Larry Thornton (1955- 2020)
Larry was an odd sort of guy. His face was already familiar enough to me in September of 2001 to make me to pause on my way to the Municipal Credit Union on Montegue Street one afternoon during my lunch hour. Somehow, our eyes met and I immediately placed him as one of a few dozen gay men I knew almost exclusively from the pre-AIDS heyday of gay taverns and cafes that dotted Third Avenue in walking distance of Grand Central Station.
Up until that point, I had never really known his name and I doubt he knew mine. But, in the wake of the hail-fellow-well-met conceit that governed so many gay male gatherings at the time, we made every effort to carry on a conversation without acknowledging how little we really knew each other. The problem as I would subsequently begin to learn with Larry was that as a professional sociologist, he took what was, in essence, a coy way of maintaining one's place in the "tribe" and raised it to a kind of high art. In the twenty minutes that it took for him to reveal that an apartment was for sale in his coop building, Larry had learned everything there was to know about me, including where I lived, how long I lived there, how many relatives lived nearby, and nearly everything there was to know about my job. In return, I had learned almost nothing about him.
And so it would continue for the next eighteen years that I found myself his next door neighbor. For the first few of those years, I made an effort to play host on July Fourth (I had a pretty good view of the East River fireworks in those days) and Thanksgiving. But, Larry would either leave early or make excuses why he couldn't attend. It began to dawn on me that just as I couldn't quite place where I knew him from in all those years of pub crawling just before The Plague, so Larry preferred to occupy the periphery of whatever social circles developed within the coop. There are in fact tons of gay men in this building, but, I can't say that he was close friends with any of them.
And yet, he had stuff on all of us. It was one of my life's guilty pleasures to ride down the elevator with Larry while he ticked off all the latest gossip regarding one or another of the residents of the building. That was his stock and trade. In fact, it became a running joke between us that as soon as Applebees opened up a franchise down the street from us, we would someday have a drink together. The restaurant has been there for ten years, but the drinks never happened.
Larry died at 3:AM this morning, five days after he was discovered unconscious on his kitchen floor by a posse of concerned neighbors. It is widely assumed the cause was complications from COVID-19.
Cheers, Larry.
Up until that point, I had never really known his name and I doubt he knew mine. But, in the wake of the hail-fellow-well-met conceit that governed so many gay male gatherings at the time, we made every effort to carry on a conversation without acknowledging how little we really knew each other. The problem as I would subsequently begin to learn with Larry was that as a professional sociologist, he took what was, in essence, a coy way of maintaining one's place in the "tribe" and raised it to a kind of high art. In the twenty minutes that it took for him to reveal that an apartment was for sale in his coop building, Larry had learned everything there was to know about me, including where I lived, how long I lived there, how many relatives lived nearby, and nearly everything there was to know about my job. In return, I had learned almost nothing about him.
And so it would continue for the next eighteen years that I found myself his next door neighbor. For the first few of those years, I made an effort to play host on July Fourth (I had a pretty good view of the East River fireworks in those days) and Thanksgiving. But, Larry would either leave early or make excuses why he couldn't attend. It began to dawn on me that just as I couldn't quite place where I knew him from in all those years of pub crawling just before The Plague, so Larry preferred to occupy the periphery of whatever social circles developed within the coop. There are in fact tons of gay men in this building, but, I can't say that he was close friends with any of them.
And yet, he had stuff on all of us. It was one of my life's guilty pleasures to ride down the elevator with Larry while he ticked off all the latest gossip regarding one or another of the residents of the building. That was his stock and trade. In fact, it became a running joke between us that as soon as Applebees opened up a franchise down the street from us, we would someday have a drink together. The restaurant has been there for ten years, but the drinks never happened.
Larry died at 3:AM this morning, five days after he was discovered unconscious on his kitchen floor by a posse of concerned neighbors. It is widely assumed the cause was complications from COVID-19.
Cheers, Larry.