Death, Suicide, & Faerie Elders...

This is an article I wrote for RFD, "a reader-created quarterly celebrating Queer diversity," for the Death and Suicide Issue that was pu7blished in Fall 2008. The theme was "Death, Suicide, and Faerie Elders" so I wrote and submitted an article that encompasses all three subjects for me. Click on the image to enlarge it so you can read the text. The editors published it as a letter on the opening page of the issue. I blacked out the opening letter from a NYC Hells Angel sentenced to life in prison for privacy reasons!

RFD is the second oldest continually operating queer publication in the United States. It's been around since 1974 and only the Advocate has been published longer! Find out more about RFD and subscribe today!

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Good Mourning Broken Hearts Club!

I'd like to take a moment to remember Richard Waugh, my dear friend, occasional sweetheart, and biggest fan. He died 8 years ago this week and I miss him much. Richard was my studio assistant and he was always after me to cut my stones and beads into heart shapes. I never would because I thought heart shapes were too "contrived" or whatever. He finally convinced me. I relented and I told him that when I got back from a show I was going to that we would cut a bunch of "hearts of stone" beads to get ready for Valentine's Day. I got back and Richard was found dead in his apartment, at age 41, from a massive heart attack related to a side effect from his HIV meds. Fat in his body had migrated to his heart and the autopsy showed his heart twice the size of normal. Even though it's been 8 yearsI miss him terribly and I have been making ever increasing numbers of stone hearts and jet mourning jewelry ever since. I make beads in the shape of hearts that are broken and have started up Leo Sunshine's Broken Hearts Club Band as a place for the broken hearted to gather. I miss ya Richard and will always remember you.

I finally learned to embed videos in blog posts and the first video I'm going to post is related to Richard's favorite song, Breakfast at Tiffany's by the band Deep Blue Something. Whenever I was going to put 5 cd's into rotation while working in the studio I would ask Richard if he had any musical requests. He would also rasp, "BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S!" Sometimes I would put in the compilation disc that had the original on it and sometimes I would put on the cd that had the disco re-mix version and sometimes he got neither! While looking at various versions on youtube I found this comedy-theatrical version. It's funny and the theatrics of the lead singer (who is obviously a comedian and not a professional singer), well he reminds me a bit of Richard, who was a pretty funny and theatrical guy himself. I think he would appreciate this...

Much love, David Leo



P.S. ...and we here at the Broken Hearts Club Band have a nice selection of new jet broken hearts as we lead up to Valentines Day! Check them out in my eBay store....

Inside the Grieving Brain & Complicated Grief

Good Mourning Broken Hearters and Happy New Year! I'm just wanting to make sure that I get here/hear to Band practice on a regular basis. While looking for a lapidary catalog I found this Newsweek article I had been saving and meaning to post and share with folks.
It's a short and fascinating article about what researchers are finding from doing brain scans of bereaved people while they look at images of their lost loved ones. It's from the section "HEALTH MATTERS" by Jerry Adler...

Inside the Grieving Brain

Memories of the person they missed prolonged their grief, giving them pleasure as well as pain.

Mourning the death of a loved one is about as universal a human emotion as exists, and it's not even confined to humans; there's evidence of it in other primates and even elephants. From its beginnings, psychotherapy has recognized the special challenge of grief and its relationship to depression (or, as Freud put it in the title of one of his best-known essays, "Mourning and Melancholia").....