Those We've Lost So Far (Part 2 of 2)
2024 is nearly halfway over, and already New York has lost a number of notable LGBTQ+ icons including Joan Gibbs, KoKo Aviance, Christopher Durang & more.
This newsletter is a continuation from last week’s, which covered the lives and legacies of Maurice Hines, Steve Ostrow, Cecilia Gentili, Dee Finley, Shelly Weiss, DJ Stacy (Ledwith), David Mixner and Ruby Lynn Reyner. This week, I’ll be highlighting the lives of Andrew Crispo, Joan Gibbs, Christopher Durang, Mary Ann Zielenko, REX, Patti Astor, Robbi Mecus and KoKo Aviance (Thay Floyd). Once again, if there is anyone else you think has been left out or should be included, please be sure to let me know via comment or message!
9. Andrew Crispo (1945-2024)
Born in Philadelphia on April 21st, 1945, Andrew John Crispo moved to New York City in 1964 and went on to found and run an eponymous high-end art gallery at 41 East 57th Street in the famed art deco Fuller Building. Crispo became a prominent figure in the City's art scene during the 1970s and '80s, and his gallery on 57th Street became a hub for high-end art transactions—attracting wealthy clients, showcasing prominent artists and making significant contributions to the city's vibrant art culture. Over the course of the gallery's history, it exhibited artists like Richard Anuszkiewicz, Richard Pousette-Dart, Charles Burchfield and Lowell Blair Nesbitt. “He could have been another Larry Gagosian today,” said David Ligare, an artist whom Crispo represented in the 1970s, in the New York Times. “He had such enthusiasm for art and such good connections.” It would later come out that Crispo also used his gallery after-hours to engage in sex parties and S&M activities.
In 1985, Crispo was notably named in a gruesome murder case that became known as the "Death Mask Murder," regarding the death of 26-year-old Norwegian FIT student Eigil Dag Vesti. Both Crispo and his younger cohort Bernard LeGeros had been on a drug-fueled nightlife run when they first met Vesti at the Limelight Club in Manhattan. The pair handcuffed and hooded Vesti and brought him back to LeGeros' parent's estate in Stony Point, New York. At some time during that night or in the early morning of the following day, LeGeros then shot the hooded Vesti twice with a rifle on the grounds of the compound, in a murky S&M scene that had gone too far.
Three weeks later, a group of hikers accidentally found Mr. Vesti’s body—with the mask still on—in an abandoned smokehouse near the LeGeros home. Mr. LeGeros was eventually arrested and the case became a tabloid sensation. Despite LeGeros’ insistence that Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, Crispo denied involvement in the killing and the police never charged him. Crispo also never even testified in the case, even though the murder weapon had been discovered at his gallery. Two months later, Crispo and LeGeros were then indicted in a different case, charged with the 1984 kidnapping and torturing of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Crispo was acquitted after he convinced the jury that the encounter had been consensual.
Although Crispo was never formally charged in connection with these cases, they nevertheless cast a long shadow over both his career and reputation. Crispo's general involvement and his continued S&M proclivities became frequent subjects of speculation and controversy. Despite the notoriety, he remained a part of New York's art world, though his prominence waned due to continued legal and financial troubles that followed the scandals. Crispo was eventually charged with evading tax payments of $4 million on $10 million in income, to which he pleaded guilty. In 1986, he began a five-year prison sentence, of which he served three. The IRS subsequently seized his art collection and auctioned off pieces from it to help recoup his tax obligations. Crispo got out of prison in 1989 but continued to live a troubled life throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. Crispo died at a nursing home in Brooklyn on February 7th, 2024, at the age of 78.
10. Joan Gibbs (1953-2024)
On March 14th, 2024 Joan Gibbs, a renowned activist and civil rights attorney who was also a core member of ACT UP and a cofounder of Dykes Against Racism Everywhere passed away at the age of 71. During her lifetime, Gibbs often fought for racial justice, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as vehemently against the spread of HIV/AIDS. Upon hearing of Joan Gibbs’ passing, author Sarah Schulman, who interviewed Gibbs for ACT UP’s Oral History Project, told Gay City News: “Joan was a kind person who devoted her life to creating community on all levels…Whether it was her work as a social justice attorney, or personally as a volunteer at Rikers, or housing friends with AIDS until their deaths. As a poet, she coalesced poets. As a lesbian, she co-built probably the first expressly anti-racist lesbian group. She was beloved by ACT UP for all her pro bono legal work in the streets and in the courts. [Joan was] a woman of great compassion.”
Gibbs was born in Harlem on January 17th, 1953 but was primarily raised in Swan Quarter, North Carolina. She returned to New York at the age of 14 and eventually attended and graduated from Rutgers Law School, becoming a practicing lawyer in both New York and New Jersey. Gibbs’s law career was an extension of her near life-long activism, which began during the 1960s when she became involved in the Civil Rights, anti-war and women's lib movements. She became a member of the Young Socialists Alliance and later played an active role in the LGBTQ+ movement, represented organizations like ACT UP. Gibbs also represented the Haitian American Anti-Defamation League when the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) deemed the group to be a risk for HIV/AIDS.
Gibbs was particularly an expert in constitutional law and utilized this expertise towards the benefit of Black people, women, political prisoners & LGBTQ+ communities. As previously stated, Gibbs also partook in the ACT UP Oral History Project, and once said about her time with the organization: “ACT UP, to me, was one of the best expressions of progressive politics in its practice that has existed since, I would say, the Civil Rights Movement.” Gibbs also had an impressive literary career. She was the founding editor of Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians, which presented fiction, poetry, and other writing by the likes of Audre Lorde, Sapphire & Jewelle Gomez. The magazine was published between 1977 & 1983, and is an early example of a noteworthy literary magazine made by and for lesbians of color. In 1980, Gibbs also co-edited the anthology Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles on Racism & Classism in the Lesbian Community.
In the Amsterdam News, activist Ada Gay Griffin wrote about Gibbs thus: “While immersed in many movements for freedom and justice, Joan bravely championed LGBTQIA+ liberation as a Black lesbian leader, committed to organizing and raising the voices of Black women.” Meanwhile, in an article on Medium, Gibbs’ friend Karen D. Taylor beautifully eulogized her fallen comrade: “We are myriad communities in mourning for one woman, whose love for humanity was as multilayered as her pursuit of justice. So much so that she devoted nearly her entire life — from adolescence to death — to easing the constrictions and restrictions of unencumbered patriarchal capitalism on top of racism, sexism, and hatred of any non-hetero sexuality. She was a conversationalist and a storyteller — a consummate raconteur. Could turn a mishap or a tragedy into a hilarious tale. She had that kind of humor.”
11. Christopher Durang (1949-2024)
Christopher Ferdinand Durang, whose career spanned more than forty years, was an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. Some of his best known plays include Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, for which he won the Obie Award for Best Playwright in 1980, as well as Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2013. According to his husband, John Augustine, Durang passed away on April 2nd, 2024 at the age of 75 due to complications from a form of dementia known as logopenic primary progressive aphasia.
Durang was born on January 2nd, 1949, in Montclair, New Jersey but grew up in Berkeley Heights. He received a B.A. in English from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Yale School of Drama. As a playwright, Durang's work often critically dealt with issues of child abuse, Roman Catholic dogma, culture, and homosexuality. Beginning in the 1970s, Durang wrote and produced dozens of plays, including The Idiots Karamazov (1974), The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (1975), The Vietnamization of New Jersey (1976), Beyond Therapy (1981), Baby with the Bathwater (1983), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985), Laughing Wild (1987), Betty's Summer Vacation (1999), Miss Witherspoon (2005), and countless others.
Durang received Obie Awards for Sister Mary Ignatius, The Marriage of Bette & Boo and Betty's Summer Vacation. His first Tony nomination came for his 1978 musical A History of the American Film, but his first Tony win would not arrive until 2013 when he won for best play with Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater and a champion of Durang’s work since the early ‘80s, told The New York Times: “There was a darkness to some of his plays, and there was great humanity to some of his plays. He was a very, very funny writer. But what he wrote about and what lay underneath those plays was quite serious.” Durang was also a lively performer, and he frequently appeared onstage as well as occasionally on television and in film. Among other roles, he originated the part of Matt in the Public Theater’s production of The Marriage of Bette and Boo and starred as the Infant of Prague in his 1987 comedy Laughing Wild at Playwrights Horizons in New York.
Later in life, Durang lived in Pipersville, PA, with his husband, actor and playwright John Augustine. The two first met in 1986 and were legally married in 2014. In 2016, however, Durang was diagnosed with logopenic progressive aphasia, which primarily impeded his ability to process language, though it subsequently also affected his short-term memory. Durang gradually withdrew from public life before his condition was publicly announced in 2022. Durang eventually passed away from complications of aphasia at his Pennsylvania home. In 2024, Durang was posthumously the recipient of the Dramatists’ Guild of America’s lifetime achievement award.
12. Mary Ann Zielenko (1938-2024)
On April 3rd, 2024 Mary Ann Zielonko passed away at the age of 85 at her home in Rutland, Vermont. Zielonko was best known as the partner and lover of Kitty Genovese, whose 1964 murder in Queens made major headlines regarding the 38 neighbors who ignored Genovese's cries for help, becoming a longterm symbol for urban anonymity and indifference. At the time of Genovese's murder, Zielonko had been living with her for over a year as lovers, though news reports from back then simply referred to them as roommates.
When police investigators first became aware of the nature of the women’s true relationship, they questioned Zielonko as a possible suspect, ultimately determining that after a night of bowling with friends, Zielonko had in fact been asleep in their Kew Gardens apartment while the attack was taking place below. “I was very numb, I would say, from the whole thing,” Zielonko told Retro Report, a New York Times series of video documentaries exploring old news stories and their lasting effects, back in 2016. “I felt, wow, she was so close, and I was sleeping, and I didn’t know what happened, and that I could have saved her. You know? That’s what I really think still.”
In a 2004 interview with The Rutland Herald, Zielonko said she had once talked with a man she believed to be the last person, other than the killer, to have had contact with Ms. Genovese: "She cried to him and he wouldn’t open his door...I knew he was afraid of everything, even to leave his house, but that doesn’t excuse him. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe people need to open doors. When someone reaches out for help, open your door, take a chance.”
Zielonko was born Mary Katherine on June 22, 1938 in New York City. Most of her youth was spent in Vermont and New Hampshire, though she attended Southern Connecticut State University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1974 and a master’s degree in research statistics and management in 1977. She first met Ms. Genovese at a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village and they were both working at different bars in the City when Ms. Genovese was murdered. “We just hit it off,” she said of Ms. Genovese in a 2004 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “We meshed. I’m very quiet, and she talked a lot."
13. REX (1943-2024)
In late March of 2024, the legendary artist and illustrator known as REX, best known for his gay fetish and erotic art from the 1970s and 1980s, passed away in Amsterdam, according to the Bob Mizer Foundation, a nonprofit that preserves and promotes mid-century erotic photography and art. As one of the most important and influential homoerotic artists during his time, REX created logos and artwork for numerous notable gay clubs in New York City, including The Mineshaft, Rawhide, and the LURE. REX’s illustrations were typically of hyper-masculine men, often wearing leather or dressed up as archetypes like cops or bikers, and were heavily influenced bu the work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland.
Abandoned at birth, REX's real name and exact birthday are unknown, but multiple references indicate that he was born in 1943. He was adopted at a young age and grew up living among beatniks and on the streets of Greenwich Village. While still in his teens, he became the protégé of a fashion designer, who paid for two years of REX’a study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. REX later worked in fashion illustration and commercial art, a career that brought him to London and Paris in the late 1960s, though he maintained an apartment on Saint Mark's Place in the East Village.
Disillusioned with commercial art, he dropped out of the industry but re-emerged in the '70s as one of the leading figures visualizing the fetish and S&M subculture in New York City and later in San Francisco. He was much influenced, he said, by his chance discovery of the drawings of Tom of Finland, which "irrevocably changed his life." The depiction of men "having sex with men, passionately and enthusiastically" "spoke to him in a way no lover or anonymous stranger ever had." REX became known for his distinctively-styled pointillistic black-&-white pen-&-ink drawings, whose raw sexual energy resonated with the leather scene that was emerging in Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District.
Given the time period during which he emerged, REX felt the need to remain elusive. "I signed myself REX because it was non-specific and untraceable in those days by the cops." Although explicit nudes aimed at gay men were becoming more permissible, the generally conservative social culture of the era still meant that involvement with gay pornography could have serious consequences. REX lived fairly reclusively and generally kept quiet about his private life. Jack Fritscher, the editor in chief of Drummer magazine, recalled the one time he was able to snap the artist: "When I began writing about REX in magazines like Drummer in 1978, editors always wanted a photo of the artist, who was famously camera-shy. I told them REX said, 'My drawings define who I am.' So, in 1984, when REX mentioned over lunch that he was having trouble drawing a tiny detail, he asked to shoot a Polaroid reference photo of my left wrist coming out the sleeve of my leather jacket. I said, 'Sure, if you let me shoot you.' He agreed. I aimed my camera. He was a trickster. He dodged, covering his face with his Polaroid camera, but I kept clicking and got the pictures editors wanted to document him historically." In his later years, REX lived a quiet life in Amsterdam. He was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2022. An authorized collection of his work, entitled Leather Cult was published in 2023.
14. Patti Astor (1950-2024)
Born Patricia Titchener on March 17th, 1950, Patti Astor was a multi-disciplinary performer who was a featured actress in numerous New York City underground films of the 1970s but perhaps was best known as key player in the East Village art scene of the 1980s. She was extremely involved in the early popularization of hip hop and famously cofounded the instrumental contemporary art gallery, Fun Gallery, which located at 254 East 10th Street, exposed New York City to the talents of street art by showcasing graffiti artists such as Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Dondi, Lady Pink, and ERO as well as contemporary artists Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
Astor was born and raised in Cincinatti, Ohio, where she was a charter member of the Cincinnati Civic Ballet. At the age of eighteen, her adventurous spirit took her to New York City where she attended Barnard College but soon dropped out to take a leadership role in the anti-Vietnam War group SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She then spent almost three years as a young revolutionary, before decided to her dance act on the road, traveling and performing across the U.S. and Europe. Astor returned to New YorkCity in 1975, and soon became involved in the East Village punk rock and new wave scenes, hanging out at notable nightlife venues like CBGB's and the Mudd Club. She became a queen of the downtown scene, appearing in dozens of low-budget and experimental films, such as Amos Poe's Unmade Beds (1976) a black-and-white 16 mm remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in which she acted alongside filmmaker Eric Mitchell, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and artist Duncan Hannah. She also appeared in such low-budget and low-audience films as Rome '78, The Long Island Four, and Snakewoman. One of the most notable films that Astor appeared in was Charles Ahearn's legendary hip-hop epic, Wild Style (1983).
But Astor is perhaps best remembered for co-founding the highly influential Fun Gallery in 1981 with partner Bill Stelling. The tenement storefront gallery was the first of a series of important 1980s East Village art galleries to open up and was particularly known for specializing in showing graffiti artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Dondi, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000. It also gave important shows to Kenny Scharf (in 1981), Jean-Michel Basquiat (November 1982), & Keith Haring (February, 1983). “Patti became the first lady of graffiti art,” said Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the art-world photographer and documentary filmmaker. “She was there before anybody, and most importantly she understood the cultural aspect of this work at a time when the art world was very white-male dominated.” The Fun Gallery space itself was just eight by 25 feet, and the idea at the time was to make a gallery by artists, for artists. Astor and Stelling had no money and no art experience when they opened shop, but they had a lot of creative friends. Fun Gallery ran for just over four years, closing in 1985 at a time when many other East Village galleries had opened, interest in graffiti painters in the art world had subsided, and rents in the East Village had risen dramatically.
After closing Fun Gallery, Astor moved to Hermosa Beach, into a trailer-park surf community, where she wrote a series of screenplays with her friend Anita Rosenberg. Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988), for which they wrote the story, which Ms. Rosenberg directed and in which Ms. Astor appeared, was a favorite at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987. Astor also at this time wrote and produced Get Tux'd, starring Ice-T in one of his first movie roles and penned a book about her experiences, entitled Fun Gallery: The True Story. In more recent decades, she worked as a consultant, curator and go-to historian for the street art she had once helped promote.
15. Robbi Mecus (1971-2024)
An April 28th, 2024 it was announced that Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger known for her leadership in search-&-rescue operations as well as for her influential role in the LGBTQ+ climbing community, had tragically died three days prior after a fall of approximately 1,000 feet from a peak in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Mecus was only 52 years old and her death was confirmed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where she had worked for over 25 years. Mecus worked mostly in the Adirondacks, searching for and rescuing lost or injured climbers facing hypothermia and other threats in the wilderness. Last month, she helped rescue a frostbitten hiker who had gotten lost in the Adirondack Mountains overnight.
Robbi Mecus was born in New York City in October 1971 and grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a Roman Catholic working-class family with her parents and an older brother and older sister. “Growing up in New York City, I always knew that I was a mountain girl,” she stated in a 2019 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History project. She recalled that as a kid she would cut up pictures of forests and mountains and tack them onto her wall. Eventually, Mecus got involved in the New York climbing community, and in 2008 she met Carolyn Riccardi, with whom she bonded over over their shared experiences growing up in Brooklyn and their love of heavy metal music. “The climbing community has some diversity to it, but you don’t meet a lot of blue-collar kids from Brooklyn, and you don’t meet a lot of kids that are into heavy metal,” Riccardi told the New York Times.
According to a 2019 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History project, Mecus officially came out as transgender at the age of 44, but said that she identified as female since she was very young, though she struggled to come to terms with her identity for decades. She even married a woman, and they had a child together. She later found an online community where she could learn to better express herself, and eventually she began working to foster a supportive community for LGBTQ+ climbers in New York. “I want people to see that trans people can do amazing things,” she said in an interview for a climbing website, goEast, in 2022. “I think it helps when young trans people see other trans people accomplishing things. I think it lets them know that their life doesn’t have to be full of negativity, & it can actually be really rad.”
In the aforementioned New York City Trans Oral History project interview, Mecus also described her struggle to develop an identity beyond the stereotypes of who she thought she had to be, but noted that after coming out she was able to develop her own definition of her gender and her “own version of femininity.” “I thought that in order to be accepted as a woman, that I would have to model myself after all the other women I see. And I think one of the big lessons I’ve learned in the past three years is that I don’t have to model myself after anybody, except me.” After Mecus’ untimely passing community members, rangers and state and local officials all came together to honor Mecus and her pioneering work. According to one friend and fellow climber: “Robbi’s vision, a dream of a thriving queer and trans community in the middle of the most rugged mountains, is alive here today and with all of our loved ones at home as well.”
16. KoKo Aviance/Thay Floyd (1980-2024)
An April 30th, 2024 news broke of the passing of KoKo Aviance, a beloved member of the esteemed House of Aviance and a New York City nightlife icon. By day, Thay Floyd was an actor and performer on Broadway, appearing in shows such as Waitress, A Christmas Story, Damn Yankees and The Little Mermaid, among others. By night, Floyd went and performed in drag at venues like The Cock & Bar d'O as KoKo Aviance, and was a leading member of the House of Aviance, which has included over the years the likes of Mother Juan Aviance, Kevin Aviance, Nita Aviance and countless other artists and performers. KoKo Aviance was also a multiple GLAM award nominee, including for Breakthrough Artist and for Best Dance Performer.
Born August 16th, 1980, Thayules Kanaro Floyd was a Memphis native who went on to pursue a BFA in Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Floyd then became a familiar face on the regional theater circuit over the years, performing in roles such as Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees at the Ordway Theater, as a Sebastian understudy in The Little Mermaid for Paper Mill Playhouse (a co-production with PCLO, KC Starlight, TUTS, Dallas Summer Musicals, and TOTS), and as Rum Tum Tugger in Cats for North Carolina Theatre. On Broadway, Floyd understudied for Eric Anderson as Cal in the original Broadway production of Waitress, where he became a fan-favorite ensemble member with a spotlight moment as the color blind man during the song "When He Sees Me." Floyd’s expertise as a drag performer also came in handy on occasion on the stage, such as when he played the Acid Queen in The Who's Tommy at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.
As KoKo Aviance, Floyd made a great impact on New York City nightlife. Upon hearing of his passing, fellow house member Nita Aviance recalled: "We met on the first day of school and became sisters immediately, our days spent running from class to dance class and our "evenings" dancing from nightclub to nightclub. We fast became the youngest daughters of the House of Aviance and the cuttings up continued. So many shows, so many kiiis, I can't believe you're gone, I'll never forget you gurl, you will always be a shining star miss KoKo "the double knockout" Aviance." Meanwhile, Johnny McGovern, a.k.a The Gay Pimp, wrote: “I’m heartbroken to say goodbye to one of the most beautiful, talented, hilarious people I have ever known. Rest in power…I love you and will never forget you.”
Several other NYC nightlife legends also reacted to Floyd’s sudden passing. Mother Juan Aviance posted: "I got shocking and limited info last night about the passing of my Broadway Baby KoKo Aviance aka Thay Floyd. May he Rest In Power! When more info is available I'll be sure to inform u all. My heart is broken!" Drag megastar Peppermint perhaps eulogized KoKo best of all: “I guess I'm of the age and time where friends and loved ones, people we once knew and admire, eventually pass on. I don't have a lot of detail but I can tell you I am absolutely crushed…I met so many iconic people over the years but I was part of a drag gang who all basically got initiated at the same time in 1998. We served and swerved on the dance floors together for several years…little did I know that I would wake up to the news that KoKo Aviance has passed away. That news is absolutely crushing to me and I will miss her with all of my heart. I hope she's at that nightclub in the sky! I'm not sure how many of you all knew her but I got to tell you she was a full key, so if you're going out tonight please have one for her! Rest in peace and passion.”
