John Herbert
1926 - 2001
by Todd Richmond
365Gay.com Features Editor

No one could ever accuse John Herbert of leading a dull life.  Far from it.  Like his English counterpart, Quentin Crisp, Toronto born Herbert was bigger than life.  A battered pansy who ultimately became a household name.

He was born John Herbert Brundage in 1926. As a toddler his "artistic" side emerged with a vengeance.  At six, he was trying on his mother's clothes and applying her makeup.

Herbert was educated at York Memorial Collegiate and various art schools including the National Ballet School. 

By the age of 18 he was an accomplished drag queen who could pass as a female model at a fashion show but was also subjected to taunts and jeers when he appeared on the streets as his visibly gay male self.

In his 20s, he was mugged on a downtown street.  But, when police arrived his attackers accused him of trying to hustle them.  Herbert was charged with soliciting, convicted, and  imprisoned in the Guelph Reformatory, in Guelph, Ontario.

At Guelph he was beaten and raped by other inmates, but that hardly stopped him from exploring drag, wearing dresses and curling his hair in prison.

When he got out, he continued to do Toronto in drag.  When one of the officers who charged him several years earlier recognized him one night in a laneway Herbert was hauled off again to jail. Dressing in drag was still a crime in postwar Canada.

This time he was sentenced to the Mimico Reformatory outside Toronto.

After his release, he built a career in theatre, establishing his own Adventure Theatre Company with his sister Nana Brundage in 1960, and then used his prison experiences to write Fortune and Men's Eyes in 1964.

The play mercilessly exposed the homosexual reality of prison culture. In the days before gay liberation, the script was considered too hot to produce in Canada. Set in a prison cell, it charts a drama of violence and desire among four male inmates who play the roles of husbands and wives.

It was workshopped by actors at the Stratford Festival but the board of directors refused to permit a public performance.

Three years later, in 1967,  it was picked up by Lee Strasburg of New York's famed Actors' Studio. Its New York debut and subsequent productions, including a Canadian premiere in French at Montreal's Théâtre Quat'Sous, shocked critics both by the raw depiction of prison culture and by the suggestion that the play was partly autobiographical. In the optimistic atmosphere following Canada's centennial year, some Canadian critics declared this underworld was best left unexamined but others championed Mr. Herbert's honesty.

Nevertheless it was adapted as a film in 1971, won the 1975 Chalmers Award for new Canadian plays, and has been produced in more than 100 countries in 40 languages.

Herbert went on to write 16 more plays, including Born of Medusa's Blood, The Dinosaurs, Magda and The Butterfly and the Nightingale, but few were given fully professional productions and none enjoyed the same success as Fortune and Men's Eyes.

Herbert made his living primarily as a teacher, especially at the Three Schools of Art, but as Toronto's theatre scene exploded in the 1970s, he also played a role as a provocative public figure who once showed up for a performance by Quentin Crisp in a tailcoat to heckle the rival gay icon.

Described as a "mordant gadfly" by one unnamed writer in The Globe and Mail, he was a satirist who contributed to various cabarets and revues. After one such performance in 1978, Globe critic Ray Conlogue compared his flamboyant bitterness to that of novelist Mordecai Richler: "His voice is one of corroding moral outrage not yet (unlike Richler's) softened into the nihilistic ennui that dries the sweat on the brow of the Rosedale hostess."

Herbert died June 23, 2001.  He was 74 and had been ill for a month after undergoing a biopsy for prostate cancer.