Billy ManesThis video oral history, and the accompanying story below was done by Salin Tilley for the Storyteller Project and originally posted on December 3, 2012
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by Salin Tilley
3 December 2012
Storyteller Project
At the Helm
My mom used to own one of the nicest hair salons in Fort Lauderdale. The Design Team was a home to a family and team of hairstylists, nail technicians, makeup artists, and all. It was a retrofitted art gallery, gleaming chrome and paneled wood, with a broad blue receptionist desk and white roses everywhere. Ask anyone. It was the best.
I may have grown up there. Sweeping up hair, and offering old ladies coffee or tea while they waited. Telling jokes in the back while my mother stirred color into a black plastic bowl. The men who worked for my mother, Tim, Randal, George, were all the best kind of gay men. Classy, funny, beautiful. They were my uncles. Billy Manes has the same kind of air. He is, I think, from the same time and place as they are, and instantly feels like family.
Something he said, after Shea and I turned off the camera, and stood up to go. He wondered aloud what the gays and lesbians of today would be like. What histories they would have to draw from. And it's true. He is like a time traveler from a long war, his life remains steeped in this history of struggle. Struggle has united these men together. Every laugh they have, every joke, every wink and grin and prancing step is earned. They deserve every bit of happiness they can find, and they know it. That is why we love them. They are survivors. They have paved a way for the rest of us, not through intentional labor though there is plenty of that, but with their very lives. We stand behind them in their easy wake, not an idea to the waves that have toppled against their chests, broken, and swirled around them in heaps of foam. All we see are gentle ripples. I am more grateful now than I have ever been to my uncles and aunts. I have been spared.
I stand with a group of people in the cold and bitter darkness of a Florida winter night. My closet full of tank tops seems suddenly scanty and insufficient. This group is the same as it has been every year. The trans people of the campus are here, familiar faces, and their friends, mostly gay. We are here to remember all the people who have been killed because of their identity. The Transgender Remembrance ceremony is always like this. Basically empty. Nicole reads the two hundred names that have been recorded we all know there are hundreds more. She reads by the light of someone's flashlight app, because that's how it is. We huddle over our candles, in our thin leather jackets with feeble lining, and numb hands. A man rides his bicycle through the center of us, his wheels tick ticking in the night.
Sometimes I live in a kind of bubble. In this bubble there are no homophobes, bigots, close-minded people, or angry Christians; there are only people. Outside the bubble, of course, I am not just a person, and these others exist in strong numbers.
I go to classes at the University. I talk to my friends, and family on the phone. No one stops me in the street to tell me that I am going to hell. Most of the time there is no reason for my orientation to come up in conversation and I literally look like everyone else. I am surprised to come across a person with these archaic backwards beliefs, more shocked that they are so certain in themselves. It is like walking into the flank of a dinosaur. I forget sometimes, that I am gay, and that this matters at all to anyone outside of my personal relationships. My bubble might look like a protection, but it is really the most dangerous thing.
Billy Manes is both typical and unique. He is an openly gay man who does not work for a gay establishment. He works from within the system, to change the system. He lives outside the bubble.
You would never know on the surface the kind of lives that these men have had. Though not every man is like this, most hide their pain. They are extremely giving in their love and affection, and expect their friends to be there for them in return. Living and loving in great quantities. I remember hanging out at the salon one Saturday afternoon, talking to Tim about his tattoos. Tim is big and burly, with biceps that were the size of my thighs and springy gray hairs on his chest. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the Buddhist symbols on his pectorals. I asked him if he had to shave to get the tattoos and how long it took to grow back, like most curious children. He looks very masculine, but his voice is soft and tender toward me. Most of the time he is laughing at something, smiling at something else, or trying on colorful wigs just for fun. But now he is serious. He tells me about his seven older brothers, and I picture him, short, skinny, sans tattoos. He lived in a state I couldn't even remember seeing on a map. His eyes got tight. There was a lot he wasn't telling me. But next thing I knew he was leaping off his stool, teasing Randall about his highlights, laughing again.
We cannot have this conversation without talking about HIV and AIDS. The pandemic has become a section of the collective conscious of Billy Manes generation, of basically all older gay men. Although statistically it is being spread more by heterosexuals, the higher correlation of the virus in homosexuals has contributed to their stigma. Billy Manes has lost a great deal of friends and family to HIV/AIDS. He told us how when he did come out to his mom, it was hardest because his parents were scared for his life. His step-brother had died of the disease only a month prior. While Shea and I were interviewing Mr. Manes in his office at the Orlando Weekly, he revealed a strong sense of humor, humility, and openness. Personal questions? I'll give you my therapist's phone number.
Manes is not afraid to tell his story. He said that he was an outsider that the insiders found entertaining. “I’m more like somebody who's fun to be around for a while and then maybe you really don't want to take him home with you ‘cause he can just be a mess. He laughed and so did we, but then he continued, I guess to go more personal, I'm newly single because my partner took his life in April, and we'd been together for eleven years, and he was suffering from HIV and so I see a lot of the nuances and the insecurities and the pain in the community and so if I laugh about it, it's just because I'm trying to put a smile on it. One of the reasons I've written my whole life is to try and escape from pain, and that struggle continues and I don't think I'm alone in that
3 December 2012
Storyteller Project
At the Helm
My mom used to own one of the nicest hair salons in Fort Lauderdale. The Design Team was a home to a family and team of hairstylists, nail technicians, makeup artists, and all. It was a retrofitted art gallery, gleaming chrome and paneled wood, with a broad blue receptionist desk and white roses everywhere. Ask anyone. It was the best.
I may have grown up there. Sweeping up hair, and offering old ladies coffee or tea while they waited. Telling jokes in the back while my mother stirred color into a black plastic bowl. The men who worked for my mother, Tim, Randal, George, were all the best kind of gay men. Classy, funny, beautiful. They were my uncles. Billy Manes has the same kind of air. He is, I think, from the same time and place as they are, and instantly feels like family.
Something he said, after Shea and I turned off the camera, and stood up to go. He wondered aloud what the gays and lesbians of today would be like. What histories they would have to draw from. And it's true. He is like a time traveler from a long war, his life remains steeped in this history of struggle. Struggle has united these men together. Every laugh they have, every joke, every wink and grin and prancing step is earned. They deserve every bit of happiness they can find, and they know it. That is why we love them. They are survivors. They have paved a way for the rest of us, not through intentional labor though there is plenty of that, but with their very lives. We stand behind them in their easy wake, not an idea to the waves that have toppled against their chests, broken, and swirled around them in heaps of foam. All we see are gentle ripples. I am more grateful now than I have ever been to my uncles and aunts. I have been spared.
I stand with a group of people in the cold and bitter darkness of a Florida winter night. My closet full of tank tops seems suddenly scanty and insufficient. This group is the same as it has been every year. The trans people of the campus are here, familiar faces, and their friends, mostly gay. We are here to remember all the people who have been killed because of their identity. The Transgender Remembrance ceremony is always like this. Basically empty. Nicole reads the two hundred names that have been recorded we all know there are hundreds more. She reads by the light of someone's flashlight app, because that's how it is. We huddle over our candles, in our thin leather jackets with feeble lining, and numb hands. A man rides his bicycle through the center of us, his wheels tick ticking in the night.
Sometimes I live in a kind of bubble. In this bubble there are no homophobes, bigots, close-minded people, or angry Christians; there are only people. Outside the bubble, of course, I am not just a person, and these others exist in strong numbers.
I go to classes at the University. I talk to my friends, and family on the phone. No one stops me in the street to tell me that I am going to hell. Most of the time there is no reason for my orientation to come up in conversation and I literally look like everyone else. I am surprised to come across a person with these archaic backwards beliefs, more shocked that they are so certain in themselves. It is like walking into the flank of a dinosaur. I forget sometimes, that I am gay, and that this matters at all to anyone outside of my personal relationships. My bubble might look like a protection, but it is really the most dangerous thing.
Billy Manes is both typical and unique. He is an openly gay man who does not work for a gay establishment. He works from within the system, to change the system. He lives outside the bubble.
You would never know on the surface the kind of lives that these men have had. Though not every man is like this, most hide their pain. They are extremely giving in their love and affection, and expect their friends to be there for them in return. Living and loving in great quantities. I remember hanging out at the salon one Saturday afternoon, talking to Tim about his tattoos. Tim is big and burly, with biceps that were the size of my thighs and springy gray hairs on his chest. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the Buddhist symbols on his pectorals. I asked him if he had to shave to get the tattoos and how long it took to grow back, like most curious children. He looks very masculine, but his voice is soft and tender toward me. Most of the time he is laughing at something, smiling at something else, or trying on colorful wigs just for fun. But now he is serious. He tells me about his seven older brothers, and I picture him, short, skinny, sans tattoos. He lived in a state I couldn't even remember seeing on a map. His eyes got tight. There was a lot he wasn't telling me. But next thing I knew he was leaping off his stool, teasing Randall about his highlights, laughing again.
We cannot have this conversation without talking about HIV and AIDS. The pandemic has become a section of the collective conscious of Billy Manes generation, of basically all older gay men. Although statistically it is being spread more by heterosexuals, the higher correlation of the virus in homosexuals has contributed to their stigma. Billy Manes has lost a great deal of friends and family to HIV/AIDS. He told us how when he did come out to his mom, it was hardest because his parents were scared for his life. His step-brother had died of the disease only a month prior. While Shea and I were interviewing Mr. Manes in his office at the Orlando Weekly, he revealed a strong sense of humor, humility, and openness. Personal questions? I'll give you my therapist's phone number.
Manes is not afraid to tell his story. He said that he was an outsider that the insiders found entertaining. “I’m more like somebody who's fun to be around for a while and then maybe you really don't want to take him home with you ‘cause he can just be a mess. He laughed and so did we, but then he continued, I guess to go more personal, I'm newly single because my partner took his life in April, and we'd been together for eleven years, and he was suffering from HIV and so I see a lot of the nuances and the insecurities and the pain in the community and so if I laugh about it, it's just because I'm trying to put a smile on it. One of the reasons I've written my whole life is to try and escape from pain, and that struggle continues and I don't think I'm alone in that