Part 1: Art of Memory
First in a six-part series
The dreams began a few weeks after Louis Fulgoni died of complications from AIDS in July of 1989, following months of hospitalization and harrowing decline. At first, he appeared as a frail, nearly transparent figure who sat silently in the corner of a room full of people, set apart from the living as if by some celestial law of segregation. Nobody noticed him except me. I had a woozy sense that the whole business of his demise had been a huge bureaucratic mix-up at the hospital. It could all be cleared up with a few phone calls in the morning.
Self-portrait, ink and colored pencil on paper, 1975.
“I’ll let them know you’re alive. Hang in there,” I told him, and he nodded vaguely.
The dreams returned nearly every night for weeks, and each night, to my astonishment, Louis grew less ghostly, more robust and corporeal. The ravages of disease started to fall away with amazing speed, as though time had changed direction. His gaunt cheeks filled out and his sallow, papery complexion recovered its olive glow. His haunted eyes came alive again with wit and sparkle. Instead of wearing a flimsy hospital gown, he was dressed for action: jeans, bomber jacket and white silk scarf. He was himself again, risen and restored.
A few years later, in the mid-1990s, the introduction of antiretroviral drugs would have an eerily similar impact, miraculously restoring the withered bodies of gravely ill people with AIDS. Clinicians called it the Lazarus effect. In Louis’s case, it happened only in my subconscious.
Before long, the tone of the dreams shifted from funereal to almost festive. The nondescript room we were in filled up with more and more people, and each dream picked up where the last one had left off. One night, amid the loud chatter of the growing crowd, Louis sat down next to me on a plush sofa and put one arm around my shoulders. He spoke into my ear so that I could hear him above the din. “I’m okay,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
When I awoke, I wanted to believe that he really was okay, if only because his suffering was over, and that he had found a way to tell me so. I wanted to think the bond of friendship and loyalty we shared was strong enough to transcend the barrier between life and death, between memory and forgetting.
At the time, I took some solace in that dream, which turned out to be the last of them. I thought it might mean that death was better than the untenable existence of his horrific last months. I’m not so sure now, because it also allowed me to forget too much, to wrap up the loss of my dear friend a little too neatly. If I was repressing memories of an awful death, I was also losing sight of the life that preceded it. And that was inexcusable, not least because it ignored the vast body of work Louis had left behind.
As a prolific visual artist who was active for more than thirty years, he produced several hundred finished drawings, paintings, prints, collages and constructions. The pieces are rich and varied, ranging from deeply abstract to meticulously representational, alternately (or, at times, simultaneously) beautiful, erotic, spiritual and profane. And yet, this work remains almost completely unknown and unseen. It’s hard to believe that Louis, or any committed artist, would truly be okay with that.
Besides being my friend, Louis was my partner in a small publishing company we established in the 1980s. I was the editor and he was the art director – or, as he would often say, “Tim does the words and I do the pictures.” I did the words all right, and yet, even now, more than three decades after Louis’s death at the age of fifty-three, I still struggle to find the ones that capture his life and legacy.
Portrait of Michael, print on paper with colored ink, c. 1980.
We first got to know each other through Louis’s lover, Michael McKee, who headed a tenants’ rights organization where I worked at the time. This was around 1980, a couple of years before AIDS smashed the illusion that a sexual revolution without limits or consequences could prevail indefinitely. A gay man who was in his forties by the time we met – when I was in my early twenties – Louis told stories of his own past exploits that made erotic adventurism seem, if not risk-free, pretty inviting.
With the Mediterranean looks and compact, sturdy build of a character actor in a Scorsese movie, Louis never lacked opportunities for extracurricular activity, even in the repressed gay scene of the 1950s and early ’60s. During the decade that followed, he would revel in the hedonistic playground that was New York after Stonewall. From the way Louis talked, that brief, wide-open era in the bars and tea rooms of the 1970s sounded like the best of times. Considering what followed, it undoubtedly was.
The rebel in me was intrigued by the vitality of gay culture back then. As a bushy-bearded, self-proclaimed member of the counterculture, I happily identified with the notion of freedom from the shackles of social control, including gender expectations. I had never subscribed to the jock mentality of my all-boys Catholic high school; I was a terrible athlete, flabby and uncoordinated, and watching sports bored me to tears. As a result, and probably because I could compete with the football players academically, they regularly taunted me as, among other things, a “fucking faggot.”
Things got a little better in college, where I didn’t feel so alone in questioning what we now call toxic masculinity. I made some queer friends and grew to admire the militant spirit of the gay liberation movement, which came of age in the 1970s, just as I did. There was only one problem: I wasn’t attracted to men, even when I tried to be. During an especially confused phase, I became a semi-regular at a lesbian bar.
Louis and I laughed about that later. Over countless dinners at the apartment on West 21st Street where he and Michael had lived together since 1974, we laughed a lot. In fact, it was at the first of those dinners that we really hit it off. Michael had invited me to the apartment after work that evening. Louis whipped up a delicious coq au vin, the first I’d ever had. After several hours of food, drink and conversation enhanced by a few generously rolled joints, Michael crashed on the sofa and Louis saw me to the door. We were both still pretty stoned.
“Hope I’ll see you again soon,” he said, smiling and red-eyed. “I hope so too,” I said, and meant it.
