Part 2: The Staten Island Connection
Second in a six-part series
Louis Fulgoni and Michael McKee were the first grown-up gay couple I had ever known. In some ways, they were an unlikely pair: Michael the quietly serious political activist and Louis the seemingly devil-may-care artist. They also had divergent backgrounds. Michael was a fair-haired Army brat originally from Texas, and Louis was a working-class Italian kid from Staten Island, the New York City borough that also happens to be my hometown.
Maybe the Staten Island connection was the reason Louis and I became friends so effortlessly. We even discovered that we had attended the same parochial school, albeit a generation apart. Louis was 22 years older than me, yet we remembered some of the same nuns as teachers – brittle, often angry Daughters of Divine Charity shrouded in black-and-white habits, as immutable as Easter Island icons. The Church would have called us both “fallen away” Catholics, but Louis’s fall was more sensational than mine. Keenly aware of his sexual orientation from an early age, he recalled fantasizing about the well-muscled, loincloth-clad Jesus on the crucifix behind the altar. (“It’s a hot religion,” he remarked more than once.) Growing up as an adolescent in the 1950s, when the closet door was bolted for all but the most courageous or foolhardy, he had to live as a kind of sexual outlaw.
Portrait of Michael, print on paper with colored ink, c. 1980.
Born in 1936 on Staten Island, Louis spent a few of his early years in the then largely Italian-American enclave of East Harlem before his family moved back to the Island’s leafier Dongan Hills section when he was five or six. Atypically for that time and place, he was an only child. His mother, Mary, endured a difficult breech birth bringing him into the world. Because doctors warned her against having more children, she and her husband, Adolph, turned to “artificial” contraception, an intrinsic evil in the eyes of the Church then and now.
Mary was apparently so mortified by her alleged sinfulness that she would forego communion at mass for decades – adding one more charge to her son’s indictment of Catholicism.
Louis’s father may or may not have indulged in the eucharist, but he was easily the more egregious sinner in the family. In fact, Adolph, an Italian immigrant who worked as a chef in Manhattan, was such a misanthrope that relatives and neighbors actively avoided contact with him. I never met Adolph, who died in 1979 – the same year Louis joined celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising – but stories about the elder Fulgoni’s off-putting demeanor were legion.
Many years later, Louis’s younger cousin, Kathy Mahoney, described the cat-and-mouse game she played whenever she happened to see Adolph on the Staten Island Ferry. Kathy’s Irish-American father had married into Louis’s extended family, and she grew up in a house near the Fulgonis. When she was in her twenties, she worked in Manhattan (“the city” to Staten Islanders) and would take a bus to and from the ferry terminal each day. Adolph worked in the city, and they sometimes caught the same afternoon boat back to the Island. If Kathy spied him, she would immediately flee to another deck and wait a few extra minutes before disembarking so that he wouldn’t see her.
“He was a hateful man, and he was a lech,” she recalled. Even though Adolph parked his car in a lot near the ferry and would have driven her home, Kathy much preferred public transportation. “On top of everything else, he was a terrible driver,” she added.
He was also dismissive of his son’s nascent artistic talent, which he saw as useless and unmanly. As Michael put it, Adolph “not only disapproved of his son becoming an artist but could never, ever deal with the fact that his son was gay.” His homophobic coping strategy was simple: deep denial. Michael remembered one interaction that took place two years after he and Louis had moved in together – and after Michael had accompanied Louis to at least six obligatory holiday dinners on Staten Island and a weekend visit to the Fulgonis’ summer cottage in the Catskills. Adolph phoned the apartment and Michael answered. “Michael, what are you doing in my son’s apartment?” he asked. “Adolph, I live here,” Michael replied. The conversation went no further.
For his part, Louis described Adolph as a petit tyrant, a bully and a buffoon. Despite his father’s intense disapproval, he earned a degree in painting and illustration at the School of Visual Arts and commenced his lifelong passion and vocation as a working artist. But Adolph’s utter lack of support left a mark. In an unguarded moment, Louis once told Michael that even after his father was dead, he felt Adolph looking over his shoulder whenever he started a painting.
