![\"Hunter,](\"https:\/\/guysreadingpoems.com\/grp_wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/hunter-at-thanksgiving.jpg\")
<\/a>Hunter, aged four, in Houston, Texas<\/p><\/div>\n
Hunter Lee Hughes is a big name for a blonde wisp of a boy growing up in Texas and Michigan, alternatively being passed from parent to parent via silver 747s traversing the great American sky.<\/p>\n
Those hours of travel afforded a lot of time to dream. And so, dream he did.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
I met my friend Hunter in San Antonio, Texas, while attending a small, specific kind of liberal arts school where we were both getting a specific kind of education. Our campus was overrun with tangled oaks that grew over our heads, forming a canopy that turned the hard Texas sun into sweet green gumdrops, our childhoods simultaneously vanishing and being extended in long afternoon naps and late night cheeseburgers. Hunter was political, committed, sincere. I was whimsical, unreliable, eager. Hunter was one of the first people to believe in my talent as a writer. I didn\u2019t know that Hunter was a writer at the time but I should have. He was very, very smart and saw the world with a tender, careful eye. He would speak in long sentences, his words specific and exact. Then we both graduated and lost touch.<\/p>\n
We found each other again in the dreamiest place in all the world, Hollywood.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Hunter Lee Hughes in “Fate of the Monarchs” – photo by Ken Gonzales-Day<\/p><\/div>\n
In Hunter\u2019s play, The Sermons of John Bradley<\/u>, we watch the son of a disgraced preacher come to terms with what love is. At first, love is ownership of another, that of course, cannot withstand the temptation of the world. Then, it\u2019s a letting go of singular love to try to heal others of their disappointment of love. And next, it\u2019s forgiving the one that broke your heart, even if you are not ready, even if you are still stinging from the fall. Finally, this leads to forgiveness of the family, and most importantly, of the father, faults and all. The last section of this play is entitled, The Death of the Body<\/em>, a theme also explored in\u00a0Fate of the Monarchs<\/u>. In this multi-media play,\u00a0a young man travels from his hometown, where he was married to the most beautiful woman in the world, to grapple with his desires to love another man. His journey is rocky and confusing, and leads to an underground preacher who wants to heal the gay men of West Hollywood by turning them away from the body\u2019s desires and toward the healing power of love. This preacher wants these men to forgo the urges of the flesh in the hopes of being qualified for a heavenly kingdom, \u201cCause up there, up there, up there, love doesn\u2019t have a body.\u201d This is a theme throughout Hughes\u2019 work. The body as a place of pleasure, then pain; a pain so intense, that only escape is acceptable.<\/p>\n Hunter\u2019s sensitivity to the dichotomy of the body, at once a place to experience the titillation and joy of life and simultaneously a place of isolation and disappointment is profound. Again and again in his work, the desires of the flesh come up against the steel walls of society\u2019s expectations that add up to the cost it is to live in this world. A world that does not honor love above the body. A world that is full of sinners and lovers and many who have to run away from home in order to find their own path to adulthood \u2013 and specifically a gay male adulthood. This journey is so painful to be in moment to moment, that fantasy acts as a salve to keep the open wound of growing up manageable.<\/p>\n