Civic Square

by Scott Symons

Written as letters addressed to "Dear Reader," Civic Square is symphonic in its range of tone and style. Largely satiric, it is the story of a man who finds himself in a cultural upheaval as the stifling society of Toronto in 1966 begins to crumble around him - begins to crumble, in part, because he himself is kicking against the walls that constrain. Caught between a huge admiration for the older values of Rosedale and the dynamic new energy of Yorkville, with its musicians, poets and writers of the counter-culture movement, the narrator finds himself trying to reconstruct his world in every aspect. First published as a limited edition in 1969, Civic Square is a lost Canadian classic that has never before been widely available.

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Hugh Brennan Scott Symons was a Canadian writer. Born into a wealthy family, he attended a number of private schools, the University of Toronto, Cambridge University and the Sorbonne. A rising star of Canadian literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he wrote two novels with homoerotic themes before leaving Canada to live in Morocco.

He was openly gay at a time when this was very difficult, publishing his first novel, Place d'Armes, which dealt directly with homosexuality, two years before gay sex was decriminalized in Canada. He was an avid diarist and many of his observations and episodes from his life found their way into his novels.

He died in Toronto at the age of 75.

Symons is the subject of a documentary film, God's Fool (1998), by Nik Sheehan.