My first Life Teacher—and unrequited love—arrived the spring of 1977 in the form of Kent Kelly. Like Ric, Kent was a couple years older than me. He was tall, ginger-haired, out, proud, and not willing to take crap from anyone—and I was immediately smitten. I don't remember if I met Kent through GSO or at Jekyll's, but I do remember he had no time for or interest in The Table.
Kent readily admitted that he liked me, but wasn't interested in me—or for that matter, anyone—romantically. He enjoyed being single and reveled in the freedom it allowed. Those were harsh words for a starry-eyed 18-year old, but to this day I appreciate his honesty because it allowed us to dispense with the bullshit and grow a platonic friendship that far outlasted anything sexual that might have come about at that point in my life. Kent knew he wasn't ready to settle down and also knew that I, as a "baby queen" (his words) had a lot of learning and exploring to do before even thinking about trying to settle down with just one other guy.
In simpler terms—and I say this with love—Kent was a self-professed slut and reveled in it.
After we both found ourselves living in Phoenix a couple years later, Kent became my ongoing dance partner and one of the best friends I've ever had. Even my mom—who constantly feared for my safety after I finally came out to the entire family—liked Kent and confided that she stopped worrying about me when I was out because she knew Kent was with me.
If she only knew…
During those first couple years after coming out, all my belief systems were in flux. I had been raised as a Lutheran, and like a lot of kids at the time, in high school I became devoutly religious. This was after all, the age of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. It was only after I came out and actually started learning about the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity that I flat our rejected it—at least the organized, brainwashing aspect of church itself. For years I skirted the issue by saying while I no longer considered myself a Christian, I still followed Christian principles.
Yeah, whatever. As I said, everything was in flux.
During this period of change, Kent opened my eyes to other belief systems, and encouraged me to explore all of them. He—like my dad (who was not at all religious and only begrudgingly attended church when he absolutely had to)—was very much into astrology, and it immediately appealed to me. It was so much simpler to put people in twelve little boxes than to deal with the fact that people are fucking impossible to fully understand and totally random acts that come out of nowhere can sometimes send your life careening off in totally different directions. I soon learned to calculate a birth chart by hand (amazing, considering how horrible I am at math), discern the meanings of Houses and Signs and Cusps and Aspects and became obsessed with trying to figure people out through the position of the planets in the sky the day they were born.
This interest in astrology naturally led me down other metaphysical paths, and after seeing the double sunset in Star Wars for the first time—and dealing with the overwhelming sense of deja vu that accompanied it—I began researching reincarnation. Of all the belief systems out there, reincarnation made the most sense to me, and I adopted that as the foundation for my personal belief system for many, many years. Even now, as an admitted Atheist there's still a tiny part of me that hopes—against all scientific evidence—that this is still what happens after we die. I guess it's just hard wired in the human psyche to refuse to accept the inevitable.
Kent shared these views, and as our friendship deepened, we simply accepted as fact that we had known each other in some previous existence. I remember one dream in which we were sitting by a lake in the mountains. Overhead three large moons moved lazily across an early morning sky. In this dream, Kent was telling me that he would soon be leaving, but not to be upset because we would be reunited again. The sense of loss was incredible, and I woke up crying. That day I asked him what he thought it meant. "Probably just a past life fragment sneaking through."
Later that summer he announced that Phoenix had grown too small and that he was moving to San Francisco. This sent me reeling, as it had come out of nowhere. (Did relating my dream to him months earlier plant the seed?) No matter what I said, nothing could convince him to stay. So, a week later, with tears welling up in my eyes after helping him pack up his battered orange VW Beetle, I watched him drive off, disco blaring from his open windows, as he started his new life.
The day he left, I gave him a card in which I'd copied a quote from Richard Bach's Illusions, a book that became my "Bible" for many years afterward:
Do not be dismayed at goodbyes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes,
Is certain for those who are friends.
The dream proved prophetic. Kent and I did in fact, reconnect after I'd moved to San Francisco in 1986, but he passed from AIDS complications about eight months later. "It's better to have lived six years in San Francisco than sixty in Arizona," was one of the last things he said to me; an idea that influenced my attitudes for years afterward.
You already shared a photo of him sooner. I remind it because he looks handsome.
Back then it was a kind of revelation for me (stupid from me, but I admit it).
I realized that AIDS did not took the lives of renegades who lived their sex life on the side in dark places.
It hit handsome men, who were full of life, and openly flamboyant about how they deal with their life.
For us, later gay kids, we've been told the story as if these victims were a bit zombies since the beginning.
That's not openly said, and it hits you even more : In the collective subconscious, remained the idea that catching AIDS was the last of many degradations a homosexual would go through. An aftertaste of homophobia, that get printed on you, even if you're gay yourself.
And overall, it's nice to have examples of Aids victim when we see them alive again.
We know people died from Aids, friends of older friends, but it's very abstract for us.
And it's even more comforting and prejudice breaking when the guy look handsome as a straight man would. He doesn't look gay per se. And it's another bad reflex that may somehow have been printed on me, why do I await gay to look different, like fop? A bit like people were conditioned to spot the hidden jews in society through the shape of nose and such, even when they don't mind jewish people at all!