The Legend, The Myth, The Man: For My Father

On February 9th, 2015, my beloved father passed away unexpectedly. He was a deeply spiritual person whose awesome, incomparable influence is perhaps most responsible for my own spiritual convictions, as illustrated in my most recent post to this blog, over four months ago. I am not yet ready to put together and present the comprehensive tribute to my father that he so thoroughly deserves, nor to detail how this event has reshaped the rest of my life. And so instead I offer for all of your reading the Words of Remembrance that I spoke at his funeral on February 17th, 2015. I believe he helped me to write these words. I KNOW he helped me to speak them. 

And so I say to him, here and now, "I Thank You" and "I Love You".

To Jennifer and I, he was “Dad”. To all of you he was “Bob”, “Bobby”, “Uncle Bobby”, “Uncle Bob”, and “R.W.”. But despite all of the different hats he wore, we all knew the same man. Whether he had nothing or had it all, whether he was a child or an adult, whether before or after fatherhood changed his life. At every age and in every context, we all knew the same towering, iconic figure who had the strength of a legend, the integrity of a hero, and the heart of an angel.

Our Dad’s larger-than-life stature was genuine, but he was, like one of his heroes, John Wayne, truly a gentle giant. Underneath his powerful presence and brilliant wit was the precocious child who evolved without growing old. He never mellowed with age, and never lost the twinkle in his eyes that fueled a self-described “insatiable appetite for knowledge”. He devoured information from books, TV, and the internet, storing it in an extraordinary brain that never, ever lost its edge.

To everyone who knew him, our Dad was a living legend. But our Dad was also a profoundly sensitive human being. He always looked up with reverence to his sisters, Barbara and Diane, and viewed all of their children, and our Mother’s nieces and nephews, as his second children. He was a man of deep faith who neither doubted nor downplayed the role that angels played in guiding and protecting he and his loved ones. Chief among these guardian angels was my father’s father, Robert E. Jeffrey, whose name he gave me the honor of carrying. Jennifer and I were not fortunate enough to know our grandfather in life, but we grew up with his portrait watching over us everywhere we lived. And his presence was ever felt through our father’s love of him, and our father’s incurable sadness that his father passed away before his children were born. Jennifer and I now know that sadness, too. But we take our greatest comfort in knowing our Dad is now among the many angels who watched over him, including his Dad.

Dad provided counsel to countless family, friends, and colleagues, and was a natural mentor to the many, many people who looked up to him at every age and facet of life. He was the least judgmental man I have ever known, living by his own, defining motto: “I deal them in before I deal them out.” He believed in equality above all other principles, and my sister and I are blessed to have had a father who was truly and utterly devoid of prejudice. He loved nothing more than sharing happiness with others. He was an individual of boundless generosity who never felt more pride than when someone told him how comfortable they felt around him. Somehow our Dad was always surprised by how truly loved he was. But as with everything else in his life, he earned it. He earned people’s admiration. He earned people’s respect. And he earned his truly iconic reputation.

Our Dad was at his happiest when with Jennifer and I and our Mom, his soul mate and wife of 42 years. Our mother was his muse, the source of his strength, and the love of his life. Theirs is a love story that goes on eternally as he and our Mom continue to get us through this now. Our Dad raised Jennifer and I to only ever be ourselves, and provided unending support and encouragement to follow our dreams. We always felt loved and accepted, because we were.

Jennifer and our Mom and I have felt our Dad’s presence wrapped around us since the the day his journey here ended. And so on behalf of all four of us, I offer my condolences to all of you who loved him, for there are so very many people in this room for whom the loss is no less devastating than it is to us. I know our father is honored and amazed by not only the love and celebration of life, but by the wave of compassion and breathtaking generosity of so many people bringing comfort to our mother and Jennifer and I. We are overcome with gratitude to all of you, and so is our Dad.

Happy 40th Anniversary To Our Favorite Couple!!

In addition to being the birthday of my second favorite movie star, Joan Crawford, March 23rd is also the wedding anniversary of two of my favorite people: my Mom and Dad. There would never have been  a "Vogue Boy" video without Madonna, but I would never have been a Vogue Boy without my parents. They protected me from the very concept of intolerance throughout my childhood, and they were offscreen cheering me on while I danced. It is certainly not the only reason I am forever grateful to them. But I think this aspect of that happy moment in my childhood speaks to why I regard them as being my friends as well as my parents.

My parents are remarkably unpretentious people who instilled in me a habit (if not a superstition) of maintaining a veil of modesty between "public" and "personal". As such, I weighed whether or not to post a collection of favorite photos as I had previously done for my mother’s birthday and the anniversary of my cat Toby walking into my life. But I decided I would share a handful of treasured images, and for two reasons. First and foremost, my sister Jennifer gave us all a gift when she scanned hundreds of family photos back in 2008 for their digital preservation. This presentation is a gift we give to our parents together, for it would never have been possible had she not spent weeks finding and saving a lifetime's worth of priceless treasures. Second, my parents have been through a great deal of hardship in recent years. Like so many people around the world right now, financial struggles have tested their other relationships. When you lose a great deal of money, you find that many friends and family members suddenly stop caring. (We do, after all, live in a “what’s in it for me?” society.) You also gain a new appreciation for those loved ones who reveal that their love and compassion is in no way connected to money or materialism, a revelation that makes you love those loved ones more than you ever thought possible. It is through these eyes of love that I present these photographs, scanned by my sister and taken by many such loved ones over the course of my parents’ forty year marriage. As much as anything else, my parents have taught me that friendship is at the root of all great relationships, and most especially lifelong romance. My sister and I are more blessed than words can ever describe to be the children of our father and mother. And nothing makes us happier than knowing that, “in good times and in bad”, they always have had and always will have one another.

Possibly the most romantic ending in film history.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MOM AND DAD, 

WITH LOVE FROM BOTH OF US ALWAYS!!!!!!!!!!!! XOXOXOXOXO

        ROB & JEN 

"As long as life endures, it's yours....this heart of mine." 

An Unexpected Farewell To An Unexpected Muse

It was the second time it happened in less than a year: my life crossed paths with a favorite gay porn star in the moments just before his death. In 2012, I saw a Tweet that Erik Rhodes posted about the tears he shed every time he listened to Madonna’s “Has To Be”. And so I Tweeted him my blog entry “Straight vs. ‘Straight’” and spent the next day anxiously wondering if he’d been affected and would reply. The next morning he died unexpectedly, and that day his passing was the first I ever wrote about for my blog.

Today I learned of the death of Arpad Miklos, the beautiful, charismatic Hungarian actor and star of dozens of modern gay classics. I did not know who he was until only a few years ago, but when I saw him onscreen, I was mesmerized. The effect never went away. Something about Arpad was warm and sensual and yet dark and dangerous. I always felt that he had the looks and the talent to be a European movie star, and that’s why he became the muse for one of the characters in a script that I have recently been polishing for submission to a screenplay competition. In my mind, Arpad plays one of the lead characters, and my dream was that his recent fame following the Perfume Genius “Hood” music video could lead to his being a contender to play the role onscreen. (I even changed the character’s name from “Oliver” to “Armand” to insure he’d be an instant fit.) In recent days I have been reworking the script, and Arpad had frequently been on my mind as such. On Sunday night, I began work on a new blog entry that he inspired when his being on my mind lead me to YouTube video clips of Arpad locking lips with his co-stars in various gay porn films. The blog dealt with the power that onscreen depictions of male-male intimacy could have in preventing suicide. I planned to post that blog this evening, but while finishing it, I learned that Arpad had taken his own life on Sunday night.

Recent events have prompted me to be more open about my deeply spiritual beliefs, and I cannot treat the timing of Arpad’s suicide and his directly inspiring my pro-sex/anti-suicide post as mere coincidence. However, I also cannot bring myself to post it as originally written so soon after Arpad’s passing. It’s not that this awful news changed my perspective: I think the message is all the more relevant after such a tragedy, and clearly the Universe agrees with me. But I’m just not prepared to rewrite what must remain “a happy post” in this sad new context. Like Erik Rhodes, Marilyn Chambers, Jamie Gillis, and Linda Lovelace, this death affects me on a deeply personal level because it was not only the loss of life but the loss of an opportunity. And that opportunity was for mainstream audiences to see in these beautiful people what made them among the most beloved film stars of erotic cinema. Fans of adult films are not viewed with the same credibility as more highbrow film connoisseurs, because we live in a society that treats sexual fantasy as a necessary evil and people who are open about their fantasies are inevitably subjected to one of many different forms of castigation. But this is nothing compared to the treatment of the stars of adult films, who are barred from working in mainstream cinema and often barred from working in the mainstream world at all. It’s easy to understand why people would still make porn in their forties when they were denied jobs by the very hypocrites who bought their videos. 

I am not going to comment one way or another on the adult film industry, because there is a very big difference between the industry and the art form. If my views of “the world of porn” seem a bit Pollyanna-esque, it’s because I’m rabidly in favor of preserving and celebrating the art form. This is not to say that porn stars are not exploited by the industry that chews them up and spits them out. But it is society at large that I call upon to take accountability for the number of porn stars who end up turning to drugs or alcohol or crime or suicide. The judgment bestowed by society upon people who have made a career having sex onscreen is akin to the evils of racism, homophobia, and misogyny their most raw and rampant. I do not know why Arpad Miklos (whose name, I learned after his death, was Peter Kozma) chose to end his life when he did, but I would imagine that the worship of countless fans, the love of his friends, and the respect of his industry peers was not enough to compensate for the cruelty of a society that refused to see his inner and outer beauty the way those who adored him did. The media will no doubt use his death to further admonish the porn industry and in turn further disenfranchise porn stars from the rest of the world. But I hope the onscreen legacy that Arpad left behind, and the many admirable qualities he exuded in his interactions with people offscreen, will be what the world remember about him. Like Marilyn Chambers and Jamie Gillis, he had what it took to be a movie star. And like Marilyn Chambers and Jamie Gillis, he will always be a movie star, 

and a muse, to me.

Rest in peace, Peter…..I will never cease to be grateful. xoxoxo

My Favorite Aquarian

My Mother is not as big a movie fan as I am, for she is the type of person who always chooses the real world over the infinite alternate universes of cinema. But she only ever encouraged my movie love, bringing me to see arthouse movies in the sixth grade (per my request) and seeing Showgirls on opening night with my father (per my birthday wish) because I was too young to be admitted. She has always had faith in my dreams and always allowed me to be who I am, no matter how far-fetched or freakish or shameless I might have been labeled by the rest of the world. She has also been an endless source of optimism and support. Her openness and honesty have shaped me every day, and encouraged me to appreciate those same qualities in all people, but most especially in other strong women. Like my father, she didn’t simply “accept” me, she encouraged me to be completely myself, but never at the expense of other people's well-being. I credit whatever good karma I have to the example my parents set from day one, and I owe every happiness to their belief in my right to lead a fulfilled life. 

This is a big birthday year for my family, as my Mother, my Father, and my sister Jennifer are all celebrating milestones. And while most sons are instructed not to reveal their mother’s age, I am proud to celebrate my Mom’s 65^th birthday today because it is a moment that deserves to be honored and reflected upon by the countless people whose lives she has touched since January 31^st, 1948. The happiness she has brought to my father and my sister and I is beyond compare, but we are only three of the people whose love for Kathy Jeffrey is voluminous, everlasting, and earned. She is an extraordinary person who has, in turn, drawn many other extraordinary people to her. 

Above all else, I am especially thankful for that.

There is no definitive way to pay proper tribute to my amazing Mother, but I hope this collection of some of my favorite photographs can be a small sign of gratitude, a testament to how fortunate I know I am to be Her son. And now I toast "my favorite Aquarian" by dedicating this 52^nd blog post to my Mother. From long before I was born up to the present (birth)day, She has been strong, passionate, understanding, funny, thoughtful, sensitive, courageous, kind, and all around just really fucking cool.

(I felt the final point was worth underlining with out-of-character profanity.;)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!!!!!!!! 

I LOVE YOU ALWAYS!!! XOXOXOXO

    

And now, to close, the performance that ALWAYS makes me think of my Mom.

"Forever Young"

Late one night in January 2008, I discovered this 1985 TV performance on YouTube. I had fallen in love with Alphaville's "Forever Young" in the late summer of 2004 when it was featured in the brilliant film Napoleon Dynamite. That same summer, Laura Branigan, whom I had loved since my days of watching the variety show Solid Gold as a child, died unexpectedly of an aneurism. My love for her music deepened in the months and years that followed her untimely passing, but it was not until five years ago that I learned that she covered "Forever Young". I still remember the first time I saw this clip. I felt as though Laura's angelic soul had guided me to it that night, when I needed it most. A part of me feels that all over again, every time I hear the song. But my most vivid memories came over the next two years, when this most haunting rendition of "Forever Young" would underscore the final days I spent with my beloved dogs, Frisky and Chloe. 

Frisky and Chloe were sisters, born the very same summer I filmed my tribute to Madonna's "Vogue", and they were a defining part of the lives of my sister and I from our childhood through our twenties. They saw us through every high and low over the span of two decades, from grade school through college and beyond. Chloe died while looking into my eyes on December 27th, 2008, and Frisky died while looking into my sister Jennifer's eyes on January 10th, 2010. Speaking as a deeply spiritual person, 2009 was a powerful chapter in my life because Frisky was here with my family while Chloe was no longer in a physical form. Throughout 2009, the last full year of Frisky's journey, I felt Chloe especially close: their bond was truly unbroken by death. Never was this more potent than on the night of September 26th, 2009, when I walked outside with Frisky in my arms, playing an MP3 of Laura Branigan's "Forever Young" on my cell phone under a Full Moon. Now, a part of me always goes back to being in that Full Moonlight every time I listen, and I am once again holding Frisky in my arms, the spirit of her sister Chloe all around us. 

In January 2013, Laura Branigan's "Forever Young" would take on another meaning for me. On January 6th, I learned that one of my dearest and most incredible friends was at the end of her life journey. Amanda was an integral part of my adolescence, an ally in junior high school who I stayed in touch with until 2012. Many of my memories of her were formed during the seventh and eighth grades, a difficult life chapter that I avoided looking back on for many years. But now I cherish those once painful memories so as to remind me of the right approach to take to truly living life...just like Amanda did. 

In the seventh grade, I was secretly coming to terms with my homosexuality while also realizing that Amanda seemed to have romantic feelings for me. I couldn't tell her why it was that I couldn't go out with her, despite how well we got along and how much I adored her. The two of us separately and collectively endured peer abuse (I loathe the term "bullying) from certain people who mocked our friendship. I'm sure some of them knew even ahead of me that I was gay, but such taunts primarily were rooted in the fact that I was extremely tall for my age while Amanda was quite short. Amanda and I never discussed anything as trivial as our height difference, but years later I learned from a mutual friend that Amanda had battled and beaten childhood cancer, and that this had presumably stunted her growth.  Looking back, I should have known by her approach to life that she was a cancer survivor. Amanda was a lot tougher than I was, and deflected the words of other people with a strength and optimism that I still hope to one day emulate. 

In junior high school, and especially the seventh grade, I was deeply sensitive to the ignorance and cruelty of classmates whose own internal suffering I would not understand until years later. And I was obsessed by a fear that I was causing Amanda more suffering than anyone else by not having for her the same feelings that she had for me. This fear dominated my thinking, yet without any cause, for Amanda never stopped smiling. Regretfully, I transferred to another school because I felt lonely and depressed and picked-on and unpopular. I thought I could hit the "Reset" button and have an entirely different teenage experience in an entirely new environment.  Amanda, on the other hand, never held grudges against those who could be so cruel: she not only forgave but ultimately became friends with the people who had once inflicted pain.

Amanda and I did not see each other very much after we went to different high schools, but thankfully America Online kept us connected for the rest of our teen years. At the start of senior year, we ended up working side-by-side at CVS, and once again I had the pleasure of seeing Amanda every day. I will never forget the night when she rang up a junior high tormentor while we were both working the cash registers. After he left, she told me how much nicer he was now. I wished I'd taken her approach to people, and to life, back when we were teenagers. Amanda weathered much more than I ever did, and yet she never let that affect her exquisuitely positive attitude. She was never blind or naive or living in a fantasy world. Her positivity was entirely by choice, and it never, ever wavered. She consciously chose to feel only love for all people. Eventually, all people loved her right back. And how rightfully so. 

Amanda's beautiful senior photo and caption in the Class of 2000 High School Yearbook.

I can't recall if I finally told Amanda I was gay shortly after I left CVS or shortly after we started college. Telling her was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, and one day I finally wrote her an email message to set the record straight--so to speak. As detailed in past blog entries, I knew all too well what it was like to be infatuated with a guy who either did not share the same feelings and/or the same sexual orientation. Inflicting that pain onto Amanda of all people was something I never ceased to be afraid of doing. I don't know if she knew I was gay by that time I finally told her, but from the reply she sent back, all the way up to the last messages we ever exchanged, it never affected our friendship one way or another. We went on to maintain communication for years by way of AIM, email, and eventually Facebook. Some time in 2004 or 2005, we ran into one another again at a grocery store in the same plaza where we'd once worked together at CVS. I remember that hug we shared and the warmth between us so vividly, and I keep remembering it all the time now because that happy moment was the last time I ever saw Amanda. 

Last May, when I posted an essay I wrote in high school about my junior high experience, there was never any mention of my friend Amanda. This was not an oversight: I removed all references to Amanda entirely from the piece I wrote at sixteen about what it was like being thirteen. I didn't want posting the full-length essay to stir up potentially painful memories of our shared experiences, not until I had given her the chance to read what I had written and to both have a conversation about it in person. Ever since I posted my "Vogue" tribute we had been planning to get together in Boston for a proper reunion. In spite of the image I have attempted to construct with my video and my blog, these last few years of my life have been wrought with different kinds of pain that have taken a physical and emotional toll on my nearest loved ones. I kept hoping this was a chapter about to end, and that once things were back on track in my life I would resume all of my dormant social activities and pick up friendships where they were left off. In spite of all my wishful thinking, said chapter has yet to end. In the midst of so much turmoil, I became intensely reclusive, but was too vain and too ashamed to let this on to all but a trusted few. Amanda was among those few. She understood where I was at, and why I was waiting for things to be better so that our catch-up in the city would be "well worth the wait". Alas, speaking in the purely physical sense, that reunion was not to be. 

Having beaten cancer as a little girl, Amanda spent a great deal of her time working with the American Cancer Society. She had a passion for helping people that was informed not only by her extraordinary soul but also by her own brave battle as a child. I naively thought she would spend the rest of her life doing so, never once thinking that the disease would come back to take her as a young adult. Just six days into 2013, I learned that Amanda was once again battling cancer, but that this battle would not be won. I subsequently spent the next several days thinking of nothing but Amanda, generating all of the energy and prayers that I could in hopes that all of the love going her way could miraculously heal her. On the night of January 9th, I learned that Amanda was in good spirits, as positive and upbeat as ever. But I also learned that she was going into a hospice the next day. In the hours that followed, I came to terms with the inevitable, and spent a great deal of time listening to music and reflecting on my memories of someone so extraordinary. Although I am a very emotional person, my emotions typically don't reveal themselves in times of sadness. I often say that I only cry in Bette Davis movies, that my appreciation of her greatest dramatic work is certainly deepened by its ability to release my own repressed emotions when I need it most. But as January 9th became January 10th, I shed many tears for the life journey that was coming to an end much, much sooner than any of us could ever have expected. In my heart, I said goodbye that night. Some twelve hours later, on a most unusually warm and sunny afternoon in January, Amanda's journey came to an end.

In the weeks since Amanda's passing, she has remained at the forefront of my mind. Memories of adolescence came back to me with almost supernatural clarity in those final days of her life, so that those experiences, once again, all seem recent. Only what I once viewed as a source of guilt or shame or sadness I now view in an entirely positive light. I look back on the times we shared together in junior high school as pure happiness, because I finally appreciate why this was Amanda's perspective all along. For years I was fixated on a fear that I had hurt Amanda more than anyone else by not feeling for her the way she felt for me, especially as we were both going through such an awkward and challenging stage together. I can finally see that she was far more content than someone as neurotic as I could ever have appreciated, least of all at thirteen. I remember seeing her one day at the start of seventh grade wearing black cowboy boots and thinking of how cool she looked, and I'm pretty sure that's the day when our friendship really began. At a school dance held in the junior high cafeteria a few weeks later, Amanda asked me to dance, and I accepted but was shy about dancing to anything but a waltz-y slow song--indeed, the carefree Vogue Boy was long gone. But Amanda had no hesitation whatsoever, and I keep smiling to myself as I remember her immediately grooving along with the song, never revealing a trace of the insecurity that I felt defined by. 

The night before Amanda's life ended, I was consumed by grief for her family. But on the night of her passing, I was consumed by positivity, thrilled by the awesome power of her incredible spirit. That night, I didn't cry. I danced. Normally when I dance in private I have a secret fear that someone is outside my window filming me. But this time I didn't feel any fear. I didn't feel anything negative at all. I was, and still am, determined to live my life as positively and as optimistically as Amanda did. She loved life, every day of it, whether good or bad or ugly or beautiful or painful or pleasurable. She faced more adversity than I ever did and she yet she was never one to complain or to expect sympathy. She may not have been tall, but she was a tower of strength. She had not one ounce of cynicism in her, and yet she was never without a sense of humor. I speak for countless lives touched when I say that I love her with all my heart. 

On the night of January 11th, I listened to "Forever Young" for the first time since Amanda's journey here came to an end. I was under the open sky on a starry night, and I wished for a shooting star to appear while I listened. When the song ended, I felt connected to Amanda despite not having seen one. I thought to myself, "I don't need to see anything to know you're near." I blew a kiss up to the sky, to a small patch of black in the center of that blanket of stars. And then a comet shot across that patch, slowly and brightly, taking my breath away. I was once again consumed by positivity, by Amanda's positivity. Now every time I drift back towards sadness, I remember that moment, and am incapable of feeling anything but gratitude and happiness. And every time I listen to Laura Branigan sing "Forever Young", Amanda is among those angels who I feel so especially near. 

Rest in Peace, James and Erik

Over the years I have often celebrated my favorite female entertainers but rarely do I pay homage to my favorite male entertainers--certain filmmakers notwithstanding. I may relate most to Marilyn Chambers, but I don't give nearly enough credit to the male porn stars whom I adore.

Erik Rhodes was one of those porn stars.

I first saw Erik onscreen in The Farmer's Son during my last semester at Emerson College. I reacted to him the way straight men and lesbians must have reacted to Marilyn Chambers forty years ago: Erik looked more like the guys I crushed on in real life than he looked like the guys I lusted after in X-rated films. At 25, he was beautiful, and more importantly, he seemed happy, and didn't leave the audience feeling guilty for watching. But I adored him far more in the "making of" featurette, where we saw him being funny and playful and human. It was obvious that everyone on set loved him, and that they knew the audience would feel the same way.

After I graduated college, I moved to New York. A few months after I moved there, I stumbled upon Erik's MySpace page and was once again struck by his beauty, his masculinity, and his overwhelming Old Hollywood star quality. I thought he was the most legitimately macho European American actor to come along since Mickey Rourke. When I learned that he lived in New York too and that we were only four months apart in age, I found myself both idolizing him and desperately wanting to make him fall madly in love with me.

But then I stumbled onto his blog.

At the time, I was in a dark and lonely place, but had no idea this seemingly ideal man of my dreams was plagued by his own demons. It was only a few months after I had seen him happy onscreen, so I was shocked by the unhappy tone of his writing. He seemed miserable, and the men who commented on his posts all seemed as shocked as I was and as sincerely compassionate. I did not like Erik less after that, but I realized then that I had transplanted the face of all my fantasy men onto Erik. I also viewed him as a perfected version of myself: being a porn icon who could bridge the gap between hardcore and Hollywood was a dream I inherited from Marilyn Chambers. Erik was better looking than me and better suited for the camera, but I had no idea until I read his blog that my dreams were not his goals. Reading his words humanized him, and though that killed my fantasy, it underlined his talent: even in subsequent years, his sadness never showed onscreen. Like Marilyn, he was a damn good actor. And like Marilyn, he was taken from us before being given the opportunity to shine outside of the X-rated universe.

I feel especially shocked today because when I recently joined Twitter I immediately started following Erik and all of the favorite adult film actors of my twenties. I wanted to know where their lives were at, and to confirm my still-standing belief that there can be such a thing as "a happy porn star". Reading Erik's Tweets over the last few weeks, I was struck by the negativity and self-destructive tendencies revealed in so many comments that were seemingly made in jest. He couldn't seem to hide his pain even when he was joking back and forth with friends. Recent comments that he made about "all gay men" and his embarrassment over revealing that Madonna's "Has To Be" always made him cry prompted me to reach out to him. I was expanding and polishing a paper I wrote in college for inclusion on my blog, one I had intended to post on June 20th, exactly nine months after my 30th birthday. But on June 12th, someone reminded me in a conversation that my obsession with dates and numbers might be more "OCD" than "numerology". So that night I published my piece about the struggle of non-conforming gay males to fit into the gay community. I didn't publish it for Erik, but he was the one person I planned to Tweet it to.

Before I went to bed, in the early hours of June 13th, I sent him the link. His last Tweet was dated June 11th, and by the tone of his recent comments, I had a lurking, dark fear that I consciously chose to ignore. I kept going online to see if he'd sent any Tweets, trying to gather if what I wrote connected with him. I was so certain it would. Maybe it did. When I went onto Twitter today I saw the news of his passing, and immediately felt my heart ripped out.

Three years ago, Marilyn Chambers died unexpectedly, mere weeks after I had been working on a screenplay that I was convinced could bring her the artistic respect and Hollywood stardom she had been denied for thirty-five years. It may have been the naive dream of an amateur writer, but either way, it was crushed on April 12th, 2009. On June 14th, 2012, the death of Erik Rhodes leaves me with a more complex kind of sadness. I loved his Tweets, but I didn't have any screenplays written that I hoped he could be cast in. I adored him as a person, but my dreams of making him fall in love with me have since become but one memory in a strange life chapter. But, like all people who were born in 1981-1982 in the American Northeast, I felt a generational and regional kinship with Erik. He would have been in my grade in school. If we grew up together, I don't doubt I would have spent my youth madly in love with him. And I probably would have spent a lot of that youth trying to save him from himself. I think that's how most of Erik's fans felt about him.

I must confess I had a fantasy that he would be affected by the piece enough to share it, but my conscience is clear because I know I wasn't trying to dupe a hurt person in order to further myself. His being affected was all that mattered. The only ulterior motive I might have had was the eternal thrill of being one person who could strike a nerve and block someone on the road to his own destruction. I hate to say that the tiny, dark fear I had was a fear he would commit suicide. In turn, I also feared that if I had only posted that piece days earlier instead of waiting then I might have stopped it. It's a ridiculous idea, yet anyone who has lost someone that way can no doubt relate to what prompted such fears. But Erik did not, according to reports, take his own life. He may have allowed death to happen by consciously choosing to put into his body drugs that he knew would one day kill him. I would suspect he that embraced such a scenario. But it still wasn't suicide. Erik was taken because, for some crazy reason, he was supposed to be.

I don't like to divide and offend by delving into theology and my spiritual beliefs, but let me say this: I do not think that science will ever prove the existence of what some of us refer to as "a higher power". But I DO think that science will prove that our existence is not limited to our life span as a finite physical being. I'll refrain from words like "soul" and "immortality", but I don't think you need to believe that our energy was created by a deity in order to believe that it is endless. Erik, whose real name was James, brought much happiness during his short time on Earth, but he was clearly never as happy a person as he always deserved to be. I'm not part of his circle of loved ones, and I'm certainly no medium. But I wouldn't be sharing these thoughts on the day James left us if I wasn't struck by the certainty that he is finally as happy as he wanted to be.

We love you and we miss you....neither Erik nor James will ever be forgotten.

How Madonna and Mr. Willis Revealed Me To Myself

When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a “loss of innocence” assignment for English class as an opportunity to purge myself of my not-so-pleasant experiences in junior high. I also took it as another opportunity to write about Madonna for an English class, a favorite pastime of mine that stemmed from my desire to fight for her integrity with the literary crowd. But with this paper, I wasn’t selling Madonna on her worth as an artist or even a commercial figure. Rather, I was offering an insight into the chapter of my life that lead to my loving her as passionately as I have ever since.

Now, it’s not as if I hadn’t loved Madonna for years. I was apparently fixated on her as a two year old watching “Burning Up” and went crazy for “Lucky Star” as a three year old. I have a dim sense of familiarity with the latter and rely on trustworthy cousins for the former. But my real love did not begin until the day my father took me to see Dick Tracy on a summer afternoon in 1990. Whether on the small screen or the big screen, I fell in love with Madonna first and foremost as a movie star. It wasn’t until a few months before my 1991 “Vogue” tribute that I became an avowed fan of her music. It wasn’t until the late 90s that I felt a great deal of shame for having waited that long, and that neurotic reaction was the result of Madonna’s impact on my life in the mid-90s.

During the seventh grade, Madonna became my internal and external salvation from what I perceived as a hellish adolescence. It honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought it was at the time, but I’d still not repeat that era for any figure below one billion dollars. I wish I had known then that my pain was significantly less than the pain being endured by those who tormented me. Had I been blessed with that understanding, I would not have quietly vilified a number of undeserving peers for most of my teen years. My negative self-image, formed as a result of failing to achieve incredibly superficial social goals, was far more destructive than anything being literally or figuratively hurled my way by others. Had I known this at the time, I might have benefitted from junior high as a lesson for the future, instead of spending years viewing it as punishment for an overly happy childhood.

Junior high school was the era that shaped who I am today, and that includes my love of Madonna. The famous indifference to homosexuality by the most influential figure in my life was vital to my self-acceptance. During the seventh grade, I finally admitted to myself that I was gay. I had been attracted to men before I even went through puberty, and I spent my pubescent years fantasizing about gay romance. But all the while I was convinced that I was going through some sort of developmental phase and would come out of it a heterosexual. I had snuck into books at the library about human sexuality and found that this was quite common. It seemed altogether rational to me as a confused adolescent since all of my idols were, after all, beautiful women.

My real awakening came about in early 1995, while watching Bruce Willis in Color of Night. I’d been infatuated with Bruce Willis since the sixth grade and counting the days till that movie came out on video so I could find a way to see it. Late one Saturday night, I stole the copy my parents had rented, and viewed this future bad movie classic while the rest of the house slept.  During the film’s most famous sex scene, the audience was offered two gorgeous, naked people making love in a pool in the form of Bruce Willis and Jane March. Only one of these people sparked a physical reaction in me while I watched the film. And the one who turned me on so overwhelmingly that I never questioned my sexuality again was, indeed, Mr. Willis. Since that fateful night I have regarded him as the man who most helped me to come out of the closet. It would be a few years before I fully came out to the world, but I never lied to myself about who I was attracted to ever again. I did this out respect not only to myself but to all women, and I have Bruce to thank.

I did not reveal my post-Color of Night sexual understanding in the paper I wrote for my 10th grade English class. But I DID reveal a lot more than I ever wrote before or since about my junior high years and why I hated them so much. In fact, I revealed more than I’d care to make public. This is mostly because it involves other people whose memories are as unpleasant as mine, and because the people who I looked at as my tormentors were just kids in pain. I know most of them now thanks to Facebook and they’ve all grown up into perfectly fine people who don’t need to be reminded of how they reacted to feeling that indescribable anguish of being thirteen years old. Someday when we’re all farther away from that stage of our lives, I’d be happy to offer the full story, but I hope this abridged version still manages to provide some empathetic reading for those who recognize the emotions of my younger self. 

Bob Jeffrey-Sophomore English, Per. 2

Personal Narrative/Loss of Innocence

10/20/97

           

            I still remember the first day. I had been telling people all summer long how I was nervous about going back to school. I never liked to get too excited, because I knew that halfway through the year I would sorely miss the summer. But secretly I had been dying to go to Masconomet. I had just finished the sixth grade, and would be going into my first year of junior high school. I couldn’t believe that I was about to be in “real school”, and that I would fulfill my childhood dream of being a teenager.

            Despite my somewhat naïve optimism, I was still nervous about going for the first time. I walked in and checked the bulletin board to find where my homeroom class was, where I would get my class schedule. Throughout the day we basically were introduced to the material we would be covering, and there wasn’t very much work involved at all. It seemed like junior high would be a blast, even better than the 6^th grade. Little did I know what was in store for me.

            The first few weeks of school were enjoyable on a social level, but somewhat challenging in regards to academics. But it wasn’t until a few weeks into September that things took a turn for the worst. I really didn’t consider myself one who had many enemies, and at the time I wasn’t a very self-conscious person. So I had no reason to suspect that people either didn’t like me or were making fun of me. But one day during my health class, while I was talking to someone and the teacher was not looking, two people who I hardly knew were throwing paper at me. At first I just pretended to laugh it off, and didn’t pay much attention. But everyday they would continue doing this when the teacher was turned around. Being somewhat shy and not very confrontational, I never said anything and every day I just sat back and basically let them do this to me. For a while I considered my behavior to be a form of ignoring them, but over time what they were doing made me feel more and more worthless until I felt like I was less than a human being. Eventually the teacher caught word of what was going on and they finally let up. Nevertheless, by that time it was too late. The permanent damage had already been done.

            Even though things at Masco were not off to a good start by any means, the turning point of junior high and, in a sense, my life took place several weeks later. I had been on relatively good terms with the two boys who had been throwing paper and other objects at me, but that changed after the fatal dance on October 7^th. I still remember it like it was just yesterday. I had been debating between going to see The Specialist, which opened that night, or going to the dance. The dance won.

It is hard for me to pinpoint specific memories of this time, because much of it I have blocked out and many of the events were minor but, when added up, had a lasting effect on me. I would be mocked constantly, sometimes by people I had never seen before, and was never accepted by any one crowd. Sometimes people would be outgoing to me and treat me like a friend, but I could never tell if they were being sincere, or were really just trying to give me the wrong impression so that I would be humiliated. People were always borrowing money from me and never paying me back, and I always felt as though people were making fun of me whenever I looked the other way.

            Masco is a regional school, and so about 2/3 of the student body were strangers to me and 1/3 were kids who I had practically grown up with. But as the 7^th grade progressed, I became estranged from the people who I had previously considered a second family of sorts. Some of them had given me reason to, whether it be because they had “mistreated me” or because they didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. With others, it was because I now felt inferior to them and didn’t risk any kind of social involvement for fear of being ridiculed. The people who I had considered my peers became strangers, and I even became separated from my friends to the point where we acted like mere acquaintances whenever we ran into each other.

            My personality also changed drastically. I became reclusive and paranoid, and I felt as though I couldn’t trust anyone. When walking in the hallway, I found myself pretending more and more not to see the people walking past me. Some of them were people who had been cruel to me during the year and who I now feared, and others were friends who had given me no reason to distrust them, but who I just couldn’t feel comfortable around anymore. I had been an outgoing, optimistic, and extremely social person a year earlier, but now I had unconsciously become a completely different person.

            This transformation spawned much of the humiliation I went through during the 7^th grade. Because I was such a naïve and ridiculously “over-kind” person at the time, I never stood up for myself. And it wasn’t the Hollywood depiction of junior high either. I wasn’t the smart kid being tormented by a powerful clique. I was the boy next door turned loner who felt completely rejected by much of the student body. I didn’t have many friends, and there wasn’t really anyone to defend me. I was on my own, plagued by the personality I had developed as a result of my experiences. This reclusive behavior I was exhibiting gave students opportunity to make fun of me throughout the year, and my lack of self-confidence and naiveté prevented me from standing up for myself. Soon every day became an almost masochistic game of cat and mouse between me and the school, and I was letting them win. Many times I felt like I was watching myself being torn to pieces in school, and even though I had the power to stop what was happening to me I literally chose not to. This was definitely the most frustrating and infuriating aspect of all of junior high school. I didn’t feel comfortable enough to trust many people, and I assumed that there weren’t too many people on my side.

         Throughout the year, one forms of salvation was Madonna. I had been a huge fan of hers for years, long before the 7^th grade. Nonetheless, during the 7^th grade I felt like she was one of the few people I could turn to for protection against Masco. Because of her outspoken, sometimes sexual, and often controversial persona, I felt as if telling everyone how much I loved her would prove to them that I was in fact cool and not the “perennial virgin” I often came across as. I also tried to incorporate Madonna into school projects and class discussions, though this was often in the hopes of making some of my peers fans as well. In October of 1994, the fall that I started Masco, Madonna’s album Bedtime Stories was released. It wasn’t until several years later that I fully appreciated this particular album, because the songs were of a very different style than most of Madonna’s music. Nonetheless, I listened to the songs “Survival”, “Secret”, “Don’t Stop”, and “Take A Bow” quite often during the Fall of ’94. Though most of them I listened to for enjoyment, “Survival” was probably the only song that perfectly described the experiences I was going through and the way I wanted to respond to some of the harsh treatment I was getting. “I’ll never be an angel, I’ll never be a saint, it’s true. I’m too busy surviving. Whether it’s Heaven or Hell, I’m gonna be livin’ to tell.”

            On January 20^th, 1995, I remember coming out of school having an urge to go out and have fun and party with my friends. The problem was that I didn’t have any friends to party with, and the only fun I could have in my area was going to the movies. Instead, I had a rockin’ time going to the video store.

            Though initially it seemed depressing to spend my Friday night at home watching videos by myself, the videos I rented would go on to provide an escape from the harsh realities of the 7^th grade for many more Friday nights to come. That night I rented a video of the Madonna tour The Girlie Show and the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Watching The Girlie Show, I felt like I was at the party I had dreamed about when walking out of school that day. Madonna’s performance was so care-free and uninhibited, and it seemed like she was speaking directly to me as well as to all of the other lonely souls waiting for their chance to be in the spotlight. Watching “Fast Times”, I saw onscreen everything that I had expected junior high and high school to be. Many of my cousins, whom I am very close to, had gone to high school during the mid to late 1980s, and so the teen culture of that period was what I assumed being a teenager was all about. But it couldn’t have been any more different from what I expected when I got to junior high. But with this film, I felt like I could completely escape. Over and over again I would watch the film, becoming completely immersed with the characters’ stories every single time.

         On April 9^th, 1995, my pet rat, Shiner, died unexpectedly. He had been with us for just under two years, which was a little bit less than the average life span of a domestic rat. I went to feed him, and noticed that he wasn’t moving. I tried not to panic, and petted him and said his name. Suddenly he jerked back violently, and then he lay limp on his back. His feet looked cut, and his nose looked like it had been bleeding. He was breathing very slowly and his breaths were far apart. I comforted him for a while, knowing that this was likely the end, before taking him to the vet’s, where I found out it was. His death continues to haunt and sadden me for it was, fortunately, one of the few deaths of a loved one which I had to experience in life, and because it was so unexpected and ultimately unexplained. That night, after he had died at the vet’s, I still had homework to finish. I remember being so furious, because it was as if I couldn’t mourn because I had work to do. It was at this point that I found myself beginning to hate Masco. All the feelings I had felt immediately after Shiner’s death had shattered the lid on the feelings that had welled up over a seven month period at Masco, and I wanted something towards which I could direct these feelings of anger, sadness, and frustration. Through there are still many reasons for which I find myself angry at the school, I think I wanted a place to direct my anger towards, and so I just blamed the school in general.

            After a long, tumultuous year, the 7^th grade was finally over. My memories of it are dark and shady. Everything about the grade seems “untraceable”, because I have unconsciously blocked it out of my mind since I have been there. I never wanted to even hear the word “Masco” or talk about anything school-related during the summer. But during the last few weeks of summer the prospect of throwing myself back to the wolves scared me to death, and at the last minute I attempted to transfer to a new school. The transfer didn’t work out, and so I went back to Masco. Fortunately the 8^th grade was not nearly as bad as the 7^th, but it was still a very unhappy, lonely time in my life.

            All in all, those were the two worst years of my life. Still, I feel they strengthened me and opened my eyes to a world that wasn’t as kind and caring as I had thought it would be. I would never want to repeat that period of my life again, but knowing that I can’t turn back the clock, I think that those two years were something that I needed to go through to make the transition from childhood to adulthood.