Gate Lepine # 4: One author wrote because he thought it was a romantic life - the other wrote because he had to
My late friend Dale was an author who wrote many words but said little. Gate Lepine is an author who wrote fewer words but said much about life, love, forgiveness, redemption and lots of music.
For most of his adult life, my late friend Dale Burkholder imagined himself as a writer. Like many before him, he romanticized the profession, right down to living in a filthy abandoned school bus on one of the Gulf Islands off the BC coast. He got deathly ill from his winters there but that was all part of the romance. I slept in that bus one night and was kept warm, unwillingly I might add, by his flea infested cat. There was no romance in my dreams that night.
Starting in university, all of his writings, including the hundred letters he wrote to me over the years, were about his troubled life that was shaped by his being an orphan, adopted and raised by a fundamentalist Baptist couple. He loved his parents but their rigid beliefs and the church that fed their fanaticism were his foil. He wrote to understand it, I think.
A couple of years before he died, he did finish a manuscript and used all of his savings to have it printed. I bought a copy of “Looking For God In The Forest” but I couldn’t finish it. He asked what I thought so I told him, "Dale, nothing happens in your book. You don't tell the reader anything about the protagonist's feelings, fears, dreams and more." It just didn’t go anywhere.
I knew him for 50 years. The only times I knew for sure how he felt were when he was losing his temper and whacking his fishing rod over the side of the boat. He died alone in a shack on a remote island in BC.
He often referred to himself, jokingly of course, as Pastor Burkholder. He was an irreverent sod who loved a good joke. Here’s an an example.
Another writer in my life has his own demons but unlike Dale, his prose is very personal and compellingly honest. Gate Lepine’s style is a joy to read. On each page, much happens. Was he inspired by the romance of being a writer? I doubt it but I’ll ask him. One thing I’m sure of. He lived his art. The authentic poet, songwriter, painter, musician…that is Gate Lepine.
I will be sharing many of his stories on these pages in the months to come. What will set them apart will be their honesty.
If Gate’s name sounds familiar, it is because he is the Timmins Ontario bartender who in 1964, reached into his pocket, handed Tom Connors the 5 cents he was short for a beer and said, “here’s a nickle if you play a song on that guitar you’re holding,”. Thus began a life-long friendship and songwriting partnership, all of which resulted in the creation of Stompin’ Tom Connors.
Today, in 2024, as a mostly healthy 86 year old widower living alone in a small apartment in Ottawa, he’s devoting the last few years of his life to going through his catalogue of songs (over 5000 at this point) fine tuning the lyrics and melodies and remembering the events that inspired them.
Unlike Dale, Gate wore his emotions on his sleeve and he expressed them through his songs, prose, poetry and paintings. His art was about meeting his demons head on, not camouflaging them with meaningless adjectives.
As an example, Gate wrote Road to Kingston on the hood of his car a few minutes after he spent a few disturbing minutes with his brother Ray, a convicted bank robber who was serving a long sentence at Kingston Penitentiary.
You’ll read the back story here in future posts….and what a story it is!
Road to Kingston by Gate (Gaetan) Lepine
Verse:
There's a limestone building, down Kingston by the bay
Where they try to teach you lessons, on how crime never pays
Beyond the world of freedom, come countless counting time
They took the road to Kingston, they chose the life of crime
Chorus:
Where it's cold, cold, cold, inside Kingston prison,
Lost men lay down wasting in the cell
They wouldn't learn the lessons, they took the road to Kingston
And the road to Kingston took them straight to hell
Verse:
Now there's a grey stone high wall down to Kingston by the shore
Some say a hundred years old, some say even more
Them cold cells have known plenty of lonely broken men
Who took the road to Kingston hell bound for the pen
Chorus:
Gate Lepine - 2024
As a bonus, here’s another side of Dale
An Open Letter to Those Who Glorify Gate Lépine — And to Every Child Who Survived a Parent Like Him
I speak not out of bitterness, but out of clarity. Out of duty. Because when I saw the stories being shared—when I watched this man, my father, Gate Lépine, elevated on a public platform as if he were some kind of folk hero—I felt something crack open in me. Something raw, buried, and long unspoken.
I am the child of Gate Lépine.
I did not grow up in a tavern, laughing at his jokes.
I grew up in the wreckage.
And so I say this clearly: it is a moral failure to glorify this man.
To put him on a pedestal, to share stories drenched in alcohol and absent of consequence, to present him as a lovable rogue with charm and swagger—that is not only dishonest, it is dangerous. It erases the truth of what children like me endured. It gaslights the pain. It says to survivors: your suffering is less important than a good story.
Let me give you another story.
Imagine being a child waiting for your father to come home, only to watch him stumble in smelling of beer and regret—if he came at all. Imagine birthdays missed, promises broken, yelling through walls, and the steady drip of neglect that carves into your self-worth like acid on stone. Imagine learning, before you could even spell addiction, that you came second to the bottle.
Now imagine watching that man celebrated. His name hashtagged. His stories romanticized. As though his drinking were a cultural badge of honor instead of the wound that never closed.
That’s what you’re doing.
You’re not telling history. You’re rewriting it with a chisel made of delusion and a bottle of beer in hand.
You say Gate Lépine was magnetic. That he had style. That he made people laugh. Maybe he did. But a man’s public persona is not his legacy. His legacy is what he left behind. And what he left me was abandonment. Inconsistency. Shame. Not fatherhood. Not love. Not protection.
There are thousands like me.
Children of alcoholics.
Survivors of chaos, of emotional neglect, of trauma in quiet rooms.
We learned to be silent. To walk on eggshells. To laugh it off because everyone else did. And now, in adulthood, we’re watching the same cultural machine turn these men into legends instead of holding them accountable.
So here’s my legend:
He wasn’t a hero.
He was a man who failed his child.
And I’m done pretending that doesn’t matter.
I will not be quiet while your platform turns pain into poetry. I will not watch you elevate a man who spent his life sinking. I will not celebrate the myth while the truth dies in silence.
This letter is not just for Gate Lépine.
It is for every survivor who is being asked to smile through the glorification of their pain.
It is for those who had to parent themselves.
It is for those who grew up with love withheld and chaos normalized.
And it is for the platforms, publishers, storytellers, and so-called celebrants of “real life” who forget that behind every charming drunk is a child with empty hands and a heavy heart.
Elevate that.
Sincerely,
me
Child of an alcoholic. Survivor of the myth.