Reed, After All These Years
A West Texas story of the 1960s, and Today
Reed was the first other boy “like that” – like me! – I’d ever known. We never talked about it. Neither of us had the words, nor probably the courage, for such a conversation. It was 1964 and such a thing was not talked about then, in Lubbock, Texas, even if one knew the words to use for such a talk. Whispered about in hushed voices, perhaps: there was our classmate and his piano teacher to fire up the rumor mongers - and put the fear in us that the same blame and shame might be heaped on us if people knew our truth. But even with our classmate and his teacher, innuendo clouded the implications.
So we never talked about it, or acted on it, not with each other, but we both knew, somehow, that in the most fundamental way, we were alike. Embryonic gaydar, perhaps, long before we had a word for that either.
We were friends for a few months that year, our sophomore year at Lubbock High School. It wasn’t love – at least I don’t think it was. Somehow we just felt safe in each other’s company in a way we didn’t feel safe in the company of other boys we knew. I do have a photo of him taken in my bedroom, snapped sometime that winter or spring, but it was a chaste affair. I wouldn’t have an inkling of what two boys “like us” could get up to in bedrooms for years yet, and if he knew already, he didn’t let on.
Reed lived with his mother and sister. No father in the picture, or rather an absent one, hardly mentioned and never seen. I lived with both my parents, but in a way my father was absent too, due to alcohol. Reed and I shared that absence, along with our special alikeness, but we never talked about that father absence either.
We were friends for that little while, close friends we thought – and then he was gone. I didn’t know where, and, back then, I didn’t quite know what a gap his going made. He was still there long enough to write in my yearbook – that annual summing up of all we wanted to believe, or pretend, we all meant to each other. Reading now what he wrote that May, I almost wonder if there was a little love involved:
“Randy, Hello, there ya’ FINK! Sincerely there aren’t enough words in the world to tell you what I think about you (good words!). It has been a real ball to have you for my friend. Love ya lots, Reed.”
Just jokey and ambiguous enough to sound coolly sincere, but at the same time, maybe, hint at deeper feelings I was then too thick to sense.
The thing I remember most about Reed – aside from that secret sameness that we shared, and the fact that he introduced me to the Beatles! – was his determination to make a life in theatre (purposely ending in “re,” to make it more sophisticated), and in New York. I’d flirted with the greasepaint life myself (another thing we shared), somewhat shocking my Church of Christ parents with my one-line walk-on as earthy Southern boy (that’s the spin I tried to give it anyway), Emory MacDougall, in Auntie Mame - the Lubbock Theatre (there’s that “re” again) Center production: “Hot damn! My sister's gonna bust a gut!”
For me, the passion for drama faded – drama on stage, at least. For Reed, it did not, though I wasn’t to know that for many decades – not till I came across that bedroom photo after almost 60 years, which took me back, and also took me to the internet to search for whatever I could find about my once-close friend. Sometimes such searches discover happy things. Sometimes they even lead to reconnections, not always close, perhaps, but real bridges to a distant, almost (but not quite) forgotten past.
My search for Reed did not produce such happy finds. I did learn that he made good on his drama dreams, and in New York! Though in a supporting way. He was never the star himself, but theatRE isn’t only STARS. It needs STAGE MANAGERS too, a role he took on in a truly groundbreaking production of Coming Out! A Documentary Play About Gay Life and Liberation in the USA, produced by the Gay Activists Alliance in 1972. How happy Reed looks, how happy they all look, in the crew photo, and how clearly among other boys like him, at last, their arms around each other as they work together to make gay history. Looking at the photo now, I’m happy for Reed, that he found his arms-around brothers – but a bit sad for the two of us, that he and I were never able to acknowledge such a closeness, together.
And then I found his panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, marking his death in 1986. I’ll be forever grateful that I found that only after I’d seen the beaming, happy boy in his New York theatre heyday, in his radiant glory. His is not the only panel in the quilt with a name I know, and I’m only one of millions who know names included there. But his may be the name that makes the Quilt a most personal and moving remembrance for me, even though it’s almost 60 years since he and I bonded, briefly, through our otherness.
Reed and I were near contemporaries, born the same month in the same year. He was the slightly older of us, by a negligible 22 days. His life ended when he was 38. As I look back now, it seems as though my own life had almost just begun by then. I’m one of the lucky ones who has had the chance to get old - and to grow old not different and alone, but with a loving husband - an idea beyond our imaging, Reed and mine, back in 1964.
Some people die young and some die old, and life is short no matter which. It’s always been that way, and always will be. I’ll never know if Reed ever thought of me later on, as I think of him all these decades later. I like to think he might have, and that “Love ya lots” wasn’t just the phrase he wrote in all the yearbooks that May. I think now I might have the courage to write it in his yearbook too – and maybe, after all this time, even say it out loud at last.
Love ya lots, Reed. Thinking of ya.
Oh beautiful my word too. Glad you have Richard.
Very sad but a good story. Nice to see you teen pic, Randy!