Symons, Hugh Brennan Scott

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Symons
  • Wiki Biography:
    • Hugh Brennan Scott Symons (July 13, 1933 – February 23, 2009), known professionally as Scott Symons, was a Canadian writer. He was most noted for his novels Place d’Armes and Civic Square, among the first works of LGBT literature ever published in Canada, as well as a personal life that was often plagued by scandal and interpersonal conflict.
    • He was openly gay at a time when this was very difficult, publishing his first novel, Place d’Armes, which dealt directly with homosexuality, two years before gay sex was decriminalized in Canada. He was an avid diarist, and many of his observations and episodes from his life found their way into his novels.  His writing style was marked by experimental forms and structures, with one of his novels being published as handwritten pages packaged in a box, and by a blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction.
    • Place d’Armes contained both autobiographical and metafictional elements; its protagonist Hugh Anderson was, like Symons, a wealthy but socially alienated man from Toronto abandoning his comfortable bourgeois life to hole up in a hotel in Montreal, rediscovering himself in sex with male prostitutes in Place d’Armes, and in turn writing his own novel within a novel about Andrew, a character who himself fit the same profile as both Symons and Anderson. The writing was liberally peppered with sexualized puns such as “fingertits”, “cocktit” and “assoul”. The novel did not garner favourable reviews upon its publication in 1967; writing in the Toronto Star, Robert Fulford deemed Anderson as “the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing”, and criticized Symons, whom he called “the monster from Toronto”, for being incapable of writing about love. Despite the criticism, however, Place d’Armes won the Beta Sigma Phi First Canadian Novel Award. Its critical reception has improved over time; in 2005, the Literary Review of Canada named Place d’Armes as one of the 100 most important books in Canadian literary history.
  • Fourth Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4860
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/199506810/scott-symons