Editor’s note: John Killacky, executive director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, and Larry Connolly, instructor at the University of Vermont, are featured in a new book, “Stonewall Strong” by John-Manuel Andriote. Drawing from research and nearly 100 original interviews, the author illustrates pivotal moments in recent history as manifestations of gay men’s resilience, from the years of secrecy and subversion before the 1969 Stonewall riots; through the coming of age, heartbreak, and politically emboldening AIDS years; and pushing onward to legal marriage equality. Andriote presents inspiring stories of gay men who have moved beyond the traumas and stereotypes, claiming their resilience and right to good health, and working to build a community that will be “Stonewall Strong.” Here is an excerpt featuring Vermonters Killacky and Connolly. Three paragraphs with sexual content have been removed.
[A]IDS certainly showed John Killacky and Larry Connolly what resilience looks like. “We had lived through most of our generation dying,” as Connolly put it in an interview for this book. We were talking in the barn outside of Burlington, Vermont, where he and Killacky board their Shetland pony, Raindrop. “So when we were faced with something that was catastrophic, but people knew what it was, I think part of our resilience came from coming through the AIDS crisis.”
The catastrophe Connolly is talking about on this August afternoon is what happened to Killacky in 1996, about a month after they had moved in together in Minneapolis, where they lived at the time. “I had a tumor inside my spinal cord,” Killacky explained to me in an earlier interview for The Atlantic. “Larry and I were going to sleep. I had this spastic attack. It seemed like an epileptic seizure or something. We went to the hospital, got an MRI, and they found a tumor inside the spinal cord. It was blocking 60 percent of the cord. They couldn’t do a biopsy to see if it was malignant or benign, so took it out.” The result was something called Brown-Séquard syndrome, a loss of sensation and motor function more commonly caused by a puncture or gunshot wound. Before he went to the hospital, Killacky was a dancer and marathon runner. When he was discharged, weeks later, he was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down. More than two decades afterward, he still has no sensation on the right side or sense of location on the left side of what he calls his “bifurcated body.”
To his utter delight, Killacky discovered that he didn’t need functional legs to drive a pony-pulling cart. “With a horse,” he explained, “you need to use your legs to ride them. With a cart, you don’t need your legs at all. You drive the animal through the rein and the bit.” Inside the vast barn, rain pattering on the roof, I ride in the little cart with Killacky about the indoor ring, my digital voice recorder catching the sounds of snorting horses, the leathery squeaks of the horse’s tack, Killacky’s lip-smacking command to spur her along, and the reflections of a man who suffered something terrible but hasn’t let it stop him. “For me,” he said, “here is what is beautiful about it: I have legs again in the world.” He added, “If other horses are in here, we are literally dancing, and she loves that.”
So does he. “This gives me a completely different space than my work place,” said Killacky, whose day job is overseeing the $7 million, 275-employee Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington. “I have no gravitas in this barn,” he said. “Larry and I are Raindrop’s dads. The kids who work here know more than us. It’s nice for me to be completely co-dependent in a very good way. It teaches me different skills.”
Besides the skills, the ten years Killacky has had with Raindrop have provided a reconnection to an earlier time in his life, and an earlier pony, when he was growing up on the South Side of Chicago. His father was “a very angry Irish alcoholic,” said Killacky. He worked selling cattle in the Chicago stockyards. John was the third child. “I think it was very complicated for him to have a sissy son,” he said. “I was like the lightning rod for him. We had a very complex relationship.” But there was one thing John loved to do with his dad. “He had to visit farms to convince farmers to sell their cattle, I would go with him. I was eight years old.” One farm, in Milledgeville, Illinois, had beef cattle—and Shetland ponies. A Shetland mare gave birth in the rain, and the filly was named Raindrop. “That Raindrop became my best friend for years,” said Killacky. “Whenever we were in Milledgeville, I would spend afternoons in the field with her. She became this mythic thing for me.”
Four months after Killacky came out of the hospital, he and Connolly moved to San Francisco, where Killacky became executive director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. After an attempt at horseback riding proved a “disaster” for him, Killacky suggested finding Shetland ponies, which they did at Fog Ranch in Moss Landing, about ninety-five miles south of San Francisco. When Killacky saw the ponies pulling carts, he thought, “I could do that.” So he did. When a Fog Ranch mare birthed a filly born in the pouring May rain, they named her Raindrop after Killacky’s boyhood pony friend. When the couple decided to move from California to Vermont, the owners of Fog Ranch gave Killacky the new Raindrop as a gift. “She has been here seven years with us,” he told me, “and it’s done wonders for my physicality. Larry can tell you. He says I am a lot stronger here because I have to walk on this uneven dirt in the barn. In the office I just sit, mainly. I have no relationship to the ground that I walk on. I could step on glass and not feel it.”
From the moment they knew of Killacky’s paralysis, both men were well aware of the odds stacked against their relationship. Connolly remembered, “When we were in the hospital and moved out of ICU into the rehab part of the hospital, the woman who ran it happened to be a lesbian. We asked her to tell us John’s prognosis. She said most people don’t make it, don’t get much improvement. She said first of all if you don’t have a partner, you don’t have much motivation because there’s so much pain, trouble, and effort to go through. The other thing is that, even if you do have a partner—and she said this is true for any catastrophic event, such as stroke or death of a child—most couples don’t make it. She said if you can pull through this together, your chances of improving are much better.”
When I interviewed Killacky and Connolly in Vermont, they were about to celebrate their twenty-second anniversary. Of the three couples featured in Holding On a decade earlier, and the only gay couple, they were the only ones still together.
“How would someone do this without a partner?” asked Connolly, looking back on the years of slow-going rehab and the many adjustments each of them had to make—not only in their sex life but in their expectations of life itself. “How do old people suffer strokes, etc., when they have no partner? How does someone go through any chronic problem without any live-in support? You need community, however it’s formed—whether it’s a spouse, friends, or neighbors—because illness is not a piece of cake.”
For his part, Killacky said, “I have gotten my resilience from Larry’s unconditional love.” His dance and running experience as a younger man have helped, too. “I was so grateful that I danced and that I learned different ways to move in the world,” he said. He’s adjusted to not moving quite as fast anymore. “It’s actually marvelous to move slowly in the world,” he said. “I experience things more fully. It’s almost like I had blinders on before and now they’re off. I can see a much wider world. Now I don’t have to be at the center, with the megaphone. I can be in the crowd. It’s changed my M.O. in the world, and I’m grateful for it. It’s really fantastic just ‘to be.’” And, with Raindrop’s assistance, Killacky said, “For three or four hours a week, I can still be dancing in the world.”
