When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

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Drama in two acts by John Herbert, premiered at the Actors Playhouse, New York, February 23, 1967, directed by Mitchell Nestor and designed by C. Murawski, featuring Terry Kiser, Victor Arnold, Bill Moor, Robert Christian, Clifford Pellow. Subsequently played across Canada (its Canadian premiere was in French at Théâtre de Quat'Sous) and around the world. In 1968, the play won a prize in the Dominion Drama Festival; the author refused the award. Also filmed in Canada in 1971 by Harvey Hart. Since 1967, John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes has been produced in forty translations in over one hundred countries.

Two years before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, Fortune was the first play to dramatize in an often shocking manner society's treatment of homosexuals and inhumane prison conditions. It forced both theatre audiences and the theatre itself to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals. Fortune opened doors for other gay and lesbian playwrights to depict gay and lesbians on stage in a more open, realistic, non-stereotypical and non-caricatured manner.

The twelve editions of Fortune and Men's Eyes published by Grove Press in New York since 1967 have made Fortune the most published Canadian play. It won the 1975 Chalmers Best Canadian Play Award and has been republished several times in Canada (in Richard Perkyns, ed. Major Plays of the Canadian Theatre 1934-1984. Toronto: Irwin, 1984; in Richard Plant, ed. Modern Canadian Drama. Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1984; and in Jerry Wasserman, ed. Modern Canadian Plays, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1985 and 1993).When Fortune and Men's Eyes premiered in Centennial Year 1967, it shocked critics and audiences in both New York and Canada. Norman Nadel, reviewing the play for the New York Tribune, claimed the homosexual drama was so disgusting that the mention of someone vomiting in the prison's off-stage toilet came like a breath of spring. Herbert Whittaker, in the Globe and Mail, called the play "the art of washing our dirty linen in the neighbor's yard." Nathan Cohen, in the Toronto Star, wrote that Fortune "lifts the carpet and shows what is underneath." Three years later Cohen added, "What was really shocking was that the author obviously was writing from his own experience."

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Writing during the patriotism and national euphoria of Centennial Year 1967, Nathan Cohen declared that Fortune and Men's Eyes presented "a truly critical challenge." "It asks deeply disturbing questions about long-established personal and social assumptions. It does not enrich our vision. It undermines it." Covering the MGM film adaptation of Fortune, filmed in a former Quebec City prison, in November of 1970, the Montreal Gazette headlined its article "A Movie That Could Shake Our Society." Bill Glassco, who directed Fortune and Men's Eyes as his first professional production in Kingston in 1969, has called John Herbert "the single most important figure of the decade" in the creation of Toronto's alternate theatre of the 1960s.

Herbert was born in Toronto in 1926. Herbert lived in the Church and Wellesley area in the late 1940s, an area of inexpensive rooming houses on Jarvis, Church, Charles and Isabella streets and also Toronto's red-light prostitution district. By this time he was "madly in love with drag" and wore women's clothing in public. As he writes in his unpublished autobiography Writing in the Sand, he and his roommate Dene "spent our money, earned at ordinary daytime jobs, on black dresses, smoky nylon stockings, sling-back suede shoes with open toes and sometimes ankle-straps, halfway-to-the-elbow gloves (yes, gloves were de rigeur for women then), large-brimmed or pillbox hats, usually black but trimmed with veils or huge silk tea-roses, swing back shorty coats (yes, in black), large purses and assorted costume jewelry from Woolworth’s, usually long strands of fake pearls or rhinestone chokers, glass and brass rings and chiffon scarves."

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Only 20 years old, Herbert and Dene were physically incarnating the fantasy life of the film stars they admired on screen. "Our faces were pure 'Hollywood' and our long finger nails brilliant as flawless rubies. "In the 1940s it was illegal for a male to be dressed as a woman in public. The violation was called being "Disguised by Night." Herbert's feminine physical appearance--he was six feet three inches tall, slender, narrow shouldered, with a sensuous mouth, oval face, black lashes and arched brows--made him look like a high-class fashion model when dressed as a woman. As a man, he was easily spotted as a homosexual and was frequently taunted and even physically attacked by straights and the police. In the fall of 1947, Herbert was attacked by a group of young thugs who tried to rob him. When the police intervened, his attackers falsely claimed that Herbert had solicited them for sex and testified to this effect in court. He was sentenced to four months imprisonment in the Guelph Reformatory, spending his 21st birthday in prison in October of 1947. Following his release in February of 1948, he was again arrested in drag after having been solicited for sex on Church Street and was sentenced to two months imprisonment at the Mimico Reformatory for "Gross Indecency." Corporal punishment was still practiced in Canadian prisons.

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