Bold and Shameless, Pete Crighton’s Memoir Is a Triumph

The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts, and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy
Pete Crighton
Random House Canada (2025)

Pete Crighton’s debut memoir has two sides, like a record, and not unlike Crighton himself.

There’s the music-lover. Call it Side A. That’s the identity Crighton developed first, falling in love with the B-52s, Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Prince, Mary Margaret O’Hara and a whole host of other incredible artists. His love of live music and passion for vinyl records were more than a hobby. They were an escape.

An escape from what, exactly? Side B.

As a gay man who came of age during the 1980s in the shadow of HIV/AIDS, Crighton was afraid to live his life to the fullest. Acting on his desires was too risky. His music collection, however, was safe.

“When I look back at those years now,” Crighton writes early in his book, “my entire youth, my entire life actually, is defined by what records I was listening to at that time.”

In his 40s, Crighton flipped the record over. He was tired of feeling shame. And as another monogamous, long-term relationship reached its inevitable end, Crighton decided to live his queer life to the fullest. The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts, and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy is the story of his midife sexual awakening. It’s a wildly entertaining and erotic celebration of queer love and self-discovery within the queer community.

Crighton is a Toronto writer with a background in comedy and theatre who works as an arts marketer. He recently spoke to The Tyee about his explicit new memoir, secret identities, feeling shame and feeling stuck, gay sex and the wonders of Miss America, Mary Margaret O’Hara’s 1988 cult classic album.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

The Tyee: I really enjoyed The Vinyl Diaries. I have to admit, I was fully scandalized at parts — not necessarily as a reader, but as a writer. When it comes to writing about sexuality, my sense is that nobody wants to hear that from me. How did you convince yourself that people wanted to hear it from you?

Pete Crighton: Well, we’ll see if they do. But so much of my life, and I write about this in the book, is this absolute, abject fear of sex in general, backgrounded by the HIV/AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I was coming of age. It just scared the crap out of me. I buried a lot of my feelings around sex for a really, really long time.

So in deciding to write this book and share my midlife sexual awakening — which had always been gay, just to be clear, but I really leaned into sex in my 40s — I just thought, why not be as honest as possible?

We shroud sex in this weird mystery, so much so in culture and even gay culture, that I thought, let’s just talk about this stuff. It’s not that weird. We all do it. I just think the more we talk about it, the more we can understand each other.

There’s a shamelessness to your writing that’s really inspiring. The good kind of shamelessness. It’s a weird word. But that lack of shame is, I think, a major theme of the book. You have that great passage on page 274: “Find a queer person and you will almost certainly find shame there. A lot of it… shame is an ever present part of queer culture.” But this passage is surrounded by candid and very explicit passages. You’ve clearly decided not to be precious about it.

You’ve really done your homework, wow.

Yeah, I think a lot about shame.

I think a lot of us do. And again, I think it’s just one of those things we don’t talk about a lot. Maybe people do with their therapist, I don’t know, but can’t we just all be honest with each other?

I find the more in my life that I open up to people, and the more I bear some of my most intimate thoughts, feelings, secrets — people respond to that. People want to hear those things.

Even in talking about this book with people of many different generations and many different sexual orientations, no one backed away from it or said, “Oh, you shouldn't talk about that.” There was sort of a uniform response of, like, “Wow, how fascinating, I never thought about it like that.” And that feels good.

Later on, you say, “I think pride and shame can easily coexist.” I liked that. I think it’s important to remember that the pride we see in the queer community isn't the absence of shame, it’s the response. It’s pride over shame. Growing up, people would say, being gay is a choice. It’s not. But pride is a choice.

Pride is so valid. I have a great time, and I love celebrating my pride at being a queer person. But you know, I think we do it in the absence of any dialogue about what else is going on, which I don’t think is necessarily all that healthy. And, you know, that’s my opinion. Maybe it is for one weekend, to just throw it all away and be like, fuck it, let’s have a great time, and just kind of have a big party. But I think it’s worth some more dialogue.

There can always be more dialogue. Because shame is a choice too. At one point, you write about “putting a stop to the cycle of ignorance shame,” and the need for “a huge cultural shift in government, education and parenting.” That’s a big topic in Canadian education right now. The pushback against SOGI is a sort of a pro-shame movement. Like, we’re not gonna talk about this. We’re gonna teach kids that this is something you don't talk about. This memoir pushes back on that: I’m proud of my life, I’m proud of my sexuality, I’m proud of my identity. No shame. Pride instead.

I advocate for that idea because it was so absent in my life. When I was growing up, there was barely any sex education, let alone any dialogue around homosexuality. And no way was there any kind of dialogue around gender fluidity, or gender presentation. I just don’t know what everyone’s so afraid of.

Okay, let’s talk about music. I was a huge record collector until I had kids, and then I had to make space for all their fucking stuff.

Oh, I’m sorry.

I had an original vinyl pressing of Mary Margaret O’Hara's Miss America.

You didn’t!

I did. And it’s a top 10 album ever for me, but I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about how good it is. Whenever I play it for people, I feel like I lose credibility.

I agree. Well, here’s your opportunity.

Tell me more about how much you love this album!

I think it’s so hard to write about music. It’s hard to really articulate what you feel about music. But it’s just so different. It’s so clearly her doing exactly the thing that she wants to do or feel. There’s no calculation around it. There’s no… I’m gonna write a cute chorus here, I’m gonna get played on the radio, like, there’s absolutely no motivation other than: I am expressing myself through art. And I think there’s something so beautiful about that.

It’s true. And a lot of the lore around that album is how difficult it was to change her mind about her choices. All these producers and engineers were sent to set her straight, and no one could.

Like, fuck off, no. She’s making this amazing masterpiece that no one understands, and not a producer, so let her do it. We’re so lucky to have it. I mean, I wish there were 10 more. But it’s a gobsmacking debut record. And I hope that when people read the book, they read that story, and think, oh my god, I gotta listen to this record. And maybe only one out of every 50 connects with it.

Your memoir’s focus on music feels deeper than just a hobby. I’m struck by the idea of avoiding one’s self-actualization by constructing this audiophile identity. Because I did that. When it was time to come into my own as a person, and leave home and potentially lose my adopted family, I put it off and pivoted to music. Like, I’ll just collect records and join a band and be a music nerd. And it was easy because I loved music. But looking back, it was the fear of who I might become that drove me into my special interest. A fear that other parts of me were maybe less translatable.

One hundred per cent. When I was younger, that was part of the reason I went so deep. Similar to what you said. It’s a world that I have 100-per-cent control of. I can buy my records, I can catalogue them, I can file them, it’s perfectly orderly. I love listening to them. I love this artist for this time of day. I love that artist for that time of day. I define myself by this artist. I define myself by not liking these artists. It really became — what do superheroes call it? Alter ego?

Secret identity.

Secret identity. Where you’re hiding the real secret identity away. But this thing makes sense to people, so this thing makes sense to me right now. I did a lot of that for sure, and just kind of buried my head in that for a long time.

It’s a great way to have conversations with people that aren’t at all polarizing. You can just be like, hey, do you like Joni Mitchell? And then they do, because everyone does, and there’s no discussion about anything about you they might not like.

That’s interesting. I never thought about that exactly, but you’re probably right.

This is something that comes up for me when I think about adoption. I know it’s not a major theme in your book, but it’s part of your story. There are a bunch of sentences in your book that made me think, this is an adoptee memoir.

Do you know which ones?

“I was terrified of being identified as an outsider.” Not as a queer person. Just an outsider, a non-belonger. There’s a fear of otherness that I think everybody has, but then there’s a fear of otherness that adoptees have, that I think is bigger and louder and more central to the choices that we make. My sense is that it’s one of the driving motivations for every adoptee, ever, anywhere, regardless of whether they say it out loud or not — this drive to get kept, to belong in this space. The need to stay. So you wind up staying longer before venturing out to become who you are. It tracks that you're 40 before you really start this journey.

You’re kind of blowing my mind a little bit, because there’s something that definitely resonates with me, for sure, in that desire to stay longer in places where maybe I didn’t feel like I should be. What was the driving motivation? That’s where I’m stuck now. Was that part of my inner dialogue? I don’t know if I have the answer right now.

When you disclosed your adoption early on, I instantly realized you had to come out to adoptive parents. I’ve heard a lot about how that can go. I read on with the fear that they’d be like, “Oh, this one's a dud.”

Like, we picked the wrong one.

It happens a lot and it’s sad.

Are there things that I wish I could change about my family? Of course. But I was very fortunate.

And your ending, where you say you found yourself “surrounded by family. My hard-earned queer family.” And, like, if that’s not the end of an adoptee memoir, man, I don’t know what is.

Family, to me… even early on, I wouldn’t have been able to define it, I don’t think. But I definitely looked outside my family unit to other people as part of my family, whether those were friends or neighbours or people in my life. I’ve always seen the nuclear family — I hate that term. The family unit of your origin was not the limit of what your family could and should be.

A lot of people reach that conclusion, but as an adoptee, you have to, you know? Step one is to confront the idea that family is bigger than just biology. Otherwise, nothing about your life makes sense.

Yeah, and queer people definitely need that, because you just don’t see yourself reflected in a more typical family situation. I especially have a lot of love and appreciation for the queer women in my life. I had my book launch last night here in Toronto, and we spent a lot of time talking about my love of queer women, and how those stories of friendships between queer men and queer women aren’t told a lot. I was actively taught that gay men and gay women don’t hang out.

I hadn’t really thought about it until I read this. You know how, sometimes, something will come up and you’ll realize you never cleared the cobwebs from that corner of your mind? That was me for a hot second, like: friends with lesbians? Impossible.

It’s so stupid. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s mostly misogyny. Most of my queer circle is made up of women. It’s they who really helped me become an artist. It's they who helped me find my voice. I just think we should, as queer people, celebrate that gender diversity in our community and not separate ourselves.

My last question is a follow-up to a question you asked in the book that I’d like to argue about. Regarding Joni Mitchell, you said, and I quote, “Has there been a better run of five consecutive albums…”

Oh shit.

“… in the history of recorded music than Blue to Hejira? Quite simply, no.” And I’ve got half a mind to call up Wesley Morris and Barack Obama and tell them what you said about Stevie Wonder. You’re telling me that Stevie's five-album run in the ‘70s, his classic period, is bested by Joni Mitchell? (Who rules, by the way. But Stevie!)

I know. It was a hot take. I think if Songs in the Key of Life were split into two different records, so I could count those separately…

How dare you.

I would never want to lessen that experience, but if we’re counting actual discs, then maybe the award could go to Stevie. But I still think those five [Joni Mitchell] albums are pretty untouchable. And listen, Stevie comes really fucking close.

I don't think I’ve ever actually heard a different argument about the best five-album run in music history. The Joni Mitchell line was a jaw-dropper, Pete. As I said at the beginning, I was scandalized a few times by this memoir. But never moreso.

I had a feeling that one would come back and haunt me.