Edward A. Lacey

Edward Allan Lacey, academic, poet, teacher, translator (born 7 July 1937 in Linsday, ON; died 1995 in Toronto, ON). Edward A. Lacey was part of a trend in the 1960s towards more openly gay writing in Canada. He studied French and German at the University of Toronto and received his MA in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with writing the first openly gay book of poetry in Canada: The Forms of Loss (1965), a collection of 26 poems that was financed by Dennis Lee and Margaret Atwood.

Career Highlights

Edward A. Lacey was fluent in French, Spanish and Portuguese. He spent most of his career teaching English in developing countries and working as a translator. In 1963, he was teaching at the University of Alberta when he became reacquainted with Dennis Lee. Lacey first met Lee when they were students at the University of Toronto, where Lacey studied languages with Robert Finch, a professor of French and a poet. Lee encouraged Lacey to compile his first book of poems, which Lee and Margaret Atwood helped finance.

Lacey’s poems sometimes dealt with issues of marginalization, as in his poem “Street Song” from The Forms of Loss. It reflects a time when gay men were commonly viewed as aberrant, and in turn valorized their outlaw status, their “otherness.” The poem also reflects Lacey’s sexual preference for rough trade and his stylistic idiosyncrasies, including spelling and capitalization.

Sick and spondiac here I flow

The streets of downtown TORonto;

The blowsy crowds wash to and fro

The winds blow high, the winds blow low

And I am dust; but I will go

Where dwell some people I well know

And I will sell my body-o

Upon the streets of TORonto.

In addition to The Forms of Loss, three other collections of Lacey’s poetry appeared during his lifetime. The self-published Path of Snow: Poems 1951–73 (1974) was distributed by gay poet Ian Young’s Catalyst Press and Ahasuerus Press. Later: Poems 1973–1978 (1978) was also published by Catalyst Press. And Third World: Travel Poems by E.A. Lacey (Jakarta, 1994) was published by Lacey’s friend Byron Black. The Collected Poems and Translations of Edward A. Lacey, edited by Fraser Sutherland and published by John Robert Colombo, appeared in 2000. (See also Private Presses; Small Presses.)

A Magic Prison: Letters from Edward Lacey (1995) was edited by David Helwig, with an introduction by Henry Beissel. Lacey’s poetry also appears in the anthologies Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine, An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics & Culture (1991) and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets (2007).

Over the years, Lacey also translated four books from French, Spanish and Portuguese, and occasionally contributed to anthologies and periodicals.

Death

After being run over on a street in Bangkok while drunk and suffering life-threatening injuries that included brain damage, Lacey returned to Canada in 1992. He died from a heart attack in 1995 in a welfare rooming house in Toronto.