“We can value ourselves better if we remember that we are more than our bodies and that the body is a gift – a perishable gift with an expiry date. We have very little time to experience life in it. Human life spans are tiny in the context of the time spans of the universe around us, so let us enjoy the gift and honor the Goddess by caring for it both inwardly and outwardly, but without being fixated by it.”
- Vivianne Crowley
In the aftermath of my friend and mentor Thomas Johnstone's passing, those of us who knew and cared about him have been left searching for answers. We knew him as a person stronger than the steel of any of his hometown's skyscrapers. Thomas was a quintessential native New Yorker; he had a heart of gold underneath all that steel.
The truth is that we may never fully know all the factors that lead Thomas to take his own life last week. And I have come to believe that while the story of his last days and what was going through his mind at the time is important, what is of greater and lasting significance will always be the way he lived his life and the rich legacy that he instilled in my life and others.
Thomas was born in Brooklyn in 1952 into a family of West Indian descent. It was in this Brooklyn of the '50s and '60s - bustling with Haitian, Jamaican, West Indian and other Island nation immigrants - that Thomas came of age and discovered his sexuality, learning what it was to be both African-American and gay, its joys and its problems. At an early age, he became aware of injustice stemming from deeply-rooted racial divisions and discrimination based on sexual orientation, and he worked tirelessly as a community organizer and political activist as a young person, living and marching on the forefront as history was made at Stonewall and other key moments in gay-liberation history throughout the '60s and '70s.
Thomas also deeply loved classical music, the ballet and the opera, and for many years worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was over this love of the arts and our appreciation of our shared LGBT history that we bonded. We spent countless hot summer afternoons and evenings at his apartment on Linden (at the time, he lived less than a block away from my apartment) hanging out, watching classic operas, talking liberal politics, history, arts, culture, what life was like back in the Stonewall era. Thomas was also a philosopher, mystic and magician, and he opened my mind more than any college professor I've ever had to new ways of thinking and being in the world. He had a great gift with words. I am honored to say Thomas was the teacher that flung open the doors for my study & pursuit of occult knowledge, magick and the Western Mystery Tradition.
At that time, I was a very wounded, lost and searching 19-year-old freshly arrived in the big city, struggling to make the transition into early adulthood, adjust to life in New York City and deal with my family's outright, total & final rejection of me and my homosexuality after a harrowing and disastrous coming-out. We shared stories and commiserated over family rejection, our violent, abusive and imbalanced mothers, and distant or nonexistent fathers. Somewhere in the sharing of our stories, seeds of healing germinated and I began the long journey toward picking myself back up, rebuilding my life and healing myself.
My life is forever and ever changed for having known you, Thomas. Your legacy lives on in me. I can't stand that I never had a chance to say a last goodbye. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for you and the countless gifts you bestowed on my life - some of which I'm sure I don't even recognize yet and will appreciate later in life. You are missed here, but your legacy and spirit live on in me, in the city we both loved and called home, and in anyone who was fortunate enough to have known you. You were a titan and an icon in this community, whether or not you even knew that yourself. Your passing is the end of an era. Until we meet again ~
