Charlie David is likely Canada’s highest-profile out performer. He has starred in TV shows like Dante’s Cove, hosted the travel show Bump! and wrote, produced and directed the film Mulligans.
We caught up with Charlie over the phone from his new home in Montreal, where he recently moved after dividing his time between Vancouver and Los Angeles.
“Part of it is politics. I feel that we are really lucky in Canada. My tax dollars [are] going towards the US Government right now, which I don’t see as treating our community as fully equal citizens. I have the benefit of being Canadian and wanted my tax dollars to go here. Also I have been west coast based for the last 12 years and wanted to try something different. I have always loved Montreal so I decided to give it a go for a few years and see how I like it.”
Those familiar with David would describe him as a warm hearted, genuine and good person. Which is why Shadowlands, with its themes of murder, death, sex and violence, may shock fans. It shows a darker side of Charlie David.
“Yes I think so!” he laughed, when I posed the contrast to him. “In writing it, I was surprised a lot myself. There is a lot of darkness there and a lot of the stories, though fictional, drawing from personal experience and imagined. Like anybody, there is light and darkness within us. This was an exploration into some of that darkness. It is not necessarily about violence, but the pain that we go through. Most of the stories in the anthology are love stories, but not necessarily traditional ones. It is more laced with the introspection and pain that comes with love and our journey with it. Whether it is meeting somebody for the first time, longing to be with somebody we can’t be with, the tragedy that happens when relationships break up or when we lose somebody that we’ve loved.”
This isn’t to say that the stories are bad, quite the contrary. Beautifully written, often erotic, the stories explore themes that all of us experience. Grindr in particular deals with a young man losing a lover in an accident, and his supernatural guide to acceptance.
“I really like to play, in my writing, with the concept of the here-and–now, and the afterlife. I have been thinking a lot about it recently; what happens to us, if there is a possibility of communion with the souls of the dead. I am in a place of believing that there is a oneness, an energy that we come from and enter back into after our journey here on earth.
“The pain of what it would be like to lose the love of your life - I haven’t gone through that, I can only imagine it, and Grindr was just that, rumination in that idea. It is something that, like it or not, we will all face at some point. ... To go through that and experience the pain is where we get the biggest growth as individuals. These stories are really an exploration for me in really yearning for that: reaching out and knowing that my soul desperately wants to fall in love in that kind of fairytale way and asking the question of [whether] that really and truly exists. I don’t believe that it exists in the way we were taught growing up with our fairytale movies and the romantic comedy. Real love is something different and it comes with a lot of joy and orgasmic moments of feeling, but it is laced with lots of moments of pain as well. That is what makes the experience so special.”
Narcissus also stands out, both from a perspective of being surprisingly frightening, and for the fact that it is written in script form.
“I originally wrote it as a 10 minute film. It won an award in Vancouver as a script reading and I decided to develop it further. Since then I pitched a Twilight-zone type show to Logo and they offered me a pre-buy on it. So that is something I am continuing to develop, to take stories from Shadowlands and put them into script format. I have four half-hour episodes done. Narcissus was the first experiment in doing that. After I had written it that way I thought it might be interesting for readers who may not be used to reading scripts to see it done that way.”
Another incredibly written (and creepy) tale is Harvest, which takes a number of surprising twists and turns before its conclusion.
“Often when I write, I don’t know where it is going. I put the pen to paper and just start going. Other writers fully know the story arc, sometimes I do and it is more methodically planned out. With Harvest it was drawn from a personal experience where I was, in ways, offered everything on a plate by a gentleman, and it scared me. I felt the darkness within that, or what was possible with it. I believe in the world there are forces of light and of darkness and we meet them in every day circumstances. Not to go with a religious connotation on that but, we are always faced with choices and they can have profound effects on us and the lives of people around us. Writing Harvest was a reflection of where I am at, being 30...where I have come from, where I go from here, and what is next. But I have never experienced an Eyes Wide Shut orgy party like in that story. It was made up, but fun to make up!”
The sexual aspect is one that, as a writer, can be a challenge. To lay your fantasies out on the page for anyone to read is quite brave, especially when it could be read by family.
“The weirdest part is having my family read it. I got a call from my Grandmother and she was coming out to Montreal to spend Thanksgiving weekend with me. I was finishing the edits on the e-book of Shadowlands and she said she had read Boy Midflight on the plane. My heart stopped. Boy Midflight was my first book and there is lots of sex and graphic ideas about sexuality in it. The thought that my Grandma was sitting on a plane reading a book with two boys in their underwear on the cover is hilarious. I was fine writing it, but the idea of my Grandma ever reading it, I didn’t know what I would do. She said, it is a real education reading this, and I thought, yeah I bet. In terms of writing it, we all have sexual fantasies and it is fun to imagine them and put them down on paper, to share and explore in that way. I think that is part of my journey. My stories, although there is sex in them, I don’t perceive them as being pornographic. There is a realistic depiction of sex that happens and they are part of a bigger journey overall.”
Writers often need to come up with unique ways to promote their work. One of the ways David has accomplished this was by creating a unique “trailer” for his work.
“It is a very interesting time in publishing. We are seeing lots of Mom & Pop bookstores closing, and unfortunately a lot of LGBT bookstores closing too. We are seeing a lot of changes in the movie, TV, and publishing industry. It is becoming more and more about individuals being able to create, using social media. Lots of people put up videos on YouTube that explode and then they have a TV show. The grander media is paying attention to some of those more grassroots movements.”
“Because I do video, I thought it would be an interesting idea to put together a video trailer for a book. I had seen a few other people do it and thought it was fun. I went to an FX house in Victoria and they had a massive green screen, and started to brainstorm interesting ways to put it together. It was so much to play with, the circus theme: me as the author being a ringmaster and inviting people into the dark circus of my mind.”
“Otherwise in terms of promotion, I am doing some book signings as I travel around with BUMP!; online promotion; I have a paperback and e-book, with an audio book coming shortly on iTunes and Audible; and a lot of other sources. I am putting it out there, and hoping that people will be interested enough to give it a read.”
Shadowlands will at times stretch your comfort zone, other times may arouse you, and will certainly make you think. Overall it is a damn fine read, and the nice thing is that it can be digested it in small segments.
“If people have enjoyed Mulligans or Bump!, or some of the other work I have out there, it offers a really different insight into who I am as a person. I really enjoy anthologies, it is nice to be able to sit down and absorb a story in 10 minutes or half an hour. ... A lot of us don’t take the time to read anymore, or to read a full length novel. This offers the opportunity to have a little morsel, little daydreams, and go on your way.”
Actor, Director, Screenwriter, Producer, Author, TV Show Host...Charlie David certainly knows how to keep busy.
“Overall when people ask me what I do or what I am, I am a storyteller. That is all it is; I tell them in different formats. I have always had that urge from a young age to share stories. Because my life is kind of weird - I don’t have a 9 to 5 job - I am faced with times of being intensely busy and then periods of downtime, like these last couple of weeks in Montreal. I just hang out and spend my leisure time as I like. I find I enjoy it the most when I continue to be creative and make stories and have little goals and push them forward. I would get very bored otherwise.”
