From Philip Watson Kuepper– October 2024 

Michael and I moved to Stamford, from Manhattan, in 1981, where we had worked with Brentano’s Bookstore, Michael as the chain wide paperback book buyer out of the Fifth Avenue office, I, as the hardcover book manager at Brentano’s in Greenwich Village.  Michael was hired by Waldenbooks, in Stamford, as the chain wide paperback book buyer.  I found a job at Cowles Business Media.  We lived for two years at Hayes House, an apartment complex, and then purchased a house in the Springdale section of the city, where we lived for twenty years.  9/11 happened, which, for some media reason, made my job at Cowles redundant.  We sold our Springdale house, and moved onto Mystic, CT, where we bought a house, and Michael found a job at Mystic Seaport, and I a job, first at the Mystic Seaport Bookstore, and, then at the Mystic Noank Library, here I have been for the past 17 years.  Because of Michael deteriorating health, we sold our Mystic house, and moved to StoneRidge, an independent living, long-term care complex, where, to my deep regret, Michael died on April 20, 2020.  We enjoyed Stamford as suburbanites, after Manhattan city life.  We traveled widely, during that time, both in New England, and in Europe.  My yearly birthday gift to Michael was a trip to wherever he and I might like to experience.  Two of Michael’s favorite places came to be Madrid, in Spain, and Honfleur, in France. 

Michael and I met in November 1971 at a Brentano’s business meeting in Manhattan.  At the time, Michael was the manager of the San Francisco Brentano’s, and I was assistant manager at the Boston Brentano’s.  About a year later, I quit my Boston job, and flew to the West Coast, where I stopped in to say hello to Michael on my way to a two week job in southern California at a college bookstore to help a friend through the opening days of the student rush to purchase textbooks for their classes.  While there, I received an invitation from Michael to return to San Francisco and scope out the city.  He invited me to stay at his apartment, which looked out over San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge, which I did do.  And I simply stayed, and took a job, as Michael’s stockroom manager at the Brentano’s store.  Thus began the magical years of our life together.  In 1974, Michael was promoted to paperback book buyer for the Brentano’s chain.  And he was asked to move to Manhattan to oversee that job. 

Growing up gay?  My mother was enraged I was gay, my father ashamed.  I was happy being who I was.  I was mystified that being gay was an issue.  I never had a desire to become intimate with a female.  And I certainly wasn’t going to let any female hijack my semen to reproduce.  One year, while at college, in Iowa, where I was born and raised, I finished the Fall/Winter semester, grew bored with college life, and, through a college friend, Bill Clendenen, had the opportunity to move to Boston.  I left college.  I left Iowa.  And I never looked back.  Since that time, 1971, I have only returned once to Iowa, to bury my father in 1990.  Being gay?  My life is my life, and not anyone else’s, not my mother’s or my father’s to dictate who I was, or am to be.  I was happy to walk away from that kind of home environment.  And, by doing so, I gave myself the gift of the world, and, to my utter amazement, Michael.  I hadn’t planned to share my life with anyone at an intimate level.  Falling in love with Michael surprised me, completely.  I hadn’t known I had such a capacity to love.  I hadn’t been raised on love.  So what did I know about love.  But Nature took care of that.  And Michael and I became mates for life.  We eventually married, in 2005, in Westport, CT.  We were married by Michael’s older brother, Wally Meyer, who was a Justice of the Peace. 

I am a poet, my poetry in print since 1975.  A new poem of mine is published nearly every Sunday on the website heartheboatsing.com, whose publisher, Goran Buckhorn, published a book of my poems A Sea to Row By in 2015.  My poems have also appeared in numerous other publications.  An essay on my friendship with Michael was published in The New York Times in the late 1990s.  Early next year, 2025, extracts from a 1981 letter I wrote to the playwright Tennessee Williams, along with one of my poems, will be published in a book about Williams, and being gay, by Daniel Ciba. 

On being gay?  Celebrate being who you are.  Live your Nature.  You have only one chance to be who you are, one chance in all infinity.  And this is that time.  The chance won’t come around again.  Live the minute.  You can’t get it back once it’s past.  It’s already too late if you let this minute pass without living it.  And living it as who you are, and not how someone else decides you should be.  Tap into who you are, mind, heart and soul.  I did so with Michael, and our life together proved heroic, rather than tragic.   

And embrace creativity if you were born with such a gift.  It took me many years to realize my gift for poetry.  But poetry wouldn’t leave me alone until I embraced it and expressed it with the words I do express it with.  In part, I found my poet self by taking a summer writing course at Harvard, when I lived in Boston.  I found it by spending two weeks, in August, 1973, at the Robert Frost Writer’s Colony, in Middlebury, Vermont.  I found it, and find it, still, by, first thing each morning, without fail, sitting in my rocking chair, my notebook on my lap, and writing poetry.  Poetry has been my savior through the years of my life, and, especially, since Michael’s death.  Find your savior in being yourself, in being who you were born to be.  I loved being who I was from the first.  And feeling so, I was given the gift of Michael to love and care for for 48 years.  Would such years were, still.  But we are temporal beings.  We are born, bud, blossom, bloom and die just like every flower that has ever been, or ever will be.  Don’t miss out on being the flower you were born to be.