Q&A << Richard "Bugs" Burnett

Q&A by Abby Schachter, freelance journalist and host of The Reaktor (Fridays at 2 PM EST on CJLO). Follow Abby on Tumblr.

Montreal writer Richard "Bugs" Burnett self-syndicated his headline-making Three Dollar Bill column in over half of Canada's alt-weeklies for 15 years, has been banned in Winnipeg, investigated by the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary over charges TDB was "pornographic", gotten death threats, outed politicians like former Parti Quebecois leader Andre Boisclair, been vilified in the pages of Jamaica's national newspaper The Gleaner for criticizing anti-gay dancehall star Sizzla (who would go on to write the 2005 hit song "Nah Apologize" about Burnett and UK gay activist Peter Tatchell), pissed off BB King, crossed swords with Mordecai Richler, been screamed at backstage by Cyndi Lauper and got the last-ever sit-down interview with James Brown. 

Burnett was Editor-at-Large of HOUR until the Montreal alt-weekly folded in April 2011, is Editor-at-Large of The Charlebois Post (Canada) where he writes his ABOMINABLE SHOWMAN column about arts /opera / theatre, is a columnist and writer for Canada's two most important gay publications, Fugues and Xtra (both since 1997), writes the POP TART blog for The Montreal Gazette, is a Montreal arts / pop culture / celebrity interviewer for the CURTAINS UP arts & entertainment Virtual Media Network, and is the pop culture pundit on The Barry Morgan Show every Friday from 8:30 - 9 pm on Montreal's CJAD 800 AM Radio. 

Burnett was one of the original organizers of Montreal's famed Divers/Cité Festival, was the founding president of the Montreal chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, is a regular lecturer and panelist at universities and conferences, co-starred in the first season of the Life Network's reality-TV series Out in the City, and has been interviewed and profiled in publications across Canada, Europe and the U.S., including Xtra!, Ryerson Review of Journalism, Washington Blade, Canada's publishing-industry Masthead magazine, Australia's DNA (magazine) and the international Dutch magazine WINQ.

Burnett was also named one of Alberta-based Outlooks magazine's Canadian Heroes of the Year in 2009, famed porn director Flash Conway dubbed Burnett "Canada's bad boy syndicated gay columnist" and The Montreal Buzz says, "As Michael Musto is to New York City, Richard Burnett is to Montréal." (Bio: Montreal Gazette)

Richard, you're a very successful Montreal journalist who has become somewhat of a celebrity. What are you currently working on? Tell us a bit about your column in the Montreal Gazette POP TART and other gigs.

I freelance for a many media outlets, from newspapers to websites. I also began writing my POP TART blog for The Montreal Gazette shortly after Montreal's original HOUR magazine published its last issue on April 7, 2011, after nearly 20 years in print. I was HOUR's Editor-at-Large at the time and started my syndicated gay column Three Dollar Bill at HOUR back in 1996. 

(In April 2011, HOUR was renamed HOUR Community and continued publishing for another year with an entirely new, skeleton staff paid a fraction of what the former writers and editors were being paid, and finally folded for good in May 2012). 

POP TART picks up where the old Montreal Mirror and HOUR magazine left off—covering Anglophone and alternative arts and culture in Montreal, as well as the LGBTQ community. Today, while the blogosphere is packed with name bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Michelangelo Signorile, just one daily newspaper in America boasts a bonafide gay blogger, staff writer Steve Rothaus of The Miami Herald. With POP TART, Montreal's 235-year-old daily newspaper The Gazette became Canada's first daily to host a (not always) gay blog.

Did you actively decide to pursue a career in journalism, if so why? Or did you have other plans for yourself?

I love to write. So I went to J-School at Concordia University. I love interviewing people, finding out what makes them tick. Had I not become a journalist, I would have become an archaeologist.

I think it's fair to say that you presently work in a more or less mainstream environment... But you actually began your journalistic career in the underground scene, working as a writer for Montreal's former alt-weekly magazine, the HOUR. How did you get involved in alternative press and what do you think attracts people to it?

I remember I almost wrote for the Montreal Mirror: Back on August 12, 1994, with the Major League Baseball Montreal Expos atop the standings in Major League Baseball—and looking like they were going to go all the way to the World Series—the players shockingly voted to strike. So I went to then-Mirror news editor Chris Sheridan and pitched him this story: Every time the Expos do good, there's a freakin' player's strike.

Chris liked the idea, assigned me the story, then a couple days later sheepishly called back to say Jake Richler (son of Mordecai) wanted to do the story, so I'd get a $50 kill fee instead.

This happened to me twice more. After the third time, I said, "F–k this s–t, I'm going to pitch stories to HOUR magazine instead."

HOUR's news editor at the time was Peter Wheeland. Peter—until recently a copy editor with The Gazette—used to be the editor of The Nun's Island Magazine, where I was currently translating French news stories to English and wrote the police blotter. Peter took a gamble and assigned me my first HOUR news story in May 1995. I became a regular contributor, later a 15-year columnist (Three Dollar Bill) and HOUR's Editor-at-Large. Over the next few years many of the Mirror's best journalists, writers and editors abandoned ship and crossed the street to work for HOUR.

What I loved about the old alternative weeklies was they put the writer's voice back up front and centre in the stories. Readers knew that good alt-weekly journalism – well-written and thoroughly researched – was subjective. It was supposed to be. I like to call it advocacy journalism. And readers would pick up the paper to read their favourite writers.

You began your stint at HOUR magazine in 1995 and worked your way up from contributor, to columnist (Three Dollar Bill) and eventually become an editor. In What way did working at the HOUR help shape your career? What were some of the major lessons you learned from that time? Good and bad.

Those early years at HOUR were really fun, especially the summer of 1996 when we had no editor-in-chief and the run of the place. We pumped out many in-your-face newspapers during that era, a time when I fell in with my two mentors, legendary Montreal boulevardier and Gazette columnist Nick Auf der Maur, as well as another legend, New York Times bestselling author and the Godfather of Gay Lit, Felice Picano.

Meanwhile, the competition between HOUR and the Mirror was extremely fierce back then. We had ourselves a genuine, old-school newspaper war. In the 1990s! Who woulda thunk? So, when the Mirror's then-associate editor Matthew Hays and I began a torrid affair, it was practically the hottest gossip in town. I remember I even attended a Mirror Christmas party at some chichi joint on The Main, and years later, after Editor-in-Chief Peter Scowen left the Mirror to run the HOUR, he told me, "Had I known you were there I would have thrown you out!"

Scowen later once famously said about his years at HOUR magazine, "Being Editor-in-Chief of the HOUR is like being the manager of The Who."

We all had a great run, all have amazing war stories and all hung out with the most interesting, amazing and notorious people. And we made a lot of headlines. Once, after Matt Hays, David Blair of the CBC and I co-founded the Montreal chapter of the Washington, DC-based National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (or "negligee," as we liked to call them), I wrote a Three Dollar Bill column about it. (The NLGJA works from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues, and opposes all forms of workplace bias.)

Mordecai Richler read that column and—in a November 1998 National Post column comparing the Mirror with the HOUR since HOUR's page count had finally caught up with The Mirror's (those were the days, my friend...)—he wrote, "I picked up some useful information reading Richard Burnett's column about the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association of Canada, obviously an organization whose time has come, but one, I fear, that discriminates against me and my kind."

Far from being upset about being the target of Richler's razor wit, the NLGJA instead awarded Richler a lifetime honorary membership.

Also, beginning in 1996, I spent 15 years assigning and editing writers as Editor-at-Large and subbing for all the other editors – news, arts, film and music. I also assisted at the paper's weekly editorial meetings that helped guide and shape HOUR into Montreal's best-read alt-weekly. The most important lessons I learnt was collaborative teamwork, meeting deadlines and recognizing that at the end of the day the paper belongs to the publisher, who has the last word.

I always tell students that journalism really isn't the career for them if all they want to do is become famous and make a million dollars. But if they want to meet fascinating people and help change the world one story at a time, being a journalist can be one of the most rewarding jobs in the world.

Three Dollar Bill was a weekly column of yours that was featured in a bunch of other publications and websites around Canada. It focused on Gay and Lesbian issues. What or who inspired you to begin Three Dollar Bill?

There are a zillion gay journalists out there, of course, but few have made a career out of being, well, out. In America fabulous sex columnist Dan Savage began his Savage Love column with the Seattle alt-weekly newspaper The Stranger in 1991. Then Deb Price began her ground-breaking weekly column on gay issues for the daily newspaper The Detroit News in 1992 (Deb retired her column last year, but Dan is still going strong). And I began Three Dollar Bill in 1996. After I established the column at HOUR, no syndicate would touch Three Dollar Bill – no one thought a gay column was viable at the time. So I approached every single alternative publication in Canada and, at Three Dollar Bill's height, ran in over half the alt-weeklies across the country, as well as a couple of big outlets in the USA, notable (the now-defunct) Gaywired.com. 

You're also a Gay Rights Activist and a co-founder of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association's Montreal chapter. For those who are not aware of this group, what is the premise? 

The NLGJA works from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues, and opposes all forms of workplace bias.

What inspired you to help form the NLGJA chapter in Montreal and in what way has it made a difference in both your life and career?

The Montreal NLGJA chapter united openly-gay journalists in Montreal for the first time – this was around 1997-98 – so we could discuss newsroom-related issues such as anti-gay bias, which would surface when straight reporters covered gay events, like Gay Pride. For instance, in the past, at many publications across North America, gay reporters were often not considered objective enough to write about the battle for same-sex marriage, as if straight reporters had a monopoly on so-called "objectivity." 

The Montreal NLGJA chapter also organized panels – one featured the late writer Pierre Vallières, a former intellectual leader of the Front de libération du Québec who later repudiated violence and the FLQ, not to mention Pierre also started Quebec's first gay publication, Berdaches—and we also organized gay-themed events at, for instance, the old Montreal Press Club in the Europa Hotel.

The documentary film Bully, by director and Emmy award winner Lee Hirsch, was the inspiration for an article you wrote for the Montreal Gazette. One in which you share your own bullying and homophobic experiences in high school. Why do you think this documentary had such an impact on so many people, yourself included? 

I think most people know what it's like to be bullied and it's no fun. Most folks also like to root for the underdog. So the film Bully resonated with a lot of people. As I wrote in POP TART, I was bullied din high school. I still remember the day I the words "Richard Burnett is a faggot" scrawled in big, black marker on my locker door when I attended MacDonald Cartier Memorial High School back in the late 1970s when the school's student population topped well over 4,000 (I graduated in 1982). The place literally was a war zone, with drug dealers, bullies and fights. There was even the infamous three-day riot in May 1980 that made national headlines. Anyway, when I read the anti-gay graffiti on my locker I was terrified because, of course, I was gay.

I got pushed around a lot in high school. When I visited the school two decades after I graduated, I deliberately checked out how many gay titles there were in the school's 12,000-book library. But after all those years there were still just a handful, including the 1964 classic Crimes Without Victims : Deviant Behavior and Public Policy: Abortion, Homosexuality, Drug Addiction by Edwin M. Schur. It reminded me of why I hated high school, and why I started to write my syndicated gay column Three Dollar Bill. I wanted to make a difference, and I think I did, because over the years I received countless letters and emails from readers across the country thanking me for Three Dollar Bill, that the column was the first thing they read each week and made a difference in their lives. The response really was quite humbling.

You're a very bold writer and are not scared to instigate or confront when necessary, even if it means saying what others might label as ‘harsh'. Why do you suppose that is? What inspires you to confront certain issues in an opinionated, editorialized fashion? Why not stay journalistically neutral?

I've got to say, my years at Montreal's HOUR magazine were punctuated by being dragged to the Quebec Press Council several times, being banned in Winnipeg, getting death threats, and Three Dollar Bill being investigated by The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary for being "pornographic." I've never sat on the sidelines, I've always taken a side, even when it displeased the majority. 

So I began compiling my most provocative Three Dollar Bill ledes in the late 1990s when they started pissing off people. Then in 2012, La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowski told me she picked up HOUR magazine every week to read Three Dollar Bill just to see what new outrageous line I'd written.

Anyway, here's my Top 20:

1. "I tried everything except blowing Conrad Black to kick start my journalism career." (Aug 1999)
2. "I have never sucked Mike Piazza's cock, so I have no idea if he's gay." (June 2002)
3. "I can't help but think when I look at Michael Jackson that his face is tighter - and whiter - than my ass." (July 2002)
4. "It's true, alas, my asshole is not the centre of the universe." (July 2000)
5. "Arrogance, not to mention my pumps, is humankind's Achilles heel." (April 2000)
6. "The only schmuck convinced that no one believed former Canadian Olympic champ Brian Orser was gay is, go figure, Brian Orser." (Dec 1998)
7. "Ricky Martin can sit on my face." (June 1999) Oh yeah, I outed Ricky two years later in TDB.
8. "I love to fuck. I love to get fucked. I just wish straight boys had as much guilt-free sex as queer boys do (and with queer boys!)." (Aug 1998) This column got me banned in Winnipeg.
9. "I am living proof that in less than a century gay life has gone from being the love that dared not speak its name to the love that won't shut the fuck up." (Nov 2002)
10. "You know, after putting up with straight people all my life, I've figured out that most of them really aren't all that bad." (June 1997)
11. "I adore women and Lord knows I love a fabulous rack. But honey, there is a limit. I mean, there I was at Barbarella's, an Ottawa strip joint for a stag party last weekend, and I hadn't seen so many flabby asses waving in the air since, well, Gay Pride." (Oct 2000)
12. "It must be spring because here I am lapping it up – behinds, that is, like a bitch in heat." (May 2001)
13. "I don't think the man they called Jesus of Nazareth ever sucked cock, though I bet he would have loved it had he taken the time, and made a proper fag hag of his beloved Mary Magdelene." (Dec 2001)
14. "A fuck is a fuck is a fuck." (April 2000) The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary investigated complaints that TDB was pornographic after this column ran.
15. "I always tell people I graduated from the Malcolm X school of rhetoric." (Oct 2001)
16. "Pope John Paul II is a sonuvabitch". (Aug 2003)
17. "If the Gay Games are the Uganda of the sports world, then the Federation of Gay Games is Idi Amin." (Jan 2004)
18. "Imagine the relief sexually abused choirboys in the Catholic Church are feeling now that the Grand Séminaire de Montréal has announced it will test all new priests for HIV." (January 2004)
19. "I'm no slut, but I lost count of all the cocks I'd sucked when the number topped 200 some years ago." (November 2006)
20. "If there is anybody who deserves to die of AIDS, it is the HIV-denialists who after 25 years of solid science still insist that HIV is not the cause of AIDS." (March 2011)

How do you feel about blogging and social media? Are you for or against? Does the term ‘everyone is a writer these days' bother you at all? There have been complaints in the writing world which claims that journalists are benefiting less from the internet because of an onset of freelance blogs... Do you believe that? If not in what way is blogging beneficial?

Most blogs just regurgitate stuff that's already out there. Few of them meet the standards of true journalism. But bloggers have carved out their rightful place in the blogosphere, and I think POP TART and Three Dollar Bill are two of the better ones out there. 

You wrote an interesting piece for The Montreal Gazette back in June in which you stated that the Montreal Mirror was "Doomed when HOUR Magazine Folded" thanks to a lack of competition among other things. Do you think that the arrival of new technologies such as the smartphone, kobo's and Tablets has somehow contributed to the shutdown of paper alt-weeklies as well? Is it possible that people prefer online zines to actual print or is it a question of compactness? 

Tablets and new technologies are clearly the future. But I think print editions of some newspapers will always exist – and many dailies will shrink to perhaps just three days a week. The thing about newspapers is everybody wants a print edition when something like 9/11 happens. Everybody still wants a hard copy they can save forever.

You've interviewed tons of celebrities, some of them legends like Cher and James Brown! Are these done over the phone or in person and who was your first Celeb interview with? 

I don't remember my first celebrity interview. Many are done in person, but most are done over the phone. I've interviewed everybody—hundreds and hundreds of celebrities, sports stars, political leaders and public figures over the years, everybody from Anne Rice to WWII underground resistance leader Gad Beck. It is what keeps the job interesting—there is a never-ending list of fascinating human beings out there in the world with a story to tell.

Can you name a couple of your most memorable star interviews, ones that you still think about.

Cyndi Lauper. Back in 2004 Cyndi and I were happily blabbing about the key to covering a great song – like Cyndi's incendiary cover of Etta James' signature song "At Last"—when I told her that Montreal glam-punk band One 976 did the most ferocious cover of Lauper's Top 5 hit "She Bop" I'd ever heard. Every time they play it, I told Cyndi, they bring down the house—which was always invariably packed with strippers and drag queens. "Their singer's name is Plastik Patrik." I said. 

"Plastik Patrik?" Cyndi asked, bubbling with excitement. "What a fabulous name! It'd be great to have them come out and do an encore with me!"

So I tracked down Patrik in Vegas and told him to get a demo over to Cyndi's management in NYC pronto. The rest, as they say, is local history: The night of Cyndi's sold-out March 4, 2004, concert at Métropolis, the audience went absolutely nuts when Patrik and Cyndi sang La Vie en rose together.

A couple years ago I was blabbing with Cyndi on the phone again and I brought up that night like she might not remember it. "What, you think I've got Alzheimer's?" Cyndi scolded me. "Of course I remember that show! We sang "La Vie en Rose"! It was a real moment!" 

Other memorable interviews – there are so many I can't remember them all now – include Bill Cosby, who started asking ME questions about my family (my Mom is from Africa and my Dad is British) in what turned into a 45-minute conversation. Same thing happened with James Brown. At the time I didn't know that my interview with the Godfather of Soul would be his last-ever sit-down interview with a journalist. Mr. Brown died on Christmas Day 2006.

Everyone who knows you calls you by the nickname "BUGS", why?

I had braces as a kid because I had buck teeth like Bugs Bunny. Other kids used to tease me by calling me "Bugs." But the braces fixed that. Then in 1996 I wrote a Three Dollar Bill column outing Bugs Bunny as a graduate of the Milton Berle School of Burlesque. My editor slugged it "by Bugs "Buggery" Burnett" on the cover of HOUR, and everybody has called me "Bugs" ever since. Besides, my life is cartoon.

Read POP TART and Three Dollar Bill and follow Bugs on Twitter and Facebook.