When AIDS activist Lori Cannon ran into Jon-Henri Damski and his friend Richard Cooke last Thursday on Broadway, her heart sank. “Jon-Henri’s face had as always that curious little whimsical look,” Cannon told me. But Cooke was grimly shaking his head. Damski is 58, and he went under the knife a year and a half ago; Cannon’s first thought was for his health.
I know Damski by phone, letter, and column, and I like him. I liked him the time he wistfully told me he was cranking up once more to take on Mike Royko–a writer he in many ways identifies with–because no one else would. I like him now when he’s reflecting on his anomalous career as a “queer” writer at a “gay” paper. I like him because he chatters and wears a Cubs hat and because behind his sometimes loopy arguments is a mind that overcame dyslexia to study Greek and Latin and teach the classics at Bryn Mawr. And because as a man with a $115-a-week room in an SRO and a net worth of $308, he trusts the world to be kind.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“He’s always been very envious of the power and the persona that is Jon-Henri Damski,” Cannon expounded. “By that I mean Jon-Henri has fame, recognition–mostly he has friends, and that’s something Jeff McCourt doesn’t have. Jon-Henri has a certain power in political circles, in the gay community of course, in the AIDS community. McCourt has always been resentful of anyone with those qualities.”
“He has a sense of history–cultural history as well as gay history–and he’s not a good-old-days person,” said Windy City Times contributor Andrew Patner. “He was writing about Nirvana when kids had never heard of Nirvana. He wrote a beautiful column on Kurt Cobain when he died. What he’s so great at is finding the gay in life in general. He could find the gay in Richie Daley. And he has an understanding of the city and race relationships in the city that nobody has in the gay press and almost nobody has in the mainstream press.
“Jeff McCourt is obviously an idiot,” Cooke told me. “Jon-Henri and I have known each other for years. He hinted at one thing when I started this nine or ten months ago. I put something in, and there was a backlash. And from then on he has given me nothing. Nothing! But I have a mole there. That’s the thing–Jeff thinks Jon-Henri was giving me information. I have a person there giving me information, and I will continue getting information from that person. I’ll prove that in the next few months.”
“I’m not in personal distress. The last time I got in a rough spot, between Gay Life and Windy City, the hustlers took care of me. They told their sugar daddies. I’m sort of an Oscar Wilde with a lumpen twist. I have a voice, an American voice, a Chicago voice. I offend highly educated people at times. I have no debts. I pay the rent. I go out–people give me food. That’s the way I live. Shoes are a difficult thing. For three years I was needing a winter coat. Someone heard what I was saying–an airline steward–and the light went on. “You need a winter coat?’ “Yes, I could wear that old blue thing.’ I like this life. I’m not about to jump to a job, work for Bernie Hansen. That’s not the answer to this situation. If I were Jeff I’d have kept me on. I do my work, I’m an unembarrassment. Now he’s made me an issue.”
Last Friday Wimsatt, who’s 22, copped a Lisagor award for a piece on wiggers (“white kids who identify themselves with hip-hop”) that the Reader carried last year. Saturday night he spent behind bars. He and some friends had gathered at the 95th Street el stop to hold a public reading. The cops looked into his bag and took umbrage. “Basically the crux of their problem with us was the name of the book and what they thought it represented,” says Wimsatt.
