STORY: A few pictures of Michael Dowell and me in the early-to-mid-90s.
We lost Michael in 1995.
This next shot is a self-portrait he drew of himself coming back to me after an extended stay with his family. It actually captures his happy, adventurous “let’s go” gait.
He was hilarious, sweet, and always game for a new experience. We’d met in late 1989 at a bar called Trunks in West Hollywood. He was wearing a beige cowboy shirt under a mink vest… yes, mink.
He winked at me and I laughed a little but thought he was cute.
I’d like to say those six years were non-tumultuous ones in my early 20s, but there were quarrels, money issues, struggles over our future stability, and ultimately a health scare that would become increasingly evident and then eventually take him away from me.
It’s difficult for me to think of this as ‘just’ gay history, though our fashions would suggest otherwise. But history is just life as seen through a lens from the future. And tumultuous or not, this was a lovely part of mine.
