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Fly High, Mama Gay
We are driving east across rural Montana when I get the news that James Patrick Fortin has died. A few hours earlier, as my old and trusty van rumbled down gravel roads in West Glacier, we’d turned on Bohemian Rhapsody and sung loudly, all the voices. I think James would have approved.
“Mama!” he’d exclaim, enthusiastically and so alive, every time I saw him at Safeway getting groceries or turning in for the evening, downtown, one or two glasses of Chardonnay down, as I arrived for a night out. “You’re so beautiful,” he promised me, like a mother assures a middle school daughter, and for some reason, from his lips to God’s ears, when he said it I believed him. We called him Mama Gay, Gay James, a walking legacy. If you knew him, he loved you, until he didn’t but he was always fair and usually right. James was every gay kid you knew in high school, too much for most people, too big for our town. He was open about safety, clear about the life he’d lived hard, and happy to (mostly) settle down in the Black Hills.
He was lonely as long as I knew him. Once, he disappeared for a number of days and we all grew concerned but found him in the local jail, scowly and irritated at a DUI on his scooter. After that we saw him out less, he declined late dinner invitations and sent his regards. I could sense he could no longer keep up with the up and comers — the gay men and straight women who kept…
