Charlie Murphy
1953-2016
What is the least that we have a right to expect from our fellow human beings?
Acknowledgment of shared humanity, yes? Surely that's the least that we have a right to expect?
With its faux herstory, shallow outrage over the Nine Million, and mindless eclecticism, Charlie Murphy's 198X song The Burning Times (“In the cool of the evening, they used to gather...”) just hasn't withstood the test of time. (“Isis, Astarte, Dee-AH-na, Hecate, Demeter, KAH-li...Inan-NA!”) Still, for a while in the 80s, it gave a voice to our collective longing, and became something of a marching song for the New Old Religion.
I met Charlie Murphy a couple of times back in those days. The memory still rankles.
We met first at a Gay Pride block party one evening here in Minneapolis. A mutual acquaintance introduced us as we stood in the middle of Hennepin Avenue, surrounded by a crowd of hundreds, in all our milling, bare-chested glory.
There's a cruel and deeply broken thing that gay men regularly do to one another. (Oh, not all gay men, and not all the time, but enough...gods help us, enough.) We disappear one another.
Here's how it works. When we meet, you have five seconds to exist: long enough for me to decide whether or not I want you.
If I don't, then poof! I disappear you. After that, we may be standing mere inches from one another but, baby, you no longer exist. I don't see you, I don't hear you. You're simply not there.
That's what Charlie Murphy did to me. He sized me up and, poof! I was gone.