Dearest Duane
Dearest Duane,
I can’t remember the first time that we met. I definitely know it was through our dear mutual friend Donna Drake — my high school soul mate. You were both in the theater department at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. Somehow you also knew my cousin Wendel who lived in the same town. I’m sure it was because of rubbing shoulders at a restaurant bar in LaGrange where the local glitterati, gays, theater crowd hung out.
During college summer breaks we’d meet up on the weekends in Atlanta — most memorable going out to Stephen’s on Peachtree Street — where the infamous ‘get drunk as shit anything goes’ party was held every Sunday. This was back in the days where driving drunk was normalized and widely acceptable.
We both had grown up in the suburbs of Atlanta. We used humor in order to keep us from being beaten up and destroyed in our younger gay days. We both had an appreciation for the absurd — a penchant for the Southern bawdy raunch — as everything around us seemed absurd as we struggled to find meaning in the herd assimilation mentality.
But after college is when the shenanigans began with a bang. So many adventures in those early young queer years in Atlanta where we ended up after college. You played Karol Kociera at Ms.P’s Annex once a week — the first underworld drag shows I first experienced. It opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of the underground queer countercultural. You were the pioneer who boldly led me to my people and the scene that influenced a lifetime of future artistic direction.
Fun was our practice as we both loved to laugh. It soothed the woes that were unspoken — yet mutually acknowledged. It was traumatic growing up gay and fem in the South.
And yet we were fortunate enough to land in the southern gay mecca of Atlanta. But even so, we were on the fringes of the Atlanta gay scene finding more simpatico with our marginalized comrades of shit kickers, hustlers, drag queens, transvestites, drug lords, and grifters.
You surprised me for my 1980 western-themed birthday party at the apartment on Juniper and Eighth Streets in Atlanta with a lip-synched performance of “I’ve Got a Tape Deck in my Tractor”. It brought the house down. You were fearless, fun, and flawless all together in one smashingly loving package — a one-of-a-kind treasure.
We were running buddies, reciprocal wing thingies — each taking turns leading our common unreasonable abilities through the murky territories of the underneath. Where we’d end up — we never knew or quite cared. It was all part of the adventure into the homo imagination of our dreams. Barefooted, adventurous, carefree off the beaten path queens fueled with quaaludes, black beauties, yellow jackets, and acid. Hello world, it's Duane and Ed ready to conquer the Club Baths, Backstreets, the Armory, the Cove, or wherever the queer wind blew.
Duane, you were an inspirational guide: kind, compassionate, and endlessly funny. Somehow we managed to stay in touch all these years: when you lived in Jersey and then when you moved to Pennsylvania. After I got a summer teaching job in Chambersburg, PA– I took Amtrak to the Harrisburg, PA station where you generously met to welcome me to town. We spent two summers in 2017 and 2018 hanging out, traveling the area together, visiting in Harrisburg and Chambersburg, and catching up about our respective lives: me in NYC teaching art and you working at 3M Company in Harrisburg.
And then you moved to St. Petersburg, Florida in 2019 for a well-deserved retirement to enjoy life and rest.
We continued our long sweet friendship and connection right until you fell asleep to not wake again on July 25, 2021. I’ll remember and miss you as my loving, gentle, sincere, compassionate long-time friend.