STORIES

Hi, my name is Craig is Chester. I’m a writer but most people know me as an actor. I was in the movie Swoon. That movie became part of the new Queer cinema movement, and I wound up being in a lot of those films in the ‘90s.

I met Michael Stremel in the mid-90s, on the set of a movie I acted in, I Shot Andy Warhol. He was doing a ‘set visit’ as one of the executives at American Playhouse, which helped produce the film. Everybody wanted to stop by production designer Therese DePrez’s stunning recreation of Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was the movie magic fun of making movies. And while I remember our first meeting very well, what he was wearing, how short and cute he was, I don’t really remember what happened next or how we wound up becoming close friends. But it doesn’t really matter because friends we became.

We all knew that Michael had HIV/AIDS but it was rarely discussed. He struck the opposite of a tragic pose. Stremel (which is what we called him) possessed a kind of impish glamour that was all his own. He was fun and fully alive, busy, always very busy. The fact that he had HIV/AIDS was not front and center because there were things to do.

My memories of Stremel are about the fun we had, of being part of his posse, running around New York’s East Village with him and Mark Tusk, of flirting with boys, of endless summers and late night beach walks on Fire Island. Fire Island was Stremel’s favorite place to stir up trouble. We were on the island the same week my Genre Magazine came out – for those of you who don’t know, Genre was a national gay magazine in the ’90s, sort of the Pepsi to OUT Magazine’s Coke, and I happened to be on the cover. That summer was the apex of my moment as an openly gay young actor and Stremel convinced me that we should do drugs to celebrate, so he found someone who knew someone who could sell us someone else’s ecstasy.

After popping our pills, we went to the Ice Palace, where we ran into writer Paul Rudnick, who I greatly admired, and who was also in Genre Magazine that month. While gabbing, mid-sentence, about how great it was to be gay, famous and in a gay magazine, the bad ecstasy kicked in and, mid-sentence, I projectile vomited onto Paul Rudnick. I turned to Stremel, he barfed too, some of it splashed onto our friend Denny’s bare legs, which sent Denny over the edge.

It was a disaster. I looked over at Stremel, who was not mortified at all but laughing – doubled over, laughing at the chaos he’d had a hand in unleashing. He loved his role as the instigator. There was always a lot of laughter, sometimes at other people’s expense, sometimes at your own.

He was provocative, impulsive. He once playfully bit someone on the nose while being introduced to them. He was wickedly smart with impeccable taste as a film executive. Boys Don’t Cry is one of the many feathers in his cap. If you met him, you would find him precocious and adorable at the same time, and a little bit infuriating. A lost little boy was in there somewhere. He knew it and got away with a lot as a result. But underneath it all, we all knew that Stremel was sick and his shenanigans, his brattiness, his getting away with things was, on some level, okay, because he was someone whose future was not guaranteed.

I moved to New York City in 1984, and HIV/AIDS defined my youth and the first 15 years of my adult life, but Stremel was the person in my inner circle who had it, the one I was closest to. He wasn’t my ‘sick friend’, he didn’t want that, so I pushed it out of my mind, we were just onto the next thing, the next party, the next crazy ‘puking on Paul Rudnick’ story in the making.

In the late 90’s, while laying next to him on the beach on Fire Island, I woke up from a nap and realized he’d fallen asleep too. Alone with him beside me, I allowed myself to acknowledge that Stremel was going to die. I watched him sleep and looked at him for a long time, studying the contours of his face, his eyelashes, his lips, the sand on his ear. Some part of me knew that I needed to take a mental snapshot while I had the chance, so I would remember everything that day, exactly what he looked like. I didn’t think that much about Stremel’s looks because we were friends, but watching him sleep that day on the beach, I remember how truly beautiful he was.

On New Years Eve, 2001, while visiting family in Texas, my friend Noah Cowan (who is gone now as well) called to tell me that Stremel had died. He was 34, a year younger than I was at the time. Now that I am 60, I know how young 34 is.

Stremel barely made it out of the ‘90, a decade he embodied so completely in all its youthful wonder and weighted sorrow. He’d taken a turn for the worse in 2000, his face sunken, there was so many pills – SO MANY PILLS – so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock, still hard to believe that someone so alive no longer was.

When I hung up the phone, I looked at my mom and dad, in their suburban home in San Antonio and I felt that pang of isolation so at the core of my gayness. I couldn’t tell them that my friend Michael had just died from AIDS. It would only reignite their worries for me. That’s something about the AIDS era that I don’t see get much lip service – this complicated isolation of grieving due to stigma. There were circles I could grieve in and circles I couldn’t.

Stremel’s obituary in Variety made no mention of HIV/AIDS. In 2001, everything was still ‘code.’ Some people understood what it means when a 34-year-old dies in St. Vincent’s Hospital after a long illness. Some people didn’t. I needed to be in New York, with the people who did.

Stremel didn’t want a memorial. I guess that’s what this is. At that time in my life, I hadn’t come to understand what a legacy is, outside of, say, winning an Oscar or shooting John Lennon. But now that I’m older, I know that a legacy is also the lasting impact each of us has on one another, the ripple effect of someone’s talent or kindness or bravery or generosity. Stremel’s legacy is evident in my life today because he gave me a writing career.

After he left American Playhouse, he moved to Fox Searchlight and optioned my first screenplay, which is called Save Me, which gave me a new, more lucrative, career than my acting career. Taking my screenplay into development got me into the Writers Guild. I’ve been a member ever since, since 1998. It’s the union that, to this day, provides me with the pension I live on. That is his personal legacy with me, and I know it and am so grateful.

Some people die young and you can’t imagine them being old. But I can pretty easily envision Michael turning 60 along with me and Mark Tusk. That bothers me. He had so much left to do. People say ‘oh, you know, he died too soon’ and it’s really true about my friend. I think he would hate the mean times we are living through today. Even so, I wish he were here. It would be fun to hate them together.