I had always wanted to write. A year earlier, when presented with a choice of electives for my junior year, I saw among the wood shop and auto mechanics courses something called “journalism.” I asked the guidance counselor “Is that writing?” He replied, “Sort of.” I signed up, and by doing so intertwined my destiny with that of Susan Lowell Butler.

At the close of my junior year, so enamored of journalism–and Susan–was I that I wanted to sign up for the class again, something that was not allowed. Electives were meant to be taken once, and repeating a class would limit the diversity of one’s educational experience, or some such nonsense. Susan stepped in and I saw for the first time the strength of her legendary resolve. Not only was I allowed to repeat the class (and serve as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Susan advised), but several other devoted acolytes of Susan joined me for a second helping of Susan’s wisdom and inspiration. At about the same time, Susan wrote a recommendation for me for a scholarship to the Blair Summer School for Journalism, an elite, nationally known pre-college journalism program at Blair Academy in New Jersey. The scholarships, sponsored by the Trenton Times (and by dailies in cities such as Baltimore and Indianapolis), were highly competitive, and I remain convinced to this day that Susan’s recommendation put my application over the top. Even more remarkable, for three more consecutive years, the students Susan recommended all won the scholarship, a feat I am sure was unmatched by any high school journalism teacher anywhere.

I went on to graduate from the School of Communications at Penn State (where I received a journalism scholarship) and to become a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. Later I was an editor at the Brown University News Bureau and, for 26 years, at Emory University in Atlanta.

In 1997 I completed the manuscript for a novel I had begun many years earlier in college. Despite the fact that Susan’s rigorous cancer treatment was not long behind her, she sat with me in her basement office in Alexandria for nearly a week helping me revise the manuscript. And she did so again several months later. The book, THE WINTER OF OUR DISCOTHEQUE, went on to win a Lambda Literary Award, marking it as one of the twenty best LGBT books of 2002. I dedicated that book to my beloved sister, Maggie, but when, five years later, I published FIRST PERSON PLURAL, the decision to dedicate it to Susan was never in question.

As I said at Susan’s sixtieth birthday party in 2004, to which I flew from Atlanta and surprised the hell out of her (with Jim Butler’s help), I told an audience of her devotees: “Susan may not have been the woman who gave me life, but she is the woman who gave me THIS life.”

I will always remember the last time I saw her, in May of this year at a dinner to celebrate my upcoming move to a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains, where I intended to write my memoirs. After dinner we parted company. I walked down one side of the street to catch the Metro, Susan down the other to return to her office. She did not look across the street toward me (as I did to her), but walked, resolutely, unsentimentally, into the future.