MISSING TIM

Today would have been poet Tim Dlugos' 70th birthday (he passed at 40 from AIDS). He was 21 and I was 29 when we met at a poetry reading Ed Cox (also long gone) and I did in DC, at Catholic University as I remember it. Tim had quit the Christian Brothers (a Catholic order just below priests) after it was made clear that he was heading for dismissal because of what they then called "a special relationship" with another aspiring brother (as Tim told it to me).

He claimed Ed and I were the first poets he ever heard who read poems about being gay and our romantic and sexual experiences. He called us his heroes and we became instant friends (Ed and I and some others had a press called Some Of Us that published Tim's first book as well: High There). From that time on we were in constant communication until his death. We shared poems and gossip and theories and spiritual journeys (he became an Episcopalian priest and ministered to AIDS patients in a Jersey City hospital in the years before he passed).

We both moved to New York in the mid-1970s and even after I married a movie actress (with Tim's encouragement) and moved to LA, we spoke on the phone at least weekly. I saw him the last time not long before he passed in the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in New York when I flew back to visit him at the end, a ward he made famous in his great poem "G-9"—the designation the hospital used for the AIDS ward (he read it on one of the national morning news shows before his death).

I loved him from the moment we met and we became so close he would use (after asking my permission) experiences from my life in his poems, as if they were his experiences. He was my biggest champion and supporter and most honest observer, and a personal hero, who I miss constantly.

Click on this photo to see that's Tim in suit and tie at my second wedding (In a NYC bar/restaurant) smiling joyfully at me and my bride, actress Penelope Milford, and poet Ted Berrigan (in tee shirt, another close and dear friend gone too soon), and my daughter Caitlin and son Miles in the foreground (with a smiling actor/poet Michael O'Keefe at the right edge of the photo, Valentine's Day 1982)