lilianavonk

New York City in the 1980’s seemed like a magical place to me, and being stuck in smalltown California, I hungrily soaked up every bit of its relentless trashy glamour that I could through magazines like Andy Warhol’s Interview and Richard Belzer’s short-lived talk show Hot Properties (which is actually mentioned in this article, though not by name).

Those memories have such a piquant melancholy to them now, since this was right as I had begun losing friends and heroes left and right from the merciless plague that was quietly decimating NYC’s downtown scene; even today, when I go to the Castro in San Francisco and see how there’s an entire generation of gay men who are missing, it strikes fiercely at the very heart of me, remembering that icy grip of fear and wondering which sweet, amazing man I loved would be next.

And John Sex? He was one of those integral New York people who I always looked for in the background (or foreground!) of any feature on those outrageous NYC scenesters; I was saddened but not terribly surprised to hear that he died—by 1990, it was unfortunately a given that if you were a gay man with any extent of fabulosity, you probably were either dead or dying at that point—but his untimely demise was all too evocative of that era overall. (If you want to know what those times were truly like, I can’t recommend a better book than Allan Gurganus’ Plays Well With Others, though I freely admit he’s one of my favorite authors anyway).

In any case, the article I’ve linked to here is a wonderful remembrance of what an amazing guy John Sex was, and why he eminently deserves to be remembered nearly twenty-one years after his death.