Toward the end of May, I was reminded of Perry Moore, when I received an invitation to the second annual HERO Fund Benefit.  The HERO Fund honors Moore’s legacy (in partnership with the Hetrick-Martin Institute), by awarding scholarships to college-bound LGBTQ youth, who’ve shown strength in the face of adversity and have overcome extreme obstacles. 

The late partner of my friend, Hunter Hill (Publisher, BlackBook Media), Perry Moore was one of those people who was roughly my vintage, and who was actually making a contribution to the world, when he died, tragically, in 2011.  He’d not only executive produced C.S. LewisNarnia movies for Walden Media; but, with Hunter, had co-written and co-directed the 2008 film Lake City (with Sissy Spacek), and co-produced the Spike Jonez-directed 2010 documentary Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.  What I admired most about Moore, though, was the paradigm-shifting YA novel he’d written, Hero (2007) – the story of a closeted, gay high school basketball player who finds out he possesses superpowers.  Neither cloying nor pedantic, Hero is funny, poignant, and refreshingly real. 

Unable to attend the event, I decided instead, to re-read Hero.  Sadly, the book isn’t available on Kindle, so I had to resort to actually buying a hardcover copy, and waiting for it to arrive in the mail.  Fortunately, it proved well worth the wait, being just as good as I’d remembered it to be. 

Right about this time, I noticed that Kevin Sessums (Editor in chief, FourTwoNine – one of the few periodicals I find both beautiful and beautifully-curated) – whose second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain was in my Kindle queue – had been photographed at the HERO benefit.  So, I took this as a sign from the cosmos, telling me to start reading Sessums’ book, immediately.  Well, ‘lo and behold, as the digital pages gave way (in a book that brings the reader on several of Sessums' journeys - both spiritual and corporeal), I came to learn that Sessums and Moore weren’t just friends; but that when Hero had won the Lambda Literary Award in 2008, in the LGBT Children’s/Young Adult category, Sessums' first book, Mississippi Sissy, had won for Gay Memoir/Biography.  Who knew?  

A few days later, after I'd finished Sessums' touching tale, I noticed that my DVR had recorded both the Ryan Murphy’s 2014 film-version of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, The Normal Heart (which I still had yet to see) and Jean Carlomusto’s 2015 documentary, Larry Kramer in Love and Anger.  So I figured, in keeping with my self-imposed summer syllabus of Shulman’s Gay Studies, it was double-feature time. 

I’d read The Normal Heart in school, and in the quarter century since then, it’s lost none of the anger and urgency that had left such an indelibly profound impression upon me.  The acting was great, and I completely fell apart, during a couple of scenes (Felix’s deathbed marriage to Ned, of course – beautifully portrayed by Matt Bomer and Mark Ruffalo – but also Tommy’s angry eulogy, that didn’t appear in the play, but that Kramer had written especially for the screen – delivered poignantly, by Jim Parsons). 

After the back-to-back with Larry Kramer, I figured I could use a bit of comedy, so I went to my go-to, which happens to be The Big Bang Theory; but seeing Parsons was having the contrary effect to what I’d hoped, so I got up and went to the kitchen to make a snack.  Upon my return, the sitcom had ended, and the TV had reverted to what was playing at that moment, which happened to be John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch (who’d starred as Bruce, in The Normal Heart). 

And bringing it all, full-circle?  There I was, choking back my tears, at the end of The Normal Heart.  That last faceless scene, where we see Tommy's hand removing Bruce’s card from his Rolodex?  And I notice (albeit blurrily) that Bruce’s address was on Perry Street. 

Perry Moore HERO Fund
Hetrick-Martin Institute
Click HERE for info 

Get into it!

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