There he was. tap shoes, top hat, and a dancing sensation. My little brother Jamie. I never understood him and the older he got the more I realized I didn't know him. Then on June 6, 1985, less than a month after his 23rd birthday, while my sister and I sat on the stairs in her home listening...he told our mother, "Mom, I'm gay and I have AIDS." It is a moment I will never forget, a desperation so profound, that I feel it in my chest as I write. This boy, this man, that I didn't know, was dying. It would be five months of dead ends before he took his last breath. During those few months I discovered who Jim was, who he had become, during the eleven years since I had left home for college. He was an amazing designer, artist, dancer, friend, and gay man. I remember the sadness I felt for him, never being able to live his life as who he really was. But, I realize that he was living his life as who he really was, I just wasn't a part of it. Today as I get ready to take my beautiful eleven year old daughter to New York to summer intensives at American Ballet Theatre and Joffrey Ballet, I think of him, of his unrealized hopes and dreams, for me she dances to honor him and his legacy.
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