Mr. Lou

While I was looking at pictures of Luigi Mangione it hit me — he reminds me of Mr. Lou. I’m still not sure what to make of this Luigi Mangione person and what his alleged actions mean in the grand scheme of things, but for now, this situation and this person have sparked off some interesting reflections and associations.

I think Lou was short for Louis, but I’m not entirely sure. It was a million years ago, or about 30 years ago to be exact. Mr. Lou was one of the workers at St. Vincent’s orphanage where I was placed after running away from home not long before my twelfth birthday. He was a handsome Italian guy, popular with the ladies he worked with and also the subject of a few giggling crushes among the girls there. It’s strange how memories work. Some are opaque and muddy and some, like this brief encounter with Mr. Lou that I’ll be explaining in detail later, are as crystal clear as something that just happened yesterday.

Because of certain things that I’m now exploring as a part of my artistic practice (mostly related to my erotic art and body work), I think it’s necessary to say a few words about how my desires and my attractions developed. As a child who was a ward of the state I faced numerous challenges and hardships, but thankfully navigating sexually predatory adults wasn’t one of them. To be sure, I got into trouble as an older teenage precisely because I was seeking out certain things while not having enough guidance and discipline, but this is very different from being shaped by trauma. I consider myself lucky that the adults who crossed my path while I was a ward of the state were actually good people who didn’t add fuel to the fire or fuck me up even more. This particular memory with Mr. Lou is a great example of this.

St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum Society was established by German Catholics in the Tacony section of Philadelphia in 1859. Located right next to a romantic bend in the Delaware river, I remember how the fog would roll over the surface of the waters at times in the most interesting way. For the children placed there, it was like a little oasis amidst the chaos of our lives. Coming from the crime ridden ghetto of west Philly this serene and peaceful place might as well have been on another planet. The nuns and workers there seemed to go out of their way to provide us with diversions and activities inside of a kind of intentionally created bubble that insulated us from the outside world and all the terrible things that had separated us from our families. I was something of an anomaly; the other kids had been taken from their homes by social workers or the police while I was there because one bitterly cold January morning I called a hotline from a payphone and got picked up by a cab that took me to the Voyage House. This was after seeing blood from my nose splatter on the wall after my latest “discipline” session. After a brief pitstop in the Voyage House I went on to St. Vincent’s and became a ward of the state.

It was late February or early March 1994 and I was just getting out of the shower. I wrapped my towel around myself and was fumbling with the imitation gold crucifix chain the nuns had given all of us; but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get the latch to catch. Maybe not surprising considering this was the first chain I had ever owned. There was never enough money for such frivolous things. Mr. Lou was on duty supervising the boys taking their evening wash up and called out to me from the adjacent room. “Everything OK in there?” After I answered him about my difficulties I realized that I was the last one, still fumbling with my chain. “Here, let me help you,” Mr. Lou said. In that moment while he was standing in front of me, I realized something that had only been a dim awareness thus far — I was different from most other boys.

Everyone knew Mr. Lou was conventionally attractive. I would say he looked like a cross between Joey from ‘Friends’ and the Luigi Mangione guy with tuffs of his shiny, jet black hair usually peeking out from his baseball cap. He was athletic, broad shouldered, about 5'9 with a somewhat swarthy/tanned complexion. I remember that his face reminded me a bit of Roman statues I’d seen in books. That evening while he was standing there in front of me I remember his forearms resting on the side of my bare shoulders while he latched my chain behind my neck. He was looking down at me curiously but kindly, and while the whole interaction was very brief, for me time seemed to have almost stood still. I was suddenly so very acutely aware of his closeness, of his manhood, of the faint smell of his cologne, of the dark fur that covered his arms, of the shape of his mouth, of my relative state of undress wearing only a towel; I was so aware of all of this and for a moment I was almost overwhelmed by an unfamiliar yet vaguely pleasurable feeling. In the novel ‘The Giver’ Lois Lowry refers to this feeling as “the stirrings”. A good metaphor. For me this was, I believe, one of the first stirrings of my budding sexuality.

After he latched my chain Mr. Lou patted me on my on my head and said to go get dressed. If he had been some kind of weirdo it would have been easy to take advantage of someone like me at that moment, or at other vulnerable moments. Unfortunately it happens all the time, especially to vulnerable children. But Mr. Lou was a good guy who genuinely cared about the youth he worked with. I remember one day he gathered all the boys together and had us watch a film about Brazilians from the favela who got involved in a capoeira competition. I remember how inspiring it was, and how interesting it was to see that even in far away Brazil there were ghettos where Black people that looked like me lived. The main thing I remember about Mr. Lou, besides that moment he helped me with my chain, was how effortlessly cool he was, and how other people felt at ease and genuinely happy to be around him.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to Mr. Lou and to the other people who were in my life during those times. Despite my complications and problems, I have to be grateful for the things that did go right amidst everything that went wrong back then. Today, when I consider my unique perspectives on body work, erotic art and so forth, I realize that my unconventional life is the foundation for all of this, and that things from my past that I’ve never considered talking about…maybe they’re more important than I’ve realized. Like, for example, my time at St. Vincent’s, founded by German Catholics and the fact that I just discovered recently that I have some German ancestry…