Letters

Letters

Should Auntie Helen’s and Being Alive be taken over by The Center?

Dear Editor,

I have been reading about the financial woes of Auntie Helen’s and Bring Alive. It may be a good idea for both agencies to be taken over by The Center.

Being Alive does case management. Why couldn’t this be done at The Center. North Park Family Health Center also does case management. Being Alive has a food pantry. The Center has a food pantry. Why couldn’t Being Alive’s food pantry be combined with The Center’s?

I’ve been told Being Alive has a moving service for people with HIV. Why couldn’t this be operated out of The Center. This would greatly reduce Being Alive’s operating expenses.

No one likes to see agencies close, but with the financial climate the way it is and HIV funding being constantly cut; we may need to streamline and not be able to maintain the status quo.

Sincerely,

JEFF SCOTT

University Heights

In response to ‘David Copley’s Double Life’

Dear Editor,

I learnt only yesterday of the death of David Copley last November, and came upon Nicole Murray Ramirez’ column, David Copley’s Double Life (Conversations with Nicole: San Diego LGBT Weekly issue 106, Nov. 29 2012), as I was going through the distorted obituaries of the man that had been placed on Google. I do not know whether it is too late for you to publish this letter, but I knew Copley slightly when I lived in La Jolla some years back, and want to tell you of the impression he made on me.

As you doubtless know, the Copley’s were beggars on horseback, and David – who supposedly loved the theatre (I say supposedly because I do not think he had the mentality to understand a good play – nor yet the patience to sit through a performance), was perfectly cast in the role of a loud and ignorant nouveau-riche.

I am a freelance writer and a former advertising and public relations copywriter, although I was not writing when I first met the fat paper boy at a déclassé bar where I went out of curiosity. After knowing him nearly a year, I telephoned to him at his office, and asked him whether he had need of a writer. I offered to send him my resume. ‘I don’t want your resume’ came the reply. ‘I’m not an employment agency.’ (!) He then proceeded to relate this to his friends – and to repeat, so I was told, his reply to my request.

Here, I must tell you that I grew up in New York in a moneyed and relatively social family, and that because my father and I were not friends (in part, because I am gay), I found myself with almost nothing after his death. Nevertheless, I had been to places David discovered only after Jim Copley married David’s mother. I thought nothing of asking him one evening over drinks, whether he enjoyed certain places I had frequented in New York and abroad: this clearly irritated him, as he must have thought I was trying to compete with him. In that ghastly bridge-club matron’s voice, he told me sneeringly that he did not remember!

On another occasion, he overheard me remark to someone at the same bar, that I liked Cole Porter: ‘Cole Porter!’ he drunkenly spat out. “I think the tune of the old Arrid deodorant commercial is more beautiful and moving than anything your Cole Porter ever wrote!’

One evening, he took off his shoes, and tried to beat out a tune with them on top of the bar. On still another occasion, he remarked: ‘I just found six pair of Gucci’s, which I bought in Beverly Hills, in the trunk of the Chrysler. I had forgotten all about them.’ (Did he imagine people might think he had bought them in Vista?)

When he crashed his tenth-rate Aston – and no-one who knows cars would buy anything newer than a DB6 – he boasted of the cost of the repairs. He moreover announced shortly after he had bought the thing, that Aston had sent him a plaque (I think it was a plaque; did the words on it compliment the parvenu owner on his good taste?), and that -here is an example of his famed wit – he was waiting for Chrysler to do the same.

Once, he displayed for a male prostitute from Beverly Hills, the contents of his wallet, a flashy emerald ring (emeralds on a man?) and the keys to that much-abused Aston.

Most of David’s friends (in fact the only individual he knew who might have been considered a friend, was an absurdly snobbish Australian – the kind of Australian who wishes he were English – who was being kept by an old dipsomaniac of a woman, who was seldom well enough to go out; the Australian subsequently died of AIDS – which does not alter one’s opinion of him as cruel and stupid) were middle aged women, either unhappily married or unhappily divorced, who hoped to meet rich (and I suppose blind and deaf) men through him.

Once, when he was giving a party – so he told anyone who would listen – one of these women came by his house earlier in the day. I do not know whether there was a pretext for the visit, but David seems to have believed she wanted to know the colour (sic) scheme of the floral arrangements, so that she might dress accordingly. Tittering like an adolescent girl, he said that he had thrown all the flowers away, and ordered others. (It would, I suppose, be naive to think that he had thrown them in the direction of a hospital or an AIDS hospice.)

David told me once that he did not like to call himself a homosexual, because life was uncertain, and he might one day meet a woman he loved and would marry. ‘Wouldn’t you like to think there was a beautiful woman in your future?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never thought of women in that way’ I replied. (His mother would have liked him to marry, and even arranged for him to take a woman to a grand party (grand by provincial standards – but then La Jolla is straight out of Sinclair Lewis). This particular woman was quite delightful, but – and this is ironic – married to a man who would offer himself to any other man who would sleep with him.

David boasted that he had had his friend, Halston – and I cannot think Halston was his friend – design a mink coat for his mother, but that she would not wear it. He believed she had refused the coat on principle, which is to say that she disapproved of her son being gay.

David Copley was a childish nonentity, a vulgarian – a perfect argument for eugenics. Thinking of him quite turns the stomach.

Sincerely,

CARL-EDWARD ENDICOTT

Formerly of La Jolla

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