[1] He was most noted for his novels Place d'Armes and Civic Square, among the first works of LGBT literature ever published in Canada,[2] as well as a personal life that was often plagued by scandal and interpersonal conflict.
[3] His writing style was marked by experimental forms and structures, with one of his novels being published as handwritten pages packaged in a box, and by a blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction.
[1] A rebellious teenager, he was sent by his parents to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where he took up gymnastics and established a lifelong friendship with journalist Charles Taylor.
[1] After completing high school, he enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in modern history as well as enlisting as a naval cadet and serving on the student government.
[1] Still attempting to repress his sexuality, Symons married Judith Morrow, the granddaughter of a president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, in 1958.
[1] With the nomadic restlessness that would characterize much of his life, however, he soon quit journalism and returned to Toronto, taking a job as a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum;[1] within a few years, he was also an assistant professor of fine art at the University of Toronto,[1] and briefly held a visiting curatorship at the Smithsonian Institution and a research associate's position at the Winterthur Museum.
[5] During this period he began to write but never finished a book on Canadian history and a stage play, and botched an audition to host This Hour Has Seven Days.
[1] Place d'Armes contained both autobiographical and metafictional elements; its protagonist Hugh Anderson was, like Symons, a wealthy but socially alienated man from Toronto abandoning his comfortable bourgeois life to hole up in a hotel in Montreal, rediscovering himself in sex with male prostitutes in Place d'Armes, and in turn writing his own novel within a novel about Andrew, a character who himself fit the same profile as both Symons and Anderson.
[8] The novel was noted for its unconventional form—a series of polemical letters addressed to "Dear Reader"—and presentation; 848 pages in length, it was neither typeset nor bound, but rather the original handwritten manuscript was duplicated by Gestetner, hand-decorated by Symons and then packaged in a blue box which was wrapped in white ribbon and emblazoned with a wax seal, with the title stamped on the box in silver ink.
[8] (Due to its unique format, the novel was published only as a limited edition, and was not widely available until Dundurn Press reissued it as a conventional paperback in 2007.)
Once the project had been completed, Symons took a copy of the novel and placed it in the collection plate at his parents' church, Toronto's St. James Cathedral.
[4] The pair continued to move frequently, residing at different times in Toronto, San Miguel de Allende and Trout River, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[9] Despite this, Symons was hurt by the process of divorcing Judith, often insisting that he still loved her and wanted to stay married to her even if his actual conduct suggested otherwise.
[4] The review digressed to criticize many of the era's Canadian literary figures, including Irving Layton, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Victor Coleman, Jacques Godbout and Coach House Press, effectively burning many of Symons' bridges.
[4] He was in a relationship with Aaron Klokeid for much of his time living in Morocco;[4] despite this, he strongly identified with the subversive "outlaw" aspects of homosexuality and disliked the increasing normalization and acceptance of gay people.
He had little interest in participating in the gay liberation movement,[1] and even harshly criticized Pierre Trudeau for decriminalizing homosexuality in his 1968 revision of the Criminal Code.
[1] In an interview with The Body Politic during his visit to promote Helmet of Flesh, Symons articulated his philosophy of sexual identity: "I am certainly a devoted homosexual.