It was 1997. It was like any one of the other rare spring Saturdays that I wasn’t at the office. I was sitting with my pals S and C having migas and bloody marys at one of our favorite places on South Main in Houston. The Bayou City’s humidity was on one of its brief March vacations to points further south and we were dishing as we poured over the various weeklies that try to entice Houston’s gay dollars into this or that club du jour, store, or restaurant. It was still a time, too, when the back of each issue included memorials for the many being lost to AIDS. It was always with a deep-purple fascination that I would read through these lists, imagining from the brief descriptions the unknown brothers I was losing. And then I saw the name…David S_____. At that point it had been 19 years since I had seen him.

I was 14; he was 18. I was a freshman; he was a senior…and a cheerleader…and the star of both school plays and the choir musical that year…and gorgeous. I was still on the brink of puberty and he seemed all grown up. From our interactions in Drama Club meetings and in the one scene we shared together in the play “Heaven Can Wait” (he was the star, I was “Second Angel”), I knew that he was beautiful, but not bright.

Everybody was in love with David--girls, guys, teachers…everybody except David, apparently. I knew that home life was bad, that his fellow cheerleader girlfriend was his best friend more than a romantic connection…and (from the Eve Harrington of the drama club, Lewis) that David was known to frequent “those places” down off Montrose. But who could believe Lewis for heaven’s sake? Was he or wasn’t he?

Did it really matter? My crush was strong, and never acknowledged, even by me most of the time. I would tell myself that I just wanted to look like him…not do anything with him. What I was feeling was envy, not longing….or so the story went inside my “Must Be the Best Little Boy in the World” inner dialogue. The infatuation was complete, however, and in later years, my friend C, now a speech pathologist, but then the best actress in our school, told me that everyone could tell that I was smitten and that he didn’t even acknowledge my existence. And then graduation came, and he disappeared into an adult life, not stopping for college along the way. And none of us heard from him again.

Over the years he had become a nameless presence in dreams, of both the night and day variety, but he was not in any real sense a part of my life. That sunny morning on South Main, learning of his death forced me--the now seemingly well-adjusted sort of out gay guy--to unpack a Pandora’s Box full of high school memories—long crammed deep down in my ample baggage, buried beneath seven years of academic distraction and almost another decade of self-denial.

For weeks I would struggle with his presence in my thoughts…the shame-filled feelings he dredged up like some long-forgotten toxic spill unexpectedly released in the effort to widen and deepen the channels of me. There was guilt too. He had been who he was…I had denied who I was. He was dead and I was alive.

In time, I would come to claim that frightened, enthralled, appalled boy again...even while knowing that he wasn’t me anymore. In time, I would come to see that my survival carried with it a calling…though what that was I wasn’t sure of (to some degree this is true even now). And, thanks be to God, I found a place to mourn David as a person, not merely some icon from my past. He was no longer the mysterious object of contemplation/obsession, but a fallen brother.

Later that year when my voice teacher suggested that I try to work up “Empty Chairs and Empty Tables” from “Les Miserables,” David’s was the face that came into my head. There would be others that would spring to mind—and they will appear here in due time. But his was the first I thought of…

What did I learn from him? When we knew one another, not much I suppose. When he came into my life again...the challenge to claim it all...and a bit of my humanity in seeing his. Thanks David. I owe you one.