My Dead Grandmother by Terry J Cyr
Gay, addicted to sex and drugs, hustling myself, lost in the night…
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My Dead Grandmother
She spent most of her life living on the fringe of desperation, an outcast far ahead of her time, destroyed by the culture that surrounded her. She was raised in an ultra Christian household, where her cotton-farm foreman father (who shot a black man for simply crossing his front porch one night), molested and repeatedly raped her while her mother looked the other way and condemned her to hell. To escape her abusive and calloused father, my grandmother married my grandfather at a very young age. I believe this was the only true love and happiness she experienced in her life. She became the quintessential housewife and had finally settled into a life of “normalcy.” My grandfather was killed on his way back from World War II in a freak car accident where he was going to tell her he had met someone else and wanted a divorce, something that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
After his death, she spent years at the bottom of a barrel – drinking, working as a prostitute, and sleeping her way from man to man. Always running, dragging her children with her, always desperate. She attempted killing her two children several times in fits of drunkenness, pushing them out of windows and leaving them abandoned with strangers most of the time. She was in and out of the state mental hospitals and finally she began pulling her life back together, sobered up, met a man she married and began to settle down.
I have been told I was her greatest joy. But something happened one night that drove her to the ultimate act of desperation. She took a pistol and shot herself in the stomach, dying on the way to the hospital. I often try to imagine what was going through her head that night.
I have always felt I was different, living on my own edge of desperation – gay, addicted to sex and drugs, hustling myself, lost in the night, becoming infected with AIDS. I was sure I wasn’t going to make it to my 30th birthday. Was it hereditary? Was I destined to follow the same path? Though I didn’t really know her, did she somehow depart her desperation onto me?
There has always been a bond that ties me to her. Recently I turned 42, which was the age she died, it was very eerie. I had seen this laundry mat years ago in Butte and every time I passed these windows I would see my dead grandmother hanging out in there. I have been trying to come up with a way to capture the essence of who she was and what she felt. With the help of my friend Rus Buyok I have finally been able to realize my own anxieties and emotions and represent, through photography, what she too must have gone through.
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Terry J Cyr has always been involved in Theater and Arts. After working as a lighting designer and professional stage manager for several years, he decided to leave the theater industry, move back to his home town in Western Montana and begin photography. “I am fascinated and in love with light. It’s what draws me to the stage and what I strive to capture in my imagery. To me the art of photography is the ability to see and paint with light. I am captivated by the beauty of men, all men, and have embarked on a journey to explore my current sexual world as an aging gay man and connecting my past sexual/sensual history to create a sort of homoerotic imagery journal of my life.”