GayPatriot

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In Memoriam, Thom Mosley

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We often speak on this blog on the intolerance we gay conservatives experience from our liberal peers, but in one particular gay environment, Outfest, Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian film festival, I have, by and large, experienced nothing but tolerance from other volunteers and theater managers holding different political views from my own.

Chief among those individuals was Thom Mosley, the man who taught me how to manage a theater when I was promoted.  Even upon learning my politics, he continued to treat me, as he had previously treated me–as he treated all individuals–with dignity and with grace.  Yeah, he’d rib me from time to time, but in a jovial and good-natured way.  And he listened when I offered my opinion.

He had the rare gift of composure in a crisis.  Few could manage a sold-out show — or difficult filmmakers — with greater class than he.

He demonstrated those qualities to which we should all aspire.  Thom passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer.  He was a great — and a good — man.  He will be missed.

May the Holy One bring comfort to his family and friends at this difficult time.

Comments

  3. Such a sad bit of news to hear this am in my inbox. I’ve been with the Outfest family for 8 years, and though I was always running around, hither and thither, it was nice to take a few moments with Thom when I could. Bummer to have lost a good person. Peace.*

  6. It has been a long 11 years since APLA’s beginnings. Death has been the one constant as the expanding epidemic has foisted often chaotic growth and change upon the agency.

    The middle-class white gay male caseload has evolved into a client base that is 7% female, 26% Latino and 18% African American. There are diaper-changing tables in the restrooms for infected mothers with babies.

    Homeless drug addicts with AIDS park their shopping carts outside the front entrance and nap in the lobby under the large pale letters that proclaim the building Geffen Center, after David Geffen, the record and film producer who donated $1 million toward the purchase and renovation of the one-time television studio.

    The Los Angeles County death toll from AIDS now exceeds 17,000, a number that includes not only APLA clients but staff members and half of the agency’s four founders.

    Thom Mosley remembers many of them, though he confesses that the more recent deaths are all a blur. “I was part of that nucleus of people who are all dead,” says Mosley, who spent eight years at APLA before leaving in January. He has escaped HIV, but sometimes wishes he had gone with the others.

    “It’s so boring now,” he says with a slight sigh. He is nostalgic not only for the libertine, pre-AIDS era but for the good ol’ days of APLA.

    “It’s such a surrealistic time as I look back at it,” he recalls. “We were sort of stumbling in the dark. It was a seductively stressful period. You could hardly wait to go to work.”

    Now, he says, APLA is like the Red Cross, a bulky, entrenched bureaucracy fighting an entrenched disease. He left angry, no longer willing to work in such a place.

    He has since mellowed a bit. He returned for the first time last summer and was surprised at his reaction. When you see people leaving the dental clinic and the food bank, he allows, it helps balance out the failures and missteps.

    He will remember APLA, he says, with fondness, remorse and “hopefully not so much rage.”

    I found this during a search. . .from the picture Dan provided, you can see the kindness
    In his soul

  9. Thom led the APLA hotline class that i took circa 1988. i have fond memories of that time and have friends still today from that experience. my sympathies to his friends and family