Sheet Music

In 1997, the Scottish indie rock band Belle and Sebastian released their breakthrough, sophomore album, If You’re Feeling Sinister. I was eighteen years old — playing in a band myself, navigating a long-distance romance, and trying to figure out my future — and the confessional lyrics and shimmery songwriting found ready purchase in my young, feel-every-feeling heart. When Stuart Murdoch sang, “Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story / About a boy who’s just like me / Thought there was love in everything and everyone / You’re so naive!” in “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” what else could I do but swoon?

While college deejays spun the album into the eager ears of new listeners, enthusiasts were already well aware of Belle and Sebastian. Three years earlier, their excellent debut, Tigermilk, had been given a limited vinyl release abroad that sold out in a matter of months. The record made rumblings in the underground on this side of the pond. If you traded tapes with the right people, you were likely to have copied it already on a beat‑up Maxell cassette.

That thrill of the hunt — the joy of discovering a treasure and the intense connection the right track at the right time can make — is a sensation Pete Crighton articulates with authority in his memoir, The Vinyl Diaries. In dozens of short chapters named after songs, he chronicles his life as a gay man and his journey to step out of the shadow of fear cast by the AIDS epidemic to completely embrace his sexuality and sexual life. He draws on an extensive and growing record collection to earmark each step on the path, from his closeted adolescence in Toronto’s east end to his vibrant middle age on the other side of town, with a cherished song or album. With these assembled anecdotes, he suggests that healing, freedom, and being seen are often just a needle drop away.

The tribal percussion of Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier, paired with the “wealth of sexual imagery” that populated their early work, first stirred yearnings within Crighton that he was not ready to admit. Frequently bullied and coming of age in a decade when “the only message that hit this confused teenager was ‘Sex = Death,’ ” he suppressed his desires and kept his distance from anything queer, because of a combination of shame and terror. However, at the iconic Massey Hall in 1983, “the penny dropped.” The thirteen-year-old watching Adam Ant, the “shirtless” front man of the English new wave band, couldn’t deny that “this was what I wanted. Not just rock ’n’ roll, not just the wild abandon, I wanted the man in leather pants.”

A year later, another group landed that would profoundly shape Crighton’s future. When the Smiths released their first and “most overtly queer” album, it was like “hearing from a friend I didn’t know I needed. A miserable, lost and confused friend from across the ocean.” Even as Crighton pushed away the clear signals in songs like “Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” he was nonetheless drawn to “the melancholy and the voice.” By the time The Queen Is Dead arrived in 1986, he was a devotee —“there was no other album that got played more during my eighteenth year.”

Yet even as Crighton found himself in the music, he shouldered a burden of unshakable loneliness and misery. For many, being young, queer, and hidden in the ’80s meant going to the next neighbourhood over to buy a copy of Playgirl —“the first public acknowledgment I had ever made”— or having early sexual encounters unfold as clandestine affairs with older men who may or may not have had your emotional and physical interests in mind. This compounding of shame, anxiety, and paranoia pushed Crighton into quasi celibacy throughout his twenties. He spent his thirties in a suffocating eleven-year relationship. When that partnership crumbled, he fell into another misguided monogamous romance. It wasn’t until his forties that Crighton began an expedition into the arms of new lovers and friends. “It was time to tear down everything I was taught to believe in,” he realized, “and start all over again.”

For Crighton, forty-five became the new twenty. Finally single and ready to overcome his fears and realize his dreams, he started swiping on the apps, exploring the limits of his desires, and evaluating what he really wanted in a lover or partner. It was a new frontier — and little from his old life remained — but, luckily enough, he had a stack of vinyl by his side to help see him through.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend in which I declared my unremitting dislike for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a group that finds considerable favour in his estimation. As we debated the merits of Flea and John Frusciante and the lyrical musings of Anthony Kiedis, it became clear that our opposing views were rooted almost entirely in the pull of nostalgia. The band was a formative part of his adolescent years in the same way that the Smashing Pumpkins were for mine. In that context, objectivity and taste go out the window.

Strong opinions are the hallmark of any true-blue music fan, and Crighton’s passion runs as deep as his record collection — even if it sometimes puts him at odds with his own community. “I am not a Barbra fan,” he admits. “For years it felt like a betrayal of gay male culture to admit my dislike for her or any of the divas who were worshipped when I first dipped my toe into gay-bar waters.” Although much of the book charts his uncertainty, he writes of music with candour: “Celine. Mariah. Barbra. Whitney. They’re still worshipped, and I still can’t stand any of their music.” Of Madonna, whose pop he appreciates, he asks, “Do I think she’s an amazing artist like she claims? No. Can she sing? Barely. Can she act? Nope. Can she dance? A little.” Sacrilege! Does he not know she filmed the video for “Hung Up” while recovering from eight broken bones? Had he found these artists instead of Adam and the Ants and Morrissey at crucial moments in his life, would things have been different?

When the pendulum swings toward praise, Crighton showers his favourites with superlatives. “Kate Bush is a genius, full stop,” he proclaims. “David Bowie is divine.” He would likely use similar descriptions for Grace Jones, Lou Reed, Stevie Nicks, and Patti Smith — artists whose legacy and singular vision he greatly admires. As difficult as it is for some to admit an error in their taste, Crighton allows that, occasionally, he’s gotten it wrong. “As a teenager, I was an idiot,” he reveals. “I didn’t appreciate Prince.” Although “it seems impossible” to him now, he had misjudged the visionary artist as only a “hitmaker” producing “music made for the masses.”

Near-maniacal fandom can sometimes develop into snobbery or gatekeeping, but Crighton delights in sharing songs that touch the far reaches of his soul with the men in his life. His hookups, trysts, relationships, and post-coital comedowns are all coloured by his careful LP selections or, sometimes, requests from his guests. Spotify? Quelle horreur. It’s vinyl only in his house. “Owning a physical copy of a piece of media is a different experience,” he insists. “If you don’t play it, it stares at you.”

While The Vinyl Diaries can feel repetitive in its non-linear narrative structure — date, sex, music, repeat — and its unvarnished prose is occasionally wanting (in fairness, Crighton is candid that he’s a novice writer), the vulnerability on the page makes it both poignant and piquant. Surprisingly, it’s the details of Crighton’s sexual encounters, outlined with raw clarity, that land with greater impact than his musical insights. The accounts of his feverish pursuit of pleasure and connection are rendered with nothing short of bliss. “He pulled out, ripped the condom off and exploded come all over my stomach and chest. With a quick tug or two, while he was still hovering over me, smiling, my come joined his,” he writes of one lover. “Matthew collapsed on top of me, squishing our ejaculate between our torsos, and we both laughed. We lay naked side by side for a while and talked about growing up, about coming into our queerness.” It’s this comfort and openness that Crighton seeks all along — more than the next great tune or the next perfect album — and what he ultimately achieves.

However, Crighton’s largely sunny dive into dating sidesteps the downsides of cruising, hookup culture, and app-based intimacy. If there were encounters that left him feeling emotionally or physically unsafe, they don’t interrupt his steady climb toward finding his whole self. Late in the book, a new sexual partner discloses his HIV-positive status, a revelation that strikes to the core of Crighton’s anxieties. “The AIDS panic I felt as a teenage boy was still alive inside me,” he confesses. “It never left. I never dealt with it.” It’s a moment ripe for deep reflection that is quickly resolved — one of a few where he could have gone deeper into the complications of casual sex and the “pent‑up fear, rage and frustration” he had been carrying since his childhood.

“When I was a kid, and later a teenager, the idea of being fifty years of age was incomprehensible. Life was over. There were no new experiences. There was no fun,” Crighton writes. If he could reach his tortured younger self now, he would likely hand him this book, as it illuminates that life’s possibilities are more boundless than he ever imagined. In the final chapters, Crighton reflects on an exciting new job at the Gladstone Hotel — a “queer space” where he “could truly be myself”— and his ever-expanding community. In richly drawn vignettes, he presents himself as proof that life can begin again whenever you want it to. And having the right soundtrack sometimes helps too.