Let E = E
Eric and Eugene. Their names will always have a special significance for me. Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth, a gay couple who celebrated 60 years of togetherness on June 13, 2013, according to an interview with Jennifer Willis of The Oregonian, published the January prior.
Foggy with world-wariness in head now as I no doubt was then, I don’t recall which LGBTQI newsfeed brought me to the link for the article, but the loving photos of the couple posted with the piece are as clear to me now as the gentle strong life force emanating from them at the time. As is often the case with inspiring images tucked away like personalized keepsakes, it was another two years before I got back the “art spark” and created a montage of those images, one attributed to Ross Harrington , the other, to Jo Banks, transparently superimposing the older Eugene and Eric upon the young. The use of digital paintbrush tools helped create the holographic softness I was hoping for, but unlike a lot of my artwork, (which I usually file to let “germinate” before deciding whether or not to share with anyone else,) I felt a pressing gratitude compelling me to reach out to Eric and Eugene as an homage. Innately introverted, I somehow squashed any qualms, sending on the image and an explanatory email to the interviewer, Ms. Willis, who, in turn, kindly forwarded it to Eric.
I was faintly apprehensive lest he be offended, but when Eric wrote back to me December 31, 2015, his welcome ruminating response lit the torch for a large series of montages which would eventually culminate in The Chroma Museum, a free, online site depicting artistic representations of international LGBTQI figures, organizations, movements (and the factions they were up against) predominantly before Stonewall. It was Eric who set the ball in motion by giving me permission to share the art I had created of he and Eugene however I wished. It was he who encouraged the brainstorming and research necessary to create an online historic museum space where he and Eugene’s relationship could be celebrated in an understated yet iconic sort of fashion. During the drafting of this essay I did a Google search of Eric’s name to let him know I was yet again passing on the tail of our email. Sadly, yet somehow as if via transmigration, it was then I learned of Eric’s death on Jan 11, 2024.
As two strangers meeting across the cosmos of cyberspace, our correspondence was not prolific but mutually friendly, since I worked a day job and, Eric, though age 85, was still very active with Buddhist learning and teaching. In another cyclical way, his Buddhism was shared with me in his first sentence while letting me know of Eugene’s death, the second anniversary of which having just occurred around the day he received my forwarded art tribute.
“I’ve had an emotional and instructive two years,” Eric wrote, “which promises even more unexpected teachings and experiences his departure triggers. I am blessed by having many friends with whom I can speak honestly when they inquire about how I am. I can honestly say “‘I am very happy and I cry a lot.'”
Happy tears. Tears of clarity, of loss, but also of joy in the knowledge of how deeply their lives were lastingly intertwined. Yes, how essential and therapeutic, a shared healing which reaches beyond his private writing to me even now as a sort of testament.
After all, Eric and Eugene’s legacy was a tangential and symbolic journey regarding how LGBTQI lives are braided via intergenerational strands. I, of course, did not know of this while growing up, how stories can be like DNA, the chromosomal links of words spoken or written and handed down as genetic molecules of cultural life, vast and varied. I did not know of this cultural bedrock even though, whether coded or explicit, it existed as a spectrum across all of the arts, dating back before even ancient Grecian times.
Growing up in a rural section of the United States in the 1970s, I experienced a time where, like other Civil Rights Movements, there was a burgeoning LGBT one, but it certainly wasn’t being taught in Civics classes or alluded to with much other than scorn or a sort of patronizing pity. Then, as now, pejoratives like fag, faggot, dyke, and sissy etc. were the norm for scholastic-age (and older) insults.  I can think of only a few rare instances in the entertainment industry where an LGBT character was not stereotypically categorized as either a joke or villain. These exceptions could be seen on perhaps a forward-thinking Norman Lear show, or in the Jody Dallas character on the campy spoof of day time TV operas called “Soap”, or the Steven Carrington character on what was indeed a night-time soap opera, “Dynasty”. (At school the names of these characters might also substitute as hurled insults for fag etc., just as in the 1990s Ellen Degeneres’ name was used.) There was also a well-intentioned gay/straight relationship triangle movie at the time with some recognizable “name” stars called “Making Love”, but the industry and public’s reaction kept the male leads struggling to find work for years afterwards. In other words, being one of those pigeonholed in the bullied subset left me without much, if any, support, including parentally or academically.  It was difficult to feel much other than shame, fear and self-hate for what I was. The lesson to take from that, of course, was to either shun or destroy it, which personally lead to suicidal ideation, a fact bullies are certainly familiar with as many an LGBTQI kid has been told by peers “just kill yourself.”
Still, by the time of my correspondence with Eric, I was middle-aged and had carved out some semblance of strength from my rocky experiences to become more ram-stubborn in my belief that I had a right to a happier existence. This awareness, along with a more slowly accepting attitude-shift towards LGBTQI people in the United States through such topics as equal rights in housing, education, employment and marriage, also deepened my respect for those like Eric and Eugene who, with even less support and more antipathy, came before.
It was during the 2019 nuclear-mushrooming phase of the global Covid-19 pandemic when I started uploading my images for The Chroma Museum online, feeling a sense of urgency to do so as if time was running out. Now, looking back from the perspective of 2024, with over 600 images added to this work-in- progress, it seems our collective unconscious must be reeling by how extreme the attacks on the LGBTQI population have become once again. To condense the daily newsfeed barrage to a run-on sentence illustrating its toxic continuance goes as follows: the powder keg terms Groomer and Pedophile as name-calling tactics, the intense multiplicity of book banning, the “Don’t Say Gay” laws, the Diversity and Inclusion departments jettisoned., the demonization of Drag, the draconian avalanches against those on the transgender/intersex spectrum, the online stochastic terrorism resulting in bomb threats, death threats and people losing jobs and homes, the financial/emotional burdens of parents and professional medical practitioners being forced to move versus allowing their children/patients be endangered by follow-the-leader power-vying politicians whose ethics are steeped in hypocrisy and the shallowness of willful ignorance. Has the phrase “Culture War”  been a misnomer from the start? This seems a human rights war framed in an Orwellian/Goebbels newspeak that woke-ism is bad, unpatriotic even, and that divisive hate-mongering is the opposite. It is an ages-old gaslighting tactic to cloak a lack of basic humane, intelligent, and ethical behavior in government. It is a score of pages out of Fascism’s playbook.
Metaphorically, it’s as if the social justice timeline on Earth is spinning in reverse, losing gravity and emotional/physical stability. What will be there for us to hang onto if indeed the center cannot hold?
How to fathom the extreme pressures all kids, let alone LGBTQI ones, are experiencing daily under this figurative zombie apocalypse, which is far from being subliminal in its messaging that they are pawns so often without emotionally mature non-toxic role models? What structures of guidance which took centuries of conflict resolution to erect are we going to have erased if we don’t allow these kids to have sustainable environments to thrive in at all? Not environments of fear, but environments of empathy, compassion and whole hearted generosity of spirit aiming to lift everyone? Isn’t that the pillar on which the Golden Rule rests?
It was that gleaming intergenerational arch of connectivity which kept returning when I communicated with Eric while working on the Chroma Museum. Kids from all parts of the LGBTQIA spectrum are coming out to protest, and are saying no to hate. They know that the Earth must survive for this and that it will take active thinking and feeling bonds between all sorts of other kids for it to happen. On the whole, they want to recognize a sustaining belief in the human species, to see the chroma in us all.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
