I probably should've teased Jim Wickliff less about his being a Wagner afficionado since he's had the last word: the last time I did it, several weeks ago, he threw his head back, forearm against forehead, rolled his eyes and intoned, "This, this, I have to take from someone who actually has his radio permanently tuned to a country western station!"
I met Jim years ago during the early years of Integrity, the gay Episcopalian organization he co-founded. He had many friends because of his knowledge of art, his charm, and his wit, but what hooked me into friendship was his stories. Let me give you a snippet of one tale: Challenged in a conversation to reveal the most surrealistic thing that had ever happened to him, he swooped us all back to the 1950s when, in the army, he had been in the occupation of Japan.
Already out, he'd talked to a perhaps gay Japanese man in a park in Tokyo and asked about gay bars. The man had apparently understood and motioned for Jim to follow him. Led to a large public washroom in a building on the edge of the park, Jim emphatically said, "No!" that this was not what he wanted. The man said yes, yes, he must come. Led inside by the man, the two stepped up to a broom closet in the large room of urinals. "Certainly not!" said Jim, but the man opened the door and pointed inside.
Taking Jim's hand and pushing aside a broom at the back of the closet, he revealed a small handle. Pulling the front door closed he opened the back wall of the closet to ... a giant room with nearly 200 Japanese men and a good number of American GI's fox-trotting cheek-to-cheek to music on a juke box playing the old Methodist hymn, "Coming Through the Rye."
Jim entered and was immediately introduced to a member of the Tokyo ballet who could fox-trot very well indeed ( and was pretty good at some other athletic things, too ) .
Jim was old but not elderly. I had breakfast with him and other friends nearly every Sunday, so I kept up on his activities.
Here's a few things the 74-year-old did in the last year of his life: revised part of his unpublished book of filmography; learned to burn CDs from old records ( thereby saving some 30-year-old obscure lesbigay folk music for me, among others ) ; turned a bunch of folks into Mae West fans, after we all went to Dirty Blond and were told by him the real item was better ( he'd met her and infected all of us with his anger that all of her movies had been bowdlerized ) ; ordered us all to read the gay/Irish revolutionary novel, At Swim Two Boys; put all of friend Marie Kuda's pre-computer columns on disc ( and was preparing to put them into pamphlet form ) ; was planning a group trip to Great Britain; had just gotten a job as elevator operator at the Lyric Opera; and was corresponding online with a group of silver foxes ( "Can you believe it?" he asked, "some of these guys consider me chicken." "Well, how old are they?" I said. "I don't go there. They might be dead," he answered. "But they sure are good-looking." ) .
He could come up with an epigram ( from correspondence ) like: "The search for a purpose can be a purpose in itself," and do a wickedly funny imitation of Mae West. He could rail about homophobic politicians, and admire that red-headed fellow getting on the bus. He, unlike many, did it all to the end. He was alive until he was dead.
Jim Wickliff passed away Sept. 9 in his Chicago apartment.
