’or.

In the television section of “Maclean’s Reviews” of March 9, 1963, Spears would also have seen Peter’s review of the CBC Television show Inquiry, which he deemed the network’s best public affairs show. Even after Peter resigned from the magazine, Maclean’s published one of his television reviews, no doubt written before the mass resignation. Spears may have been scrambling to assemble his first issue, and, of course, he knew that Peter wrote astute reviews. In the September 1964 issue, Peter expressed surprise and disappointment that television had turned the Canadian Open into a dull experience. During the first part of the golf tournament, Peter had followed the players along the fairways of the Pinegrove Country Club near Montreal. To watch the final rounds, he located a television set. He was greatly disappointed. “One of my favorite sequences,” Peter wrote sarcastically, “has the camera following a ball after it has been driven — up, up into the air and then bouncie, bouncie, as it rolls along the grass. What this is supposed to illustrate, I can’t imagine.” You would think, he wrote, that after so many years of broadcasting the game on television, “the networks would have learned a little about how to make golf interesting.”³

Although Spears didn’t hesitate to hire Peter,⁴ he thought it best that his reviewer remain anonymous. Henceforth he was known as “Strabo,” the Greek geographer who lived at the time of Christ. Peter claimed, perhaps incorrectly, that the name meant “squinter.”⁵ In any case, “Strabo” suited Peter’s role as someone who squinted at a television screen in order to see around and behind the images presented on that screen.

Strabo’s first television review appeared on February 6, 1965. In “TV’s ‘7 Days’ — Not a Gem in All That Muck,” Strabo came down hard on the CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days, a current affairs show broadcast live each Sunday evening during the mid-1960s. This Hour, deemed Strabo, was raking muck for the sake of raking muck. And it failed “to raise or clarify a single legitimate national issue — unless one considers its bold stand against the corrosion of cars by salt.” When Peter wrote that damning review, the two hosts were John Drainie and Laurier LaPierre, who had been chosen from a list of candidates that included Peter Jennings; Pierre Trudeau; Trudeau’s future father-in-law, James Sinclair; and someone called Peter Gzowski.⁶

On March 6, 1965, in an article called “Why the Real Sports Fans Stay Home,” Strabo discussed how television was changing the way fans viewed sports events. With the new tools of television such as instant replays, “stop-action,” and the “isolated” camera, which could focus on an individual athlete, television viewers in the mid-1960s were beginning to enjoy not only immediacy but omniscience. Strabo argued that all this technology helped to make Hockey Night in Canada the most popular show on Canadian television.⁷ Two weeks later Strabo wrote about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Danger Man, which used nonsensical dialogue and a plethora of James Bond–type gadgets to satirize the spy thriller genre. When Jonathan Miller, Johnny Wayne, and Frank Shuster, whom Strabo called “the three most accomplished satirists on TV,” tried to satirize The Man from U.N.C.L.E., they failed. “You can’t spoof a program that won’t take itself seriously,” concluded Strabo.⁸ On April 3, 1965, Strabo complained about commercial breaks. He chastised Bell Telephone for interrupting the mood of a show about Duke Ellington with silly commercials. Instead, he urged Bell to announce its sponsorship at the beginning and end of the program.⁹ On April 17, 1965, Strabo again complained about the fact that television was trivializing the good, old parlour game called “Charades.”¹⁰ On May 1 he denounced stereotypes on television, specifically the nice “Negro.”¹¹

On June 19, 1965, Maclean’s published an article called “How the ‘Flush Test’ Rates Your TV Habits.” Although it bore no byline, the mischievous style seems like Peter’s. In order to gauge viewer interest in Sunday evening shows, the magazine asked the Public Utilities Commission of Barrie, Ontario, to gauge the volume of water used during Bonanza and This Hour Has Seven Days on Sunday evening, April 2. This Hour came out the winner. In other words, fewer viewers of that show had wandered off to relieve themselves and flush their toilets. Similar surveys in Saskatoon and Peterborough yielded the same results, the anonymous writer noted.¹²

In one column, Strabo admitted that he enjoyed American quiz shows such as Call My Bluff and Jeopardy, first broadcast in March 1964. Both were much better than what he called the “kindergarten pap” of Canadian quiz shows.¹³ In another column, written after spending a sunny May afternoon watching ninety consecutive television commercials during the third annual Canadian Television Commercials Festival in Toronto, a grumpy Strabo complained that, no matter what the quality of the commercials was, the admen in the audience applauded.¹⁴ In July, Strabo wondered, as he sipped gin and tonic on a summer evening, why he was presented with so many reruns of mundane TV programs. Why, for instance, did the CBC not replay its best shows from the 1950s, or even American dramas like Marty or the comedy shows of Sid Caesar?¹⁵ In his last column as Strabo, Peter wrote about one of his great concerns: that television might be robbing his children of the sense of wonder that he, as a boy, experienced whenever he met a “star” like Foster Hewitt or a hockey player like Max Bentley. Strabo informed his readers that he had never lost his childhood sense of wonder whenever a star hockey player (Eric Nesterenko?) or a well-known singing couple (Ian and Sylvia?) came to dinner. His children, especially the eldest two, seemed indifferent to stars. “To the generation born into the televised world,” Peter contended, “there is scarcely any difference between someone’s appearance on the television screen in the corner of the living room and his appearance in person.”¹⁶

On September 18, 1965, Strabo became Peter (Strabo) Gzowski. Perhaps by that time Borden Spears no longer felt it necessary to hide the identity of his television columnist from Maclean-Hunter managers. In his coming-out column, Peter wrote a sarcastic piece called “Wow! Count Those Stars on the CBC.” To introduce its new schedule, the CBC was sending “stars” like Catherine McKinnon, Norman DePoe, Gordon Pinsent, and Tommy Hunter to western Canada; and Maggie Morris, Knowlton Nash, and Warner Troyer to the Maritimes. “Guess that woke them up out there in viewer-land,” Peter sniffed.¹⁷ By October 2, just plain “Peter Gzowski” lamented the fact that on CTV, rival network to the CBC, youth culture seemed to be taking over in shows like A Go Go ’66. Peter also excoriated CTV shows such as Gomer Pyle, Jackie Gleason, and morning cartoons. “As a grown-up,” he concluded, “I expect to get a lot of reading done this winter.”¹⁸

On November 1, 1965, Peter returned to This Hour Has Seven Days. Now he thought it was one of the highlights of the CBC’s season. “For one thing,” he noted, “it’s lost its embarrassing, on-air fascination with itself — its self-congratulatory gloating over the week’s mail and telephone calls; its self-glorifying promotion of programs yet to come.” Furthermore, Patrick Watson was a far better co-host than John Drainie, and as long as Laurier LaPierre didn’t try to sing, Peter would continue to like him, too. He admitted that he had once expected too much from the show. He had wanted more analysis. Now he understood that television’s role was not to analyze but to transmit experience. Furthermore, Peter admitted, he was addicted to the show. It wasn’t great journalism, but it was, he concluded, good television.

Two weeks later Peter was singing the praises of Peter Falk, who played a lawyer in The Trials of Danny O’Brien. Peter especially enjoyed O’Brien’s flaws: he lied, cheated, and chiselled. Sometimes he lost cases, and he pursued his ex-wife almost incessantly.¹⁹ On December 1, 1965, Peter was pleased with a new show, Quentin Durgens, M.P., which, he thought, might even convince Canadians that “Canadian politics can be dramatic.”²⁰ The star of the new show? None other than Gordon Pinsent, who, apparently, was becoming a real star.

On December 15, 1965, Peter excoriated shows such as Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy because they trivialized war.²¹ On New Year’s Day 1966, he gave out “Strabies” for the best and worst in television in 1965. Pierre Berton won for best improved performer, for he had “finally learned to listen to the people he’s talking with.” Gordon Sinclair, the popular and outspoken radio personality, won for best interviewer, and for the “sheer brass” of his questions on religion and income. For sports Peter liked Bob Pennington’s commentary on soccer games. Pennington proved that it was possible to comment “in a reasonably normal voice, to be silent sometimes and sometimes even to criticize what’s going on in the field without spoiling the viewer’s enjoyment.” Laurier LaPierre won Peter’s award for the most perfect moment on live television: while introducing himself, he forgot his own name. Peter thought that CBC’s coverage of the 1965 federal election, hosted by Norman DePoe, was “bungled,” while CTV’s coverage with Charles Lynch was “immaculate.”²² Peter also singled out Singalong Jubilee, Quentin Durgens, M.P., and Wayne and Shuster’s Show of the Week for special praise. He liked Beryl Fox’s film reportage, particularly The Mills of the Gods (1965), one of the first films to criticize the American role in the war in Vietnam.

On January 22, 1966, Peter declared space shots on television dull and boring.²³ Two weeks later he thought the same of CBC-TV’s news. At 11:00 p.m. each evening Earl Cameron merely read “someone else’s words.” Peter’s point was that while the medium could be a powerful communicator, it was underused or misused. Where were the “interviews, films, cartoons, diagrams, maps, songs, skits, speeches,” and so on? In other words, where was the visual content on CBC-TV’s news?²⁴ On February 19, 1966, he defended the much-maligned spy series Blue Light, starring Robert Goulet, because the show was a serious interpretation of the detective genre. Now he had grown tired of satires of the genre such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Danger Man, the very television shows, he admitted, that he had once liked. On March 5, Peter thought that colour television, which at the time was available only on American channels, was “a nice gimmick,” but not much of an improvement over black and white. Peter was looking forward to Batman in colour, and so was Alison. “Imagine,” she told her father, “Batman with green teeth and red eyes.”²⁵ On April 2, 1966, Peter noted that, several years after the scandals of the 1950s, game shows were back in fashion.²⁶ Greed, uncomplicated by skill, he pointed out, was the emotion that seemed to appeal most to viewers.²⁷ Two weeks later Peter and his family were still having misgivings about colour TV, so he decided to return the rented set.²⁸

On May 2, 1966, Peter debated whether it was better to watch hockey at Maple Leaf Gardens or live on television. On the one hand, he liked the way television brought the viewer both long shots and close-ups. On the other hand, he disliked some of the commentary, which failed to understand the subtleties of hockey. For instance, when Eric Nesterenko shot wide of the net, it wasn’t necessarily a missed scoring opportunity. He might have been setting up a scoring chance by bouncing the puck off the boards to make it land in front of the net where a teammate was waiting to score.²⁹

Two weeks later Peter was up in arms because CBC’s president, Alphonse Ouimet, had fired Patrick Watson and Laurier LaPierre. Viewers, Peter pointed out, as well as some of This Hour’s guests, including René Lévesque and Pierre Berton, also protested, but in vain.³⁰ On June 4, 1966, Peter was fed up with the expression “would you believe that ...?” The expression, according to Peter, had begun as a joke on Get Smart, with a line like “The building is surrounded by 25 men. Would you believe it?” The other character in the show did not, so Smart, the bungling detective, pared down the number of men to twenty, then fifteen, then ended up with “How about two car hops and a nun?” Even Peter’s tax accountant used the expression, as in “Would you believe that you owe ...?” It was a “pretence of fashionablity,” deemed Peter, and those who used the expression were merely exposing their squareness.³¹

On June 18, 1966, in Peter’s final column as television reviewer, called “The Vietnam War: TV’s Epic Eastern,” he slammed television coverage of the war. Dissenters were being marginalized, and Peter laid the blame on television, which gave too much time to the opinions of official Washington and almost none to young protesters. In place of debate, television showed specials on President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch, and on Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra. “But on a cruel, ugly, sordid war,” Peter railed, which was “sopping up the lives of thousands of young Americans, draining away billions of dollars, slaughtering innocents and innocence, what is here? One side of a many-sided picture.”³²

Peter’s television reviews provide a window onto the world of the mid-1960s, a world that was being torn apart by war. His reviews also reveal his thinking on the nature of television as a medium. While most viewers were enchanted by its magic, and while most reviewers continued to review only content, Peter was beginning to examine the relationship of the media to its message. Marshall McLuhan, no doubt, influenced Peter.³³ Although McLuhan’s Understanding Media wasn’t published until 1964, just as Peter was beginning to write his TV reviews, articles by McLuhan had appeared beforehand. Since Peter read voraciously and assimilated information rapidly, Understanding Media’s explanation that form and structure of information determine meaning filtered into Peter’s reviews. As Strabo, the skeptical squinter, he did indeed have the ability to see distant objects clearly. And, more importantly, to see through and around images near and far.

In addition to hiring Peter as a television reviewer, Borden Spears published several of Peter’s feature articles. On November 16, 1964, “Do the Toronto Argonauts Lose on Purpose?” was published in Maclean’s under the pseudonym Peter N. Allison. During the 1960s, the once-proud team, founded in 1874, usually finished last. Nevertheless, Peter remained a fan. What was compelling about the Toronto team, he wrote, was the fact that they always lost “marvelously,” for they played with zest and enthusiasm right to the gend.

In “Geneviève Bujold to Stardom on a Cool New Path,” published in Maclean’s on December 15, 1965, Peter turned from sports to culture. For the article, he later admitted, he had interviewed the actress once only, over lunch in Montreal and while driving back to Bujold’s home there. (The interview actually took place in Toronto.) His only other research, he confessed, came from a few clippings, and he had never seen any of her films. When next he met Bujold, she was rude. While writing some of his freelance articles, Peter later admitted, he had been more interested in money than quality. After all, he explained, he was paid the same fee, $600, no matter if he worked for weeks or days. One can scarcely blame him for shortcuts. He had no full-time job, and yet he had a growing family to support.³⁴

The next month, January 1966, in “Dylan: An Explosion of Poetry,” published in Maclean’s, Peter turned to music. He had attended a Bob Dylan concert in Toronto’s Massey Hall the previous November, and the show had changed his mind about rock and roll, which he had once judged “too loud, too boorish, too dull.” To complete his research, he flew to New York where, in Greenwich Village, he listened to bands that blended classical music with rhythm and blues. His trip convinced him that this “New Music” was “the most vital, exciting art form in America,” for it boldly mixed folk music, one of Peter’s favourite genres, with 1950s hard-core rock as well as blues, jazz, and country. Dylan’s innovation, Peter explained, was to add to New Music his haunting and poetic lyrics; these in turn gave voice to disenchanted youth and its preoccupation with racial injustice. The British music critic Kenneth Allsop was right, Peter concluded, to call Dylan “the most remarkable poet of the sixties.”

During the mid-1960s, Peter collaborated with Trent Frayne on Great Canadian Sports Stories: A Century of Competition, which was published in 1965 as part of a series of books published in anticipation of Canada’s centennial. Pierre Berton was editor-in-chief of the series; Frank Newfeld, art director; and Ken Lefolii, managing editor. In their generously illustrated book, Frayne and Gzowski covered sports from horse racing to figure skating to hockey. Among the short articles was one on Marilyn Bell’s heroic swim across Lake Ontario in 1954, one on Tom Longboat’s victory at the Boston Marathon in 1907, and one on Sandy Somerville’s first-place finish in the American National Amateur golfing championship of 1932. While each chapter was the result of collaboration between the two men, the prologue was Frayne’s, and Peter wrote the impressionistic epilogue entitled “The Changing Styles of Watching and Playing.” Canadian pioneers, he argued, had little time for playing or watching sports. By Confederation, however, Canadians had become spectators. To celebrate Confederation on July 1, 1867, Torontonians took in a lacrosse match between the Toronto Lacrosse Club and Six Nations Natives from Brantford, Ontario. Spectator sports peaked between 1945 and 1965, but only hockey, Peter maintained, continued to attract spectators. Baseball was “a dead item in Canada,” and boxing was “staggering against the ropes.” Even Canadian football, he claimed, was at the end of a boom period that had begun in the 1930s. Horse racing, like hockey, drew crowds, but Peter wondered if it was only on-track betting that kept people coming to the races.³⁵

However, there was some hope — as attendance declined, participation increased. “In 1965,” Peter claimed, “more Canadians were engaging in sports more than ever, and their interests ranged from volleyball on Vancouver Island to skin-diving off Newfoundland.” Sports equipment sales were up. So popular was curling that, he predicted, it might soon rival hockey as Canada’s national game.³⁶ Golfing and sailing were increasingly popular. Skiing, too, was on the rise. Canadians had more leisure time, more expendable cash, and at the same time, Peter speculated, “the first excitement of televised sport” was wearing thin.

In the last half of his four-page text, Peter singled out Bobby Hull, who was, according to Peter, “indisputably the finest [hockey] player active in the game.” Hull combined bits of his famous predecessors — “the speed of Morenz and the instinct for goals of a Richard to the strength and control of Gordie Howe.” What Hull added to these qualities was “a sheer joy” in playing. According to Peter, he skated “with the abandon of a prairie twelve-year-old set free on a frozen river.” Although he was “a remarkably clean and gentlemanly player,” he sometimes belted the opposition “just for the thrill of the contact.” And he derived his greatest pleasure, Peter thought, “from the pure motion and excitement of the game.” Off ice, he engaged in farming, fast boats, and scuba diving “with the same swashbuckling enthusiasm” he brought to hockey.

To accompany the article, Peter chose a photograph of Hull standing nonchalantly against a background of an ice-blue sky. Photographer Horst Ehricht had taken the shot at thigh level looking upward to a bulging torso whose hands tenderly hold a fishing rod. The hockey star, as if unaware of the camera, peers at a distant object.³⁷ The photograph had already appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1961 where Peter must have seen it, and perhaps clipped it for future use. Copyright belonged to the photographer, but Peter never did seek permission to use it.³⁸

After Harry Bruce had quit Maclean’s in September 1964, he was appointed managing editor of Saturday Night. Almost immediately, Bruce hired Peter as the magazine’s sport columnist. In the November issue, Peter gave seven reasons for scrapping the Olympics, including the fact that professionals were excluded, as were hundreds of millions of Chinese. To replace the Olympics, Peter suggested annual world tournaments focusing on specific sports.

In April 1965, Peter expressed his distain for professional boxing. In fact, he believed that Cassius Clay, the world champion, was “a publicist first and a fighter second,” a premature judgment that he later modified. His sports column in May was a review of several books on horse racing — Trent Frayne’s history of the Queen’s Plate, published in 1959; Bert Clark Thayer’s The Thoroughbred; and a collection of articles called The Fireside Book of Horse Racing. In June 1965, Peter was vexed because Sports Illustrated had refused to take a stand on the colour barrier that kept qualified “Negroes” from competing in the annual Masters Golf Tournament at Augusta, Georgia, an objection that was probably ahead of its time in sports journalism. In July he turned to soccer, which he had already written about in Maclean’s two years earlier, and in much the same manner. He liked the “mosaic” quality of the game. In Toronto the most predominant flavour, Peter deemed, was Italian. In August he wrote about Bill Crothers’s victory at the Toronto International Track Meet over Peter Snell, his greatest rival in the half-mile run. And in September 1965, the sports columnist was back to golf when he wrote about the Canadian Open of that year, starring Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, “golf’s most exciting twosome.” October found Peter arguing that “baseball is just as Canadian a sport as, say, golf.” He even threw out the possibility that baseball was the only game played from Atlantic to Pacific in Canada.³⁹

In November 1965, Peter’s sports column for Saturday Night presented Barbara Long, a sultry twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker, whom Peter called “the most interesting sportswriter to appear on the scene in some time.” She wrote for The Village Voice. Peter liked Long’s “loose and easy” style of writing, and the fact that she always appeared to enjoy her subject matter. “She writes with a kind of cool,” Peter explained, “that lets the essential humour of most sports shine through.” She loved describing sexy male athletes. Long also wrote about a pool hustler, Nine-Ball Mike, for whom the game was “his whole identity, and he had to play every day.” Peter’s article was accompanied by a beguiling photograph of Long. He had never met the woman in person, but he seems to have fallen in love with her photograph, and with her “nice laugh” when he interviewed her during a one-hour telephone conversation. In the article, Peter mentioned Norman Mailer, whose piece on the first Sonny Liston– Floyd Patterson fight had influenced Long. Peter also referred to Tom Wolfe, who once observed that Long’s style was “a cross between H.L. Mencken and William Burroughs.”⁴⁰ Peter concluded the article with the hope that he could convince Barbara Long to attend a hockey game, presumably in company with the sportswriter of Saturday Night.⁴¹

In January 1966, Peter wrote about the creation of a new trophy, the Vanier Cup, named after Governor General Georges Vanier. College football, too long ignored, according to Peter, would now gain a greater following.⁴² In February, Peter was back to heavyweight boxing, which was becoming “more and more ludicrous.” Since winning the world championship, Cassius Clay had never really been challenged.⁴³ In March, Peter sang the praises of Canadian sportswomen, and mentioned, among others, Petra Burka, who had recently won the world championship in figure skating; Marlene Stewart Streit and Sandra Post, champion golfers; Nancy Greene, Canada’s best female skier of the day; and Elaine Tanner, one of the country’s best swimmers.⁴⁴ Peter’s topic in May 1966 was golf, and in June, baseball. Now he was down on the sport. “Poor baseball!” he opined, “It’s become the cricket of the 1960s — a marvellous game to play, and an achingly boring one to watch.”⁴⁵

Peter’s final sports column for Saturday Night, published in July 1966, was on volleyball. Two years earlier, soon after Jennie and he had purchased their Toronto Islands cottage,⁴⁶ a group of volleyball aficionados, friends, colleagues, and mostly fellow islanders had organized weekend volleyball tournaments. The court was located near the cottage of Harry and Penny Bruce. Among the players was a bank clerk who was also, according to Peter, “one of Canada’s finest and most subtle poets” (Raymond Souster). There was a literary critic (Robert Fulford) who, according to Peter, never used his wit to demean a writer of little talent; a gentle, young mother (Elizabeth Amer); and a “devilishly handsome young writer, thought of by his friends as the sweetest and most evenly dispositioned of men” (probably Liz Amer’s brother, Victor Coleman, poet and editor at one of Toronto’s small publishing houses). David Amer was also one of the players. The Amers were so good-looking that the players assumed their marriage would last forever.⁴⁷ Although Peter doesn’t describe a character who sounds like Harry Bruce, Bruce was indeed one of the regulars. Peter simply had to win. “Peter was one of those who, if the competition was good, wanted to play on till the stars shone and the ball disappeared in the face of the moon,” recalled Bruce. After a poorly played or boring game, Peter skulked off, head held down in sulking disapproval. David Crombie, who was also one of the players, remembered Peter’s zealous need to win.⁴⁸ In his article in Saturday Night, however, all that Peter recalled were “some highly enjoyable Saturday afternoons,” and fellow players “leaping around in the sunshine … arguing about what the score really was.”⁴⁹

In April 1965, Harry Bruce promoted Peter to the position of contributing editor of Saturday Night, where he joined the likes of Nathan Cohen, Robert Fulford, Ken McNaught, and Philip Stratford. The new position allowed Peter to write occasional feature articles in addition to his sports columns. In April 1965, his first feature was called “The B and B’s Desperate Catalogue of the Obvious.” In it Peter excoriated the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, established in November 1963 by Prime Minister Lester Pearson to examine the perilous state of French-English relations in Canada. Chaired by newspaper editor André Laurendeau and university president Davidson Dunton, the commission was, according to Peter, a waste of $1.5 million dollars. The commission’s first published report, which Peter called nothing but “committee think,” informed Canadians what Peter believed they already knew — that French Canadians weren’t happy with Confederation, and that English Canadians couldn’t understand why. “The committee has laboured to design a horse,” Peter concluded, “and has brought out the rough outline of a very expensive camel.”⁵⁰

Peter’s next feature in Saturday Night was “The Awesome Cult of the Utterly Trivial,” which began with “I wonder if everyone would mind not talking about homosexuals for a while,” for he was becoming bored with “the homosexual problem.” Every media outlet, he harrumphed, was discussing what was new with “the flits.” An American magazine had even published a glossary of homosexual slang, and, especially irritating to Peter, the good, old word gay had been co-opted by homosexuals. He poured scorn on Susan Sontag, whose “Notes on Camp,” published the year before in Partisan Review, had noted homosexual influences on camp, whose purpose, the New York writer pointed out, was to puncture middle-class artifice and pretension. “Homosexuals are in the vanguard of the fashionable, we’re constantly being told,” Peter went on, “and life for heterosexuals is just one constant struggle to keep up with what’s new with the flits.” The article was published in Saturday Night in June 1965, which was, ironically, the same issue in which Peter had boldly and admirably voiced his complaint about the Masters’ banning of African-American players. Blacks, yes. Gays, no. For years to come, well past the time when intelligent people had begun to show some modicum of respect for sexual variation, Peter’s mind remained firmly closed.