Journalist Colin Murphy has a legacy so monumental, he even has two monuments in the cemetery. We’ll get to that story in a moment.
While he discovered and nurtured many writers and activists, I think it's safe to say his two main media proteges are Colin Lovett and myself. Lovett, his dearest friend and media partner, published a thorough obituary last week, which meticulously detailed Murphy’s life's work founding #Boom Magazine and his many awards and accomplishments. It was exactly the obituary Murphy wanted.
With that taken care of, and in the spirit of the dual monuments and dual proteges, I have a different story to tell, one about our operatic and tumultuous history. Murphy would roll his eyes when people whitewashed their personal histories when honoring the deceased, and more than anyone, he knew that wouldn't be my approach.
Plus, Murphy loved a good show.
Colin Murphy had taken an interest in my writing about 15 years ago after reading my stories on MySpace. He persuaded Vital Voice publisher Darin Slyman to add me to the glossy magazine's roster, at which time Murphy became my editor. And he was a tough editor, sending my pieces back repeatedly until they met his standard. I grew a great deal working with him.
I bounced around the country for a few years, still submitting stories to Vital Voice. I had moved to San Francisco for the second time to try to salvage a relationship, then ricocheted to New York to try to get over it. In 2014, I returned to my adopted hometown for my third St. Louis run, oblivious to the news that the Vital Voice team had recently split in two, with Murphy and Colin Lovett forming the rival #Boom Magazine.
Normally, I would have been all over such a saga, but somehow missed it, distracted by my collapsing marriage and unmoored existence.
During my time in California, I observed a tidal pool at low tide and found two hermit crabs battling over a half inch scrap of seaweed. As an experiment, I dropped in a third hermit crab, and before it even landed, it had its claw on the seaweed, too. I was that third hermit crab when I returned to St. Louis, suddenly engrossed in a bitter battle I didn’t even know about moments earlier. It wasn’t just me, though. It felt everyone in the LGBTQ community had to pick a side in the media war. I'd chosen my side unwittingly, just by showing up to the Vital Voice weekly meeting as I had done before moving away.
The Vital Voice and #Boom rivalry was like Chevy vs. Ford, Coke vs. Pepsi, or Apple vs. PC, only far more personal. We vigorously competed for breaking news, threw shade and sometimes tossed a wrench in the other’s plans. It was the greatest show in Queer St. Louis because there was always drama and intrigue. For instance, when Slyman published my first book, Delusions of Grandeur, which chronicles much of this time, #Boom sent a spy to the splashy release party to retrieve two copies, as I learned years later. I recalled the story in my second book, House of Villadiva:
Colin & Colin were waiting at Coffee Cartel, located at the same Central West End intersection where we were dining on one corner and then drinking on another following the event.
“Darin publishing a book at the height of the media wars, we knew we were probably in it. Our spy came in carrying two books and I asked, ‘Are we in it?’ and she replied, ‘Oh yeah.’ We opened it up and there we were on the FIRST FUCKING PAGE!” Colin Murphy later laughed. “I said ‘I gotta go home and read this thing.’ Then as we were walking to the car we kept passing all the gays carrying the book and we’d give them serious side-eye.”
After years of not speaking, Murphy extended an olive branch when I was named editor of Out in STL, the RFT’s LGBTQ sister publication, in 2017.
“Congrats on joining the exclusive club of editors for STL LGBT publications,” he wrote. “It's a small but storied group and we stand on the shoulders of giants who prepared the ground since ‘Mandrake’ launched in 1969/70. Always defend and encourage your writers when possible, edit gently, but without fear; make the hard choices and keep your community at heart, and when you fuck up, correct, apologize and move on. Lastly, if you thought writing put a target on your back, be prepared for double criticism. I know you have a thick skin so you'll be fine. Best of luck.”
And just like that, the hatchet was buried and a profound friendship blossomed. I regret some of what I wrote in Delusions, which I attempted to atone for in Villadiva, but we laughed about the dramas of the past. He said friends were often aghast at seeing his then-enemy's book on his coffee table, but he’d tell them not many people could say they were in a book.
To the outside world, the goings on of our city’s LGBTQ community may seem as consequential as that scrap of seaweed I mentioned earlier, but for me and Murphy, the study of this tidal pool was our life’s work. We followed (and participated in) political struggles and developments, activist actions, the arts, including drag, and the community machinations. St. Louis is a soap opera of big characters with long histories of collaboration and conflict, and we’d discuss the players and backstories. He’d call when a situation arose that impacted the community, and it was like a meeting of the elder stakeholders. The conversations we had, so rich in camaraderie and in shared interest and experiences, are unlike conversations I've had with anyone else. It's hard to imagine anything coming close.
We had a shared sense of nostalgia, and a love of storytelling. Murphy had an enormous wealth of historical knowledge, which fundamentally informed my work. For many years, bars were essentially the only places queer people could be themselves, and he told me many fascinating bar stories. Tales of mob-owned gay bars that operated like speakeasies and police raids. He was the one who first told me about drag queen Midnight Annie, whose cremated remains were interred in the wall of Clementine’s, a Soulard gay bar that closed in 2014.
While determined to fight his cancer diagnosis, he was sober about his prognosis. We had a series of calls that were akin to his exit interview, until he no longer felt up to it. His only request was that I not publish until after he passed.
“I was diagnosed with HIV in 1991,” Murphy said last year. “Seven years before the cocktail. Everyone we knew was dropping dead. We all thought we were dead men walking. We were all on Social Security Disability, and Clem’s would cash our checks.”
Murphy’s then-partner of six years was very sick with AIDS, and committed suicide in 1988. Murphy expected to die soon, and had a double headstone made for him and his partner, but the game-changing cocktail came out in 1999. “Thirty-two years later and I’m still here,” he said.
He was with his second partner, Kurt Ross, for 22 years, and they were legally married for 10. Ross passed away during the pandemic, but before that, Murphy decided he should be buried with Ross, so his name now appears on two headstones in one cemetery.
I asked him about his early interest in journalism, and he said it began when he was the editor of his high school yearbook. He discovered the gay community during his first year in college. “I then just majored in being gay. I discovered the bar rags and thought, ‘I can do this!’”
While many decried the Vital Voice and #Boom war as being terrible for the community, Murphy said LGBTQ media wars were nothing new. “We had so many publications, Show-Me Guide, TWISL, MO Pride, Les Talk, SLAM, Vital Voice… In the ‘90s especially, the editor’s letters would talk shit like you wouldn’t believe! There were five publications, and they all hated one another.”
Murphy was five years older than me, which seemed significant initially and then like nothing.
We're the last of the era before queer people were assimilated, coming of age when even having sex was illegal, and when doing so often became a death sentence. A generation for whom merely surviving is an achievement. Murphy never took our collective achievements and rights for granted and constantly warned young people against being complacent. In his final years he witnessed the clock being turned back with the Right's war on trans people and drag queens.
When my Grandma Andoe died, my brother Joe said it felt like there was one less blanket on the bed. I think of that quote often when someone passes, and it captures how I'm feeling now. Murphy was on my personal board of directors, someone who was there with guidance and perspective. He filled an irreplaceable role in my life.
I was working on this piece in the den when my 29-year-old houseguest friend Bryon Dawayne Pierson Jr. sat down to visit. He moved away to build his tech empire last year, but stays with us when in town.
He spoke of his morning run, the exciting date he had planned for the afternoon, and then to my surprise, brought up Murphy. I wasn't aware he knew of him.
“Did you hear that Colin Murphy passed away? I feel like he was someone who was always working behind the scenes. Whenever something was going on, he was a part of it.”
This small tidal pool feels lonely without Murphy’s claw on the other end of the seaweed, but hearing Pierson’s words, for me, was a sign his reputation was recognized even by younger generations, and his substantial contributions won't soon be forgotten. A man worthy of two tombstones, two proteges and two obituaries.
A public celebration of life for Colin Murphy will take place from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday, March 24 at Just John Nightclub.
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