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By Papa Tony Lindsey, January 1, 2021:
I do not claim to have known John deeply and well, but he led a life that has been parallel to mine since 1978.
My relationship with John began when I met his husband Skip at the gym. Skip and I became close friends, and John and I got along very well. I visited them at their home on the canyon many times, and my boyfriend David and I attended many kinky gay leathermen's play-parties with Skip and John.
We were all part of a large group of men who had found each other in the way that gay men did in the late 1970's - Sex together was our way of "shaking hands and saying howdy". We developed many deep and kindly friendships that were meant to last a lifetime.
Fate had other plans.
As I have shared elsewhere, our brothers started to die. Gay leathermen were hit the earliest and the hardest, because we had a highly-developed play-party culture. I stopped counting when I had lost 140 dearly-loved men in my life, and it just went on and on for years. Skip died, and then David, along with so many others whose names I want very badly to recall, but I can't - My mind recoils.
Of all of the kinky men who I knew in the 1970's, only three of us survived: Me, Eric Swenson, and John McConnell. The experience damaged us. We never got over the PTSD and the Survivor's Guilt. John and I were never so close again, though I reached out many times. When Eric and I see each other, we are always glad, but we find it hard to talk about what happened - The feelings are too close to the bone.
As time went by, we few survivors laid low for a few years and licked our wounds.
John and I independently decided to become community leaders in our own ways...
- I went for the spotlight... the large and numerous events and the splashy publicity.
- John had a mailing-list (which I still have in my possession), of kinky men who wanted to learn from John's deep wisdom. That private and small grouping suited John's style very well, and he carried that bright torch for years.
He also became very involved in supporting the rebuilding of our community after so many of our community leaders had died. In the 1990's, there were various e-mail discussion-groups where we could coordinate plans, calendars, resources and volunteers. I still have hundreds of thoughtful, deep and to-the-point emails from him that contributed much to community plans, history and philosophy.
Here is one example:
August 8, 2000: Remembering Tony DeBlase, by Roadkill, San Diego
I remember being very nervous once because Tony DeBlase was in the audience when I made a presentation. This was years after we'd become friendly with each other. It's not that I expected him to be critical or negative. He wasn't. In fact, whenever he was at a run or event you felt safe knowing that there was an authority present who spoke with quiet reason and love. I was nervous because he was THE man, THE authority, THE tribal elder, and because of this I wanted to please him. If it made sense to Tony, then it made sense.
He has inspired accolades for his role as a teacher, leader, philosopher, and innovator in the leather community. He more than deserves these accolades. I'll miss his wisdom and the sense of safety it imparted. But let's not forget that he was first and foremost a great player. It was true that he was gentle, kind, and courteous. He was extraordinarily caring. But all his gentleness could never mask how completely he enjoyed being a sadist. He delighted in and was proud of his sadism. And knowing how sadistic he was added adrenalin-driven fear to the pleasures of bottoming for him. As a masochist, I'll miss how his sadism scared the shit out of me.
Along the way, John asked that he be publicly called "Roadkill", as a reference to the pain that he had endured in his life. In the kinky community, that was his "scene name". I always called him John to his face though, because in my eyes, I could still see the younger man that had been my friend, and who I have never stopped loving.
John became a well-respected psychotherapist along the way, and I have referred at least seventy folks to him over the decades.
There has been a desperate need for counseling and therapy within our community. He has had a local peer in this work with Jerry Moreau, who also counsels local kinksters.
In later years, John opened up his life to teach publicly-advertised classes to local San Diego kinky organizations. It is a great shame that he was unable to share more of himself, but he never stopped trying. He was a great contribution in how he lived his life fully, and without apology.
The world was a better place with him in it. I will never stop missing him.