5/12/10
7:06 PM
Page 160
NEWSMAKERS
by Richard Burnett
“I don’t want to be judgmental but I do feel there's a certain amount of denial that for all of the fun of these drugs there is a price to be paid. Some people can manage it but I just couldn’t. Unfortunately those who can are lionized and olympified in gay culture – those who can take the most drugs, stay up the latest and still have a great body and have 45,000 affairs. I just can’t do that. I don’t have the stamina.”
Rufus, a long way from Sarajevo’s I’m trying my best not to stare at Rufus Wainwright’s crotch, except Rufus is sitting directly in front of me, legs spread as he scratches the inner left thigh of his pants. I stutter. “Uh…” So I ask Rufus how he manages to avoid temptation since checking into rehab eight years ago to beat his crystal meth addiction. (I know, but it’s all I could think of…) “I haven’t been a severe hedonist for a long time,” Rufus replies matterof-factly. “It WAS a lot of fun and I got a lot out of it.” I remember those years, notably Rufus’s descent into crystal meth hell. “I’d been drinking for years, but certainly what brought the curtain down was the crystal meth,” Rufus told me at the time. “I’d go on these three- or four-day binges. So I checked myself into rehab. I had a lot of help. I consulted other performers who’d been through the same experience and the general consensus was, yes, I should put everything on hold. I was very fortunate.” Wainwright also believes crystal meth is ruining the gay community.
Today, all these years later, I’m staring Rufus straight in his eyes – and they’re smiling – as he scratches the inner left thigh of his pants some more. “That’s not to say these phantoms don’t arise. But that said, I want to live.” If anything, the January 18 death of his mother, famed Montreal folk singer Kate McGarrigle, from a rare form of cancer called clear-cell sarcoma, spurred Wainwright to re-evaluate the gift of life. The morning after her passing, Rufus wrote on his website, “When inevitably I read today in the papers that my mother lost her battle with cancer last night, I am filled with an immense desire to add that this battle, though lost, was tremendously fruitful during these last three and a half years of her life. She witnessed her daughter’s marriage, the creation of my first opera, the birth of her first grandchild [his sister Martha’s son Arcangelo]… “Yes, it was all too brief, but as I was saying to her sister Anna last night while sitting by her body after the struggle had ceased, there is never enough time and she, my amazing mother with whom everyone fell in love, went out there and bloody did it. I will miss you mother, my sweet and valiant explorer.” On this day, two months later, Rufus tells me, “I’ve been up to Montreal a couple of times since my mom died and I’ve had to wrestle with the intensity.”
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I’ve been up to Montreal a couple of times since my mom died and I’ve had to wrestle with the intensity. RUFUS
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160 juin 2010 fugues.com
Then at this very moment Rufus’s cell phone rings and the display
Photo : R o b e r t L a l i b e r té
MADO BURNETT:Layout 1