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. 

A Special Post For A Special Guy

Nine years ago, the angelic cat photographed above literally walked into my life in the parking garage of a North Miami Beach apartment building that I was living in in late January 2004. My best friend/lover/roommate encouraged me to take him in despite our building's ban on pets, saying he'd give the adorable little kitten to his parents. He convinced me to break the rules, something I have never done enough in my life. I'm ever thankful that my better half convinced me to do the right thing: it wasn't long that the little boy I named "Toby" had been in our apartment before I declared him our adopted son. We secretly kept him in our apartment until we moved out, and one year shy of a decade later, he's curled up beside me as I type this. 

To celebrate my beloved feline son now being as old as my "Vogue Boy" self, here are a handful of fairly recent favorite photos of Toby, selected from the hundreds on my Facebook page. I hope they capture his magic for all of you.

Thanks for being my little sidekick, "Mr. T"! ;) xoxoxoxo