Although he was taken out of my life so early, my uncle haunted me—in good and bad ways—for a long time. For my family, he became the cautionary tale. Look what happens to those poor queers, dead so young. He was only 41. And some even speculated—and do so to this day—that his cancer might have been a mistaken diagnosis for AIDS. You don’t want to be like him. Such words resonated with the hostility of the health teacher, and I sometimes vowed to myself not to be like my uncle. And yet his fabulous home in the French Quarter, his love of music and costuming, his delight in food, his boldness in bringing over his lover—all were also part of my life, gesturing, pointing, orienting me toward paths beyond the cautionary, the safe routes. As such, they formed part of an alternative genealogy, one that lay alongside, however hidden at times, the genealogical imperative that I satisfy certain familial demands and obligations—that I buy a home near my family, get married, get to work, and take care of my parents as they once took care of me.

I will never know what my uncle's presence might have made possible or imaginable had he survived. But I am nonetheless left with those foreclosed-upon possibilities, those unknowable trajectories. Indeed, what seems important to me now is marking both the place in my life that my uncle occupied while he was alive and marking what his absence throughout my adolescence actually did. I could've had a gay guide—a gay “dad” in my uncle. In this light, what my uncle's survival might have meant for me was a local modeling of a working-class queer man making queerness livable—if not in fact absolutely fabulous. What's at stake here is proximity. And what his death meant for me was a foreclosing of possibilities, at least possibilities for imagining a queer life in New Orleans.

Ultimately, I felt I had to leave to find that life. In so many ways, I was such a disappointment to my family. I moved away. I married a man. I work as a college professor, not the high school teacher they imagined, that they could imagine, as worthy and valuable. But in another way, I was true to my roots, to the alternative genealogy my uncle’s life gestured toward. But not without cost.