Philip Ruckdeschel

Despite the fact we dated for months and knew each other for years afterward. I do not have a single photo of Philip, and can only vaguely picture him now.

We met the night of the gay pride parade in 1988.

That evening, after grabbing dinner with friends, I decided it was time I venture into some of the Castro bars and see what sort of trouble I could get into. My first—and as it turned out, my only stop for the evening—was The Detour. It was a dark, hole-in-the-wall place with chain link fences, throbbing dance music, half naked bartenders, and that night was full of some very good looking menz…

It was there I met Philip. As I recall, he came up to me. He was quite drunk, but I was still flattered that such a good-looking man (inebriated or not) took an interest in me. We talked for a bit, and agreed to meet at his apartment after I'd run back home and let my houseguests who were ostensibly in town for the parade know I'd probably be out for the remainder of the night.

The houseguests were not there. This was a decade before the first cell phones, so there was no way of tracking them down. I left a note, grabbed my trick bag (contact lens case, solution, toothbrush and toothpaste) and drove up to Philip's apartment.

He lived on Van Ness, probably somewhere near Clay Street. (I have long sense thrown out address books from that period and a quick Google Streets perusal didn't come up with anything definite.) What I remember most about his place at the time was the elevator was old. It didn't even have a door in the cab, just an open metal accordion gate. Philip had a large studio apartment that was done to the nines. I learned soon after that he was an interior designer—and it was evident. Unfortunately our tastes were very different. That alone should have been a red flag.

I stayed the night. We dated for a few months thereafter until one evening we were scheduled to get together and we had a blowup over my refusal to come pick him up to drive him back to my place, where we had planned the 1988 equivalent of "Netflix and Chill." (I was in the middle of putting a desk together and he had indicated earlier in the day he would take a bus down.)

After that, we didn't speak for months. We reconnected by accident later that winter and got together occasionally for some recreational activities when the need arose. It was nothing serious, as we both realized that we were fundamentally different in so many ways. Philip also drank a lot. Eventually this became a problem in the bedroom and things just—pardon the expression—petered out. We remained friends, however, until his death in 1992.

The reason I bring all this up is that he popped up in a dream the other night. Well, not him specifically, but rather that I'd found a photo of him—and being a dream, it was not just a simple photo. It was like a little video on a credit card. It was damaged, and while he was doing something extremely campy as I remember, it still warmed my heart to see him again.