Part 6: A Reckoning
Conclusion of a six-part series
About a week after Louis Fulgoni died, I found myself walking up Eighth Avenue, carrying his boxed ashes in a shopping bag. As a favor to Michael McKee, I had picked up the bag from Redden’s Funeral Home on West 14th Street, one of a minority of New York morticians then willing to handle the remains of people with AIDS. I had never carried anyone’s cremains before. They were surprisingly heavy. Now and then on the way to deliver them to Michael, I shifted the bag from one arm to the other to ease the strain. Although I was not quite thirty-two, I felt older that day. After dropping the ashes off and staying with Michael for a while, I took a walk back over to the Union Square office to clear my head.
“First Black,“ oil and gesso on canvas, 1988.
I kept the office for a while after Louis died, but it felt empty and vaguely haunted. In his absence, I was hesitant to rearrange the place, but neither could I bear working in a sarcophagus day after day. When the lease was up, I decided to move to a different office building nearby. While cleaning things out for the move, I ran into one of the other tenants on our floor, Francisco, a strikingly handsome sculptor about my age, who had an enviably steady stream of attractive women – perhaps models, perhaps not – coming in and out of his studio. The exact nature of their visits had been a regular topic of wicked speculation between Louis and me, in part because Francisco introduced us to his wife one afternoon in the corridor.
He invited me in, for the first time in the several years we had been neighbors. Over coffee, I mentioned my girlfriend in passing. Francisco nearly choked on his espresso. He fixed me with an incredulous stare.
“But. You’re not gay?” he blurted out. “I thought. You and Louis. I mean.”
“No,” I said. “We were just good friends and we enjoyed working together, that’s all.”
He looked down into his cup and started to apologize for prying. I told him not to worry, that it was a perfectly understandable assumption. But in truth, his mistake took me by surprise. I suddenly realized that many people were probably under the same impression about Louis and me. If they’re not lovers, they must have wondered, what the hell are they? The more I thought about it, the more absurd and, frankly, offensive it was. Why shouldn’t a gay man be close to a straight man? It was like suggesting that a heterosexual man couldn’t be friends with a woman unless they were fucking. I thanked Frank for the coffee and walked back down the hallway to finish packing the remnants of Louis’s art supplies. I couldn’t bring myself to throw anything away.
Eventually, the grief of that awful time faded. I married my girlfriend, we started a family and I went on to a new career. Michael remained active as a tenants’ rights advocate and, at eighty-two, he still is. He also embarked on a new relationship with a wonderful man who is now his husband.
Moving on, as we did, is of course a natural part of the grieving process. In some ways, it is the easy part. Remembering can be hard, but it’s essential. That’s why Michael and I decided last year to start work on a virtual retrospective exhibition of Louis’s work, which will launch online this spring. We had been discussing an exhibition off and on for thirty years but made scant progress. It’s difficult to say why the exhibition didn’t happen sooner. We have both remained immersed in Louis’s work; his art fills the walls of Michael’s apartment – the same one in Chelsea where they lived together – and I have hung at least a dozen Fulgonis in four different abodes since 1989. But our love for these precious artifacts was never quite enough to move the idea of an exhibit forward. Finally, the onset of another pandemic, distinct from AIDS but carrying familiar echoes of inexorable loss, gave the idea new urgency. So did the inexorable passage of time. “I’m determined, before I kick the bucket, to have a retrospective,” said Michael.
Remembering can also be a reckoning. It has been for me, as work on the exhibition has proceeded. Despite our age gap, it occurs to me that I always considered Louis a peer. He certainly treated me that way. In many cases, an older partner naturally acts as a mentor to the younger one, passing on accumulated knowledge and experience. I did not cast Louis in that role, and he never overtly played it, because that would have been alien to his nature. Nevertheless, I see now that he taught me many things. Most profoundly, he modeled a level of devotion to channeling creativity – to living the life of an artist – that was a revelation and an inspiration. Altruistically, I want more of the world to feel, know and remember that devotion through his work. Selfishly, I am seizing the opportunity for a final, long-overdue creative collaboration with him, which the retrospective, in a certain sense, provides.
In the 1980s, AIDS activists rightly proclaimed that silence about the crisis equaled death. For Louis and all those who perished too soon, death equals silence only if they are forgotten.
