This amazing kind of energy moment

The First Time | Kirby and Don Pyle revisit the past and discuss Pyle's new photography book Shot in a Mirror launching this week from Midnight Mass Press in Toronto

The opening picture of local Toronto legend musician/artist Don Pyle’s immensely personal new photography book Shot in a Mirror (launching November 26, 2022 from Midnight Mass Press) is a blurry shot of his grade 5 and 6 teacher during recess, a major crush at the time.

This photo “says so much to me,” explains Pyle, that somehow as a queer youth, “I understood quite clearly others perceived my developing interest in men as wrong, something to be hidden and definitely not safe.”

So rather than simply ask his teacher if he could take his photo, the grade schooler hid his camera to sneak a shot, caught in a sideways glance by his idol. Another class day, Pyle couldn’t help but inquire about what appeared to be a classic Beethoven portrait bleeding through his teacher’s dress shirt. The teacher responded in kind by proudly unbuttoning his shirt revealing the famed composer, complimenting Don’s acuity.

Ah! School daze.

Don Pyle, 1977

Forming his first band at age 16 (Crash Kills Five), releasing 13 albums with various bands he played in (drummer in the all-girl groups Fifth Column and Long Branch), producer or engineer on releases by The Sadies, Iggy Pop, John Doe, Flesh World, scoring four feature films (including John Greyson’s) and perhaps best known for TV’s Kids in the Hall theme and music with Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Pyle had thought his follow-up to his photographic narrative of Toronto’s Punk History, Trouble in the Camera Club (ECW, 2011) might well be his memoir, when Midnight Mass publisher, Matt Finner approached him about a second photobook. Much like Trouble, Shot in A Mirror also forms a narrative, what Pyle describes as “a trail of clues” about a secret and openly gay history that, in our relatively short lifetime, has gone from unspoken hidden things to be ashamed of to all out queer extravaganza.

Pyle notes, “Now on YouTube, countless boys make videos of themselves sashaying in high heels with no fear whatsoever. Something that can be jarringly shocking to me but so moving.” Having gone from criminal to diseased pariah to reigning queen, I share Don’s amazement.

Unlike Trouble, Shot in a Mirror is far more reflective of what directed/shaped this burgeoning queer artist’s life in the 80s/90s Toronto arts scene, some friends, others strangers, those that Pyle describes as “a bunch of beautiful queers in some way.” Through the lens of Don’s camera, we become privy to a collective richness of activists, visual artists, writers, musicians, their ideas, wit, beauty as people which makes this collection immediate and moving.

Candid shots of such luminaries as artist Stephen Andrews (who graces the cover), Fifth Column’s Caroline Azar, Beverly Breckenridge, filmmakers Kevin Hegge, Wendy Coburn, artist Shary Boyle, novelist Edmund White, as well as Lou Reed, Bowie, Soft Cell, Fred Schneider, The Runaways (at El Mocambo).

Pyle says, “They all contain a part of me and I them whether they know it or not.”

What touched me the most were portraits of personal friends, so intimate, a few captured at Halloween parties, one of Bryan Fisher (a.k.a. Brenda Star) Pyle’s first relationship introduced by a friend, ‘My friend over there thinks you’re cute. Do you want to meet him?’. Older-than-him gay men who listened to Millie Jackson, Barbara Cook, Melissa Manchester, “had lady names and personas for their drag alter egos (Brenda, Pearl, Rose, Luda-Mae, Gypsy…).” Friends who died of AIDS or other horrific violence prevalent against gays. 

Pyle tells the story a friend whose name he couldn’t remember, someone he didn’t know as well, but who he’d see out on the street from time to time. “We’d stop and say ‘hi’ at first, and then that became smiles and ‘hi’ as we passed—our only real connection being the loss of friends, men who had meant so much to us and each other.” This is a painfully accurate description of the AIDS years.

In a zine that accompanies the first run of Shot in a Mirror, Pyle reflects on loss, “capturing grief is something I turn away from…I want to give people their private moments.” But when revisiting the photos something that really struck him was the loss. “O my god, so many of the people in this book are dead … Those keep adding up, adding up and the number of living ones, including me, is getting smaller and smaller. The balance is shifting,” he says.

For Pyle, this book is about capturing more of the joy and what he describes as “this amazing kind of energy moment.” That queer penchant towards joy carries Pyle’s collection throughout.

“Queers did not just riot. We are everywhere,” declares fellow photographer, queercore musician Martin [Crudo] Sorrondeguy, who designs/publishes Susto, a 24” x 30” double-sided screen-printed portfolio/poster that comes housed in a custom-screened envelope, its latest edition featuring Pyle’s punk photography along with an interview by Martin, which will also be on hand (as well as Sorrondeguy DJ-ing) at the launch.

Martin [Crudo] Sorrondeguy, Susto, a 24” x 30” double-sided screen-printed portfolio/poster

I asked Don about when and how his punk scene connected with the emergence of gay disco. “I didn’t really meet/know any gay men who knew or were into my music back then, I would go to Stages (above the Parkside Tavern) and Voodoo, and I joined a gay softball team, Cabbagetown Group Baseball League,” Pyle adds, not ‘Gay’ but ‘Group’ so you could tell your family or work at the time.” Like every other multi-facet of gay life you found your queers, or they found you.

Don and I had met back in the early 80s, the must-go-to late Sunday afternoon tea dance at Cornelius above the Gasworks (Yonge & Dundonald) where Bryan tended the beer cooler making his rent in tips that single day. Talk Talk’s It’s My Life and Prince’s When Doves Cry crammed the dance floor lit by an exterior glass brick corner wall. Back at Don’s, he put on 4AD’s This Mortal Coil It’ll End in Tears. I had no idea what I was listening to but knew I wanted more. And he indeed introduced me to so much more.

Being a huge fan of Galaxie 500 then, Don made me a mix tape, saying, “Here’s a bit of history to fill in.” It was that queerest of bands, The Velvet Underground. Icons Lou Reed, Warhol, Mary Woronov, John Waters, Divine… this queer counterculture having way more fun breaking the rules than creating/imposing them. Working their queer magic. The last of its local kind emerged with Will Munro and Vazeleen.

“Being able to hold a tangible image that captures an element of the essence of a person or animal has always contained some sort of magic,” Pyle muses. “Is it the eyes, or the spirit, or just the beauty of light as it plays over living and moving things, animating and holding moments that are otherwise fleeting?” This essence is the very heart of Shot in a Mirror.

While looking through his viewfinder to select photos for the book, Pyle revisited so many memories that he simply wanted to keep, “I just thought I want to hold what is happening and what I’m seeing forever.”

And for those of us who lived through and those wanting to know what it was like, the photos by Don Pyle collected here are as close to being there we have.

Midnight Mass & Susto present Don Pyle, Shot in A Mirror launch Saturday, November 26 at Two Two’s (296 Brunswick Avenue). Doors 7pm, Talk 8pm.

Kirby’s Poetry Is Queer is out now from Palimpsest Press.

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Shot in the Mirror
Midnight Mass Press
November 2022

Publisher’s Description

Shot In A Mirror is a new 100-page collection of 50 intimate portraits, and is the second book from Don Pyle.

Spanning 1977 to 2016, this edition of colour and black and white photographs is published by Midnight Mass Press, 2022.

Each book is accompanied by a companion volume, Reflections In A Mirror, featuring an interview with Don Pyle conducted by Chris Colohan and Matthew Finner. Pyle provides images relating to the conversation from his photo and personal archive. Risograph printed, 8.5” x 11”.

Each set includes a deluxe colour postcard portrait of Gary Floyd from 2016, and a Shot In A Mirror bookmark designed by Ashley Hohman.

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Issue #21 of Send My Love to Anyone

November 2022 Gatherings

Excerpt from Holden Before and After: Love Letter to a Son Lost to Overdose by Tara McGuire

 The First Time: “This amazing kind of energy moment” by Kirby

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