About a month ago I woke up on a sunny Saturday morning, only to be greeted with a text message from a friend stating simply - "jeremy gillitzer died." Typically one would be surprised to receive such a message about a 38 year old man, but Jeremy was different - he'd been battling his eating disorder for most of his life, and for the last 8 or so years he had been mostly losing.
He actually played a fairly significant role in my life. Not long after starting to live openly as a gay man, we met on a flight from Miami to Minneapolis - a layover for me, a liftime destination for him. He was a non-traditional student and aspiring model and I was a young man recently self-aware, without a job and time to kill before my next life adventure overseas. I fought the temptation to just stay there in Minneapolis, promising to see him again.
When I returned to Montana and then subsequently moved for a short period of time to Miami, the two of us stayed in regular touch. I flew up to visit him for a long weekend once and while I continued to be impressed by his physical appearance, I quickly became aware that he was suffering with many personal demons. At that time, the only signs of his bulimia were the receding gums - the result of stomach acids eating away at them due to many childhood years of forcing himself to vomit. However he obssesed over working out, what he ate, limiting his cigarette smoking (two puffs, save the butt, repeat until used up), fantasized about being kept and obsessing constantly over his appearance. He was very lonely and seemed to want to spend his life with someone, and stupidly, when he asked after the first day if we could be boyfriends I agreed - mostly to put off his whinging.
Most of this took place between late summer of '97 and Christmas of that same year. In January I was leaving for the Pacific on an extended overseas trip with one of my best friends, and most of December was spent home in Alaska with family and friends prior to my departure. I hadn't given Jeremy my family's number, but considering the lack of 'Sela's' in Alaska, it was easy for him to get it by calling information. Jeremy was an obsessive guy, and I had become one of his fixations, so he called our house repeatedly, and at first I was flattered and honored. But since I was out so much it was frequently my mother who took the messages and I began to be worried about what she was thinking since I was not out at home yet. Despite my requests for him to hold off, he continued to be persistent.
After partying all New Year's Eve with friends, upon returning home after only a couple hours sleep, my mother pulled me aside and asked if I was gay. I was tired - both from the night before and the tangled web of lies I had constructed to cover my ass the last few years and I told her I thought I was. She didn't handle it well - she wasn't ready, her own life with my father was hell, and she was still in a more conservative mind set. She cried and insisted it wasn't true, that it wasn't possible, that I might die of AIDs, that I would be alone my whole life - a litany of things that I know she is embarassed about now. There was no conclusion to our conversation and while the rest of the family must have known there was a conflict, they weren't within hearing distance and there were no shortage of tears in our household at that time and didn't ask.
I left home for a day party immediately, speeding to a friends house, slamming the car door. The first thing I did was pick up the phone, dial Jeremy and tell him to never call me again. And he didn't. For nearly 4 years.
As for mom, a week later she dropped me off at the Anchorage International Airport to begin my trip overseas. Our conversations had been strained since New Years, and when I went through my carry-on, I discovered a copy of Pope John Paul II's book, along with a letter from my mom. Mom and I stayed in touch but our relationship changed for nearly 5 years. It wasn't all about me, but we stopped talking openly for 5 or 6 years.
