Patrick Roscoe

Patrick Roscoe
Born	1967 Formentera, Spain
Occupation	short story writer, novelist
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1980s-present
Notable works	Birthmarks, God's Peculiar Care, The Lost Oasis

Patrick Roscoe is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and actor.

Roscoe was born to Canadian parents on the Spanish island of Formentera and grew up in Tanzania,England,Port Hardy, Victoria and Vancouver. Roscoe moved from Canada to California in 1981. He later lived in Toronto, Seville, and Madrid.

His first book, Beneath the Western Slopes, was released by Stoddart in 1987.

Birthmarks, published in 1990, was noted for its unconventional subject matter, addressing themes of loneliness, desperation and survival among prostitutes, gay men and drug addicts who were living on the margins of conventional society.

On the promotional tour for Birthmarks, he received publicity for claims of having previously worked as a male prostitute. He later disavowed the prostitution claim, telling The Globe and Mail in 1991, "I thought, if I'm going to do [the book tour], I'm going to act, I'm going to become one of the characters in the book, I'm not going to tell anything that's the truth because that's none of (the interviewer's) business." He has claimed to have no friends, no hobbies, no spouse, no lovers, no children, and no interests outside writing, regarding isolation as being important to him as a writer. While living in Madrid in 1991, he told The Globe and Mail that although he wrote in English, he spoke only Spanish in his daily life and told no one that he was a writer, passing instead as a student of Spanish.

Despite the uncertainty about Roscoe's own sexual orientation raised by his disavowal of the prostitution claims and the relative lack of similar themes in his later work, the LGBT themes in Birthmarks have made it an important milestone in the history of LGBT literature in Canada; it is the subject of an essay by Andy Quan in the 2010 book The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.

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