My uncle Bruce died of cancer in 2024. In 2022 and 2023, he wrote a few pieces for The AIDS Memorial which ran on their instagram account. Because you never know what’s going to happen with social media (or with anything on the internet, for that matter), I am republishing those pieces here, just to make sure they stick around in some form in case anything happens to those posts.
Bruce also went by Beau, which is how he was credited in these posts.
Oscar Ampagoomian, Posted June 18, 2022:
“When I moved to Key West in the 1970s, Oscar Ampagoomian (February 14, 1955 – March 25, 1987) was one of the first people I met. He was a good looking Armenian with a deep rich voice. He was kind and had a generous heart. We quickly became close friends and confidants.
Oscar and I frequented The Monster, a gay bar/restaurant/disco on Front Street. At times, we went to Claire’s on Duval Street for breakfast after The Monster and then to the wooden pier. We would sit at the end of the pier and talk till the sun came up. When we were sitting there neither of us could have envisioned the terrible plague heading our way. I certainly couldn’t have imagined it would only be a matter of years before this handsome, articulate, vibrant young man laughing and talking with me would be dead.
As you ascend my stairs, there are pictures of Oscar and dozens of other friends I’ve lost over the years. When we were young and carefree, I often tried to imagine what we would look like as old men. Of my group of close friends, I’m the only one given the privilege of age.
It gets lonely knowing all your friends are gone; but I do have my wall. It’s covered with pictures of handsome, vibrant, young men to remind me how lucky I am to have known and been loved by them.
Oscar, I miss you and I think of you every day.” – Beau Neal
Bonnie Slater, Posted June 19, 2023:
“Bonnie Slater didn’t have HIV but was greatly affected by it.
Bonnie was the first person I met when I moved to Key West. I was on the dancefloor and had come out of a bad relationship ready to meet the man of my dreams. I didn’t meet him that night but I met the best friend I ever had.
Bonnie came up to me and started dancing too. She said she thought I was the Marlboro Man because of my boots, tight jeans and Stetson. After the disco closed, she invited me to Claire’s Restaurant for breakfast. We ate then she said she was going to take a taxi home. I had a car and drove her instead. We got to her place and I ended up staying for a year.
Bonnie grew up on the island and knew everyone. She wasn’t bashful and went up to everyone and introduced herself. She always referred to herself as, “The Welcome Wagon Lady.” Everyone else called her Ms B. She was loved by the gay community. In return, she gave them a place to stay if needed, food if they were hungry and lots of motherly love. She was a proverbial matchmaker.
Bonnie and I lived together for 10 years. In 1980, she moved to San Francisco. I arrived 6 months later and she already knew half the men in the Castro. She had me a date on my first night in the city!
In 1981 the party stopped. Everyone was afraid. People were being seen around town gaunt or with purple lesions on their body. Everyone was afraid to touch them. Bonnie was the exception. She never lost sight of the fact that a hug can mean more than anything else in the world and Bonnie had lots of hugs.
Bonnie watched a generation of men she loved disappear. She did all she could for her sick friends and would ultimately marry one, Lee Slater, putting him on her insurance and nursing him. When he died, she returned to Florida.
We stayed in touch but I could tell Bonnie was hurting. She never recovered from the heartbreak of losing so many to AIDS. Her health deteriorated and she became reclusive.
Bonnie died in 2018. She was a true friend to the gay community and impacted by AIDS as much as as any person I know.” – Beau Neal
Gary Westheffer, Posted July 26, 2023:
“I met Gary Westheffer (1960 – 1993) on a Sunday afternoon while I was playing pool with my lover at Moby Dick Bar in San Francisco. The bar was always packed on Sunday afternoon but Gary stood a head above the rest of the crowd so I could see him coming before he arrived.
Gary was in his early 20s, good looking with a large personality and an ego to match. He was extremely hyper and I’m certain he had ADDH. He talked a mile a minute and was constantly in motion. By the end of the afternoon, he had told us his entire life story. My lover told me Gary was too hyper for him but Gary and I became good friends.
We ran around together quite a bit and went dancing on a regular basis. Somewhere along the line Gary started referring to me as “Momma.” He had a voice that was easily heard above the murmur of a crowd. Once at a bar in Palm Springs, I heard his familiar voice yelling “Momma.” It seemed where ever I went Gary was close by.
In 1989, my lover died just after my 40th birthday. It was a very hard time for me and I decided to leave the city. When I told Gary I was leaving he gave me this picture of him. He put lipstick on and kissed the back of the photo and told me not to forget him. I told him that would be impossible.
Gary and I stayed in touch for months but he suddenly stopped answering his phone and his number was disconnected. I tried to find out what was going on but was unable to find anyone who knew his whereabouts. It was only after the Internet came along that I did a Google search and ran across his obituary.
Gary died in a nursing home in Lawrence, Kansas, age 32. His obituary was exceptionally short and told nothing of his life or the vibrant young man he was.
Gary, like myself, grew up on a farm. Although I can’t imagine it, he said he lived a closeted life growing up. He was so full of life and wanted to taste everything life had to offer. San Francisco offered Gary the full buffet.
It breaks my heart when I think of this energetic young man dying in a nursing home without his friends by his bedside. I intend to visit Gary’s grave before I die. I need to tell him “Momma” never forgot him.” – Beau Neal
I’m also going to repost what I wrote when Bruce died. It’s on my patreon, but like I said above, you never know what’s going to happen with stuff on the internet:
My brother Jake and I took a trip from central North Carolina to Knoxville, Tennessee last Friday to visit our uncle Bruce in the hospital, where he was being treated for very aggressive cancer. We spent three and a half hours with Bruce and his husband Alan. While there was frank discussion of Bruce’s health, the visit was a lot of fun. I feel confident in saying that all four of us had a good time despite the circumstances.
On Sunday, Bruce died.
Above: Bruce and Pumpkin.
My brother and I both loved and respected Bruce very much, not because of any lessons he actively tried to teach us, but because of the way he lived his life. He was always direct and honest and kind. He was exceptionally funny and had perhaps the darkest sense of humor I’ve ever encountered.
During our visit, which was on a Friday, a hospital employee told Bruce she’d be back on Monday, and he cheerily told her he’d either be there or in the morgue. She said she didn’t appreciate the joke, even though she smiled. I couldn’t stop laughing. Bruce pointed at me and said, “That’s why I get along with this one.”
Above: Bruce and Alan.
Bruce was a gay man who lived through the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. He wrote a couple years ago, “Of my group of close friends, I’m the only one given the privilege of age.” After this period of his life, Bruce moved back to rural Tennessee. In my experience, he never hid who he was, despite the fact that he was not in an area known for being progressive, to put it mildly.
I am confident that part of the reason I am as accepting of other people as I am is because of him.
…there’s a reason I’m writing about this for my comics patreon.
I’ve been drawing Meeting Comics, my ongoing comedy soap opera comic book, since 2018. It started as a gag comic about work. I figured out characters and relationships and stories as I went. There’s now a plan in place, but for the first couple of years, it was a comic that grew a page at a time without much planning.
Early on, a group of characters emerged as the main cast of Meeting Comics. They were a middle management team at an unnamed company. The head of the department was an older guy named Don, and the assistant director of the department was a lady named Val, who would eventually prove to be the most popular and prominent character in the series.
I decided I wasn’t just going to draw comics about work. I wanted the characters to have lives outside their jobs. I decided for the Fourth of July to draw a comic set at a party at Don’s house. I had established that Don was gay, and I wanted to figure out what his husband Terry looked like.
From Meeting Comics #2: Terry appears in panel three, scolding Don.
I decided to base Terry loosely on my uncle Bruce. Terry doesn’t have Bruce’s personality; Terry is frequently grumpy, and Bruce was cheerful and very, very funny. Terry is also the younger man in his marriage and the opposite was true of Bruce in his relationship.
I didn’t look at photos of Bruce when I drew Terry, and I abstracted him away from Bruce’s features just by virtue of my cartooning style, and I assumed I could just kind of slip him into the comic without anyone noticing, but my brother Jake caught the similarity immediately.
From Meeting Comics #10: Terry and Don after Don’s heart attack
You can see from my examples that Terry’s appearance changed a bit over time, as all my characters’ appearances changed, but his Bruceness has remained, and in fact has probably become more pronounced.
Terry shows up occasionally throughout Meeting Comics, mostly when we see bits and pieces of Don’s home life. Terry and Don’s marriage is almost the only romantic relationship in Meeting Comics that hasn’t gone through significant upheaval. This isn’t something I knew was going to happen when I chose to use Bruce as a visual inspiration for Terry, because at the time I introduced Terry, I was figuring out Meeting Comics one page at a time. Is it possible I let my positive feelings toward Bruce impact the way I depicted Don and Terry’s relationship? It’s definitely possible.
I do a lot of things in Meeting Comics almost subconsciously that I realize I’ve done later. Most of my longer stories have setups in the beginnings that I don’t even realize are there until I get closer to the end.
I haven’t talked about this much. I don’t like to lead people to take my comics a certain way. I like people to take away thoughts or feelings on my comics based on the comics, not based on what I’ve said about the comics.
I decided that when Jake and I went to visit Bruce, I would take some of my comics and that I would show Bruce how I had used his likeness for Terry. I am not always good at initiating potentially emotional conversations, so I told Jake that if it looked like I was going to punk out and not tell Bruce, that I wanted him to make me do it. It turned out he didn’t need to push me, but when Bruce mentioned my comics, Jake slid the stack I’d brought across the table and nodded at me. He had my back even though it turned out I hadn’t needed it.
From Nexus of Exes: Terry barely tolerating Val.
I showed Bruce and Alan multiple comics which included Terry, and I told them how I had based Terry visually on Bruce and a little bit of why I had done so. The conversation went well, and I’m glad I took the opportunity to tell Bruce what I had done. It was something that I hadn’t realized was important to me until I knew that he was on his way out, and I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity, considering I waited until the eleventh hour.
I’m wary of writing about this for public consumption. I like to use the internet primarily as a tool to promote my comics, tell jokes, and post pictures of my cats. There are lots of people for whom social media is a conduit to their emotional state at any given time. I’m too private a person for that.
There are also people who use the internet to promote their work and who will cannibalize their own existence to promote themselves and to encourage their followers to feel like they know them, and therefore, to give them more money, likes, shares, and whatnot. I don’t think this is healthy for anyone.
I don’t want to use Bruce’s death as a promotional tool for my work, but I did want to tell people he was important to me, and that he inspired a small aspect of my comic in ways that I probably don’t fully understand myself. Hopefully I have fallen on the right side of that line here.
I have tried to use as an example Bruce’s own writings. He wrote several posts for The AIDS Memorial about friends that he lost which were published as instagram posts. Even though Bruce wrote from his point of view and told about his friends based on his experiences with them, the pieces feel like tributes to those friends rather than a way to draw attention to himself. I’ll link to those pieces at the bottom of the page.
From The Divorce Party: Terry sighing in panel two at Don goofing around.
All of my characters have a bit of me in them. Some of them have bits of other people I know. They’ve all grown into their own characters even if their initial defining traits mirrored something I’ve seen or experienced in life. Terry isn’t Bruce, but I bet he would have turned out to be a different character if I hadn’t based him visually on Bruce. How? I don’t know.
There are definitely lessons to be learned here about letting your life, your relationships, and your experiences inform your work, and the ways that can happen in both direct and abstract ways, but the most important thing that I want to say here is that I hope you all have someone that you respect as much as I respected Bruce, and I hope you had or still have a chance to let them know.
Take care!