Just learned that a former boyfriend of mine, Ray Brizendine, passed away unexpectedly. He was 41 years old. I first met Ray, as did many others, in his role as backward-walking, sass-talking tour guide at Rice University. A year or so later, after I'd enrolled, I met Ray on the second floor of Jones College. It was the day after Windsor castle burned, my nineteenth birthday, and I'd stayed up all night celebrating with friends. Running down the hallway with Angela Hung on my back -- or maybe I was on Angela's back -- we crashed into Ray. Our first conversation was sitting on the floor amid images of the burning castle on the cover of the Houston Chronicle.
We were together for a year and a half, even lived together for a while in an apartment on Hawthorne Street. My favorite memory of him is the morning I fed him the cherry from my fruit cocktail in the cafeteria of Brown College. I wasn't trying to be provocative. I just didn't want my cherry, and when I asked him if he wanted it, he said yes, and so I fed it to him. This was 1992, and merely being out of the closet at the time was a scandal in itself, so feeding him with a spoon in public was an act that reverberated through the college. How times have changed for the better!
Ray was one of the smartest and wittiest people I've ever met, and the world is a lonelier place now that he's gone.