Leo & Lance

for David Trinidad I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video, its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled, on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard- won a little corner of sex was then, no internet, no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can. In an elaborate bid to convince myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual video that I can’t recall, and a box that made my heart stop: Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap: I spent all my allowance.) I can measure this adventure in increments of shame: tape loop, checkout, the run-walk to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out. And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . . Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine, that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein. Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give. And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara, or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints in jail, IV drugs, and conversion. Leo and Lance had the chance to work together twice on film— Leo & Lance and Blonds Do It Best— and more than once on the corner. Where have all the hustlers gone, anyway? They died weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first, in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications. On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.” That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s, his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India— IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . . As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache of scanned porn. Leo & Lance: it begins in synth, Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo, shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim, letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow. God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill, gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet, before they go back to the lodge and do what they do better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet— like children in the street.