Guest columnist:
Manes lives on in our collective soul.
“Oh, the pretentiousness of reading the New York Times at the bar on a Sunday morning,” he squeaked, “Who does that?” It was our first meeting in Orlando as he arrived late and didn’t realize that the paper was mine. I’d already devoured the Weekly.
He had not yet evolved from gangly outsider to responsible leader, so we got irresponsibly drunk. We were young and indestructible. Newsprint became our coasters.
I was immediately intoxicated by him. His waifish frame, lyrical voice and giant heart filled every room we visited. His racing mind overflowed every space, as his words often interrupted themselves.
Across from Dexter’s, under dryers with aluminum foil in our hair, we reaffirmed our friendship.
Brought together by a favorite professor at Florida State University, Billy and I could not have been any more different except for the frosted tips and our affinities for vodka. We spent much more on our hair than either of our twenty-something budgets justified. Swirled in very different social and political circles, we remained together: meeting clandestinely at mimosa brunches, Firestone after parties, and random visits to Barnes and Noble. Besides the fact that neither of us was naturally blonde, we were each others’ best-kept secrets.
And then I decided to go natural and realized that he already had. Only one of us could be Billy Manes, after all. And only one of us could bask in the periphery of Billy Mania. He recognized his calling toward activism and eventually developed a public persona that he cordoned off from the private Billy. This public Billy knew that a community needed a larger-than-life character to represent it. He created and fed it. The Billy Show in those days could be frenetic.
For 20 years we floated through each other’s overlapping circles. I settled happily into the orchestra seats of the increasingly better scripted Billy Show, occasionally called backstage to help him out of his costume and into the skin of a sweet, tender man. His thoughtful and tempered analysis, far more rational than Billy Mania would allow, became my conscience. We clashed intellectually, rivals fighting for conflicting utopias, but we did so with mutual respect and love. His fervent, grassroots progressivism informed and tempered my staid, academic conservatism.
And, eventually he realized that the next step in his activism required the public Billy to become more than a character. When his husband Alan died, Billy made the ultimate sacrifice. He gave away his privacy to become a human face against gun violence, for LGBT equality, for economic justice, for health care. He became a human face of empowerment against institutionalized injustice. Later with Tony, he was free to be the sweet backstage Billy I’d always known. Billy Mania was banished. The private Billy and the public Billy fused; he became the human face of love.
He was now ours and we hung on his every word. I was seldom allowed the super-private interactions we’d had for years. That private Billy had been sacrificed, and those of us closest to him were also thrust into the sunshine. We would have to carry out our dialogue publicly, in the full light of public scrutiny. He gave me a column where he and I could carry on our discourse for all to see. He served as both editor and intellectual foil without hushing me.
He invoked discomfort where it was necessary, but also knew that alienation of political rivals was unproductive. He became a statesman of sorts, shooting the gap between the fringes and the center of his party. He moved beyond gay theatrics and melodrama; he settled into the difficult work of leadership. As his cadre expanded to include rivals and, to neutralize detractors, he transformed from a single-issue icon to a relevant voice that spoke out from Orlando to a greater soapbox. We may not have agreed with everything he said, but we were proud of him, nonetheless. When we were paralyzed by Pulse, Billy spoke for us. We were unspeakably thankful for his voice.
With Billy’s death, the most private is again public and in real time. With Billy’s death, our grief is, once again, unspeakable. Now, Billy’s failing body becomes the message he would have wanted to share: “Though I am yours, I’m also a fragile human being; I hurt too, beneath these blisters turned calluses.”
A crater sits in the center of Orlando, a giant hole in our hearts, a vacuum in our discourse as we struggle to imagine how we will be without him. Of course, we are not without him. He will live on through archives, recordings, and Billy For Mayor bumper stickers. Most important, and where it matters most, he lives on in our collective soul.