This is very difficult to write.

The fabulous writer Richard Bowes passed away on December 24, 2023.

We first met Rick many years ago at a WisCon where we had an amazing lunch full of stories from him about New York City and the different scenes he belonged to through the years. Rick was more than just a phenomenal writer. He was charming, fascinating, and kind. Rick was one of our elders who had been there through events that were foundational to our history as both SF/F creators and fellow queers.

As we became editors, Rick completely understood our vision and supported us in all of the ways he could. This included sending us a marvelous story, “Anyone With a Care for Their Image,” which we published in Uncanny Magazine’s second issue. Rick believed in us at a time when we really needed mentors and friends.

In honor of his contributions to our community, we’ve gathered some remembrances from a few of Rick’s friends. We hope you will read them and get to know Rick and the impact he had on so many lives.

We’re sending our love to all of Rick’s loved ones. He will be greatly missed.

—Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

I have been gutted by the loss of my dear friend, mentor, and adopted godfather, Richard Bowes, since learning that he passed on Christmas Eve. Rick and I have been friends since 2001, when he discovered the second short story I’d published in a magazine and then got my email address from a mutual friend to write to me about it. I remember realizing he was the writer of the Kevin Grierson stories that I had been reading in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which later became Rick’s amazing novel, Minions of the Moon. After I realized, I wrote to tell him, “Wait, you wrote the Kevin Grierson stories. I could probably tell you anything.” He loved that reply and took great pleasure in telling others the story of my response to his first email.

He was always an amazing supporter of other writers, but Rick and I found in each other a person we both needed in our lives in important ways. Our email correspondence began in 2001, turning into long late-night phone calls, meeting up at various writing conventions, me going at least once or twice a year to visit him in Manhattan, or him to Youngstown, Ohio, where he would visit me and meet my family and friends here, who all adored him as easily and warmly as those of us in the speculative fiction writing community did.

Early in our relationship, Rick appointed himself my godfather, and took a special interest in helping me to develop not only my talents and skills as a writer, but to help me grow and find a place in the world. One of his greatest pleasures was introducing me to the world of Broadway. Each time I’d visit him, he’d have tickets for us to see at least one show, but more than likely he’d have tickets for two. I remember the very first show he took me to was in December of 2002, the Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam, which we attended with his nieces, Antonia and Dirrane, who had come into the city by train, and were the most darling and devoted nieces to him.

After I had gotten my first job offer out of graduate school to teach English in Japan, but had trouble coming up with the money I needed to get there and be able to take care of myself for a month before I’d begin being paid, Rick offered me the money I needed, but only if I would promise to come home and not stay there forever. Later, once I kept that promise and returned home two years later, he allowed me to pay him back by letting me occasionally buy us the tickets to Broadways shows when I visited over the years.

Rick as a person was a remarkable influence on so many writers, but he was an icon especially to young, LGBTQIA+ writers in the speculative fiction community. That field of writing doesn’t have an especially warm and inviting history toward LGBTQIA+ writers, despite having many devoted LGBTQIA+ fans of the literature, and Rick was one of the best-known writers of speculative fiction who, beginning in the 1980s and 90s, wrote about queer lives in speculative fiction. And while he could have stopped there, he didn’t. He was the kind of writer who held the door open for others to come in behind him, or reached out a hand to lift you up if he could. He and his writing are bedecked with awards (two World Fantasy Awards, seven times as a Nebula Award finalist, The Lambda Literary Award, The International Horror Guild Award, and many others), but the way he treated others with such kindness and grace, with a side of dry wit, will be as keenly remembered as his much-honored writing.

Rick told stories, but his own life was storied. He grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Boston, moved to New York City in the sixties, worked in the Garment District as a writer in advertising for the fashion industry, was a well-known antique toy expert and dealer, a novelist and short story writer, and a beloved reference librarian at NYU. One of his most treasured stories was his account of the Stonewall Riots, which he wrote about on the fortieth anniversary of the riots, an amazing story of what he witnessed that day, a memory he gifted so many of us who weren’t even alive yet to know what it felt like to be in that place and time, where people fought for our rights and equality before we came into the world, a story that many of us in the LGBTQIA+ speculative fiction community still share online on the anniversary of the riots each year.

He brought so much support and kindness and love. He has been a pillar to me (the words I used in one of our email exchanges I’m including with this remembrance of him) for over two decades now, and though he was ill and being cared for over the last two years, which might have allowed me the time to prepare for him to leave us, I was never able to figure out how to do that, and now I think I’m realizing that I never will. I’ll never get over him. My heart is both full with the love he gave me, and thoroughly broken.

Rick and I always made sure to tell each other we loved each other when we were ending a phone call, or one of us leaving after a visit, and often he would tease and say, “I love you more than you love me.” But that wasn’t possible. I loved him more than anything. He made this world so much better for me. He made me promise to continue to love others and life and to not give up on myself or the dreams that make my life meaningful. I made those promises, among others, and I will keep them, even when life is a struggle, and will strive to keep his memory alive not only for myself, but for others.

—Christopher Barzak

Of Dust Devils and Streetcar Dreams: For Richard Bowes

Richard Bowes won a couple of World Fantasy Awards back when the prize was a silver, caricatured bust of H.P. Lovecraft’s head designed by Gahan Wilson. He kept the statuettes on a top shelf in the bedroom/sitting room of his Greenwich Village apartment—and they were decorated with blonde wigs, wild sunglasses, costume necklaces, and other accoutrements. This is the essence of Rick for me: the mastery, seriousness, and commitment to craft that wins World Fantasy Awards…and the irreverence that dresses those awards in drag.

Rick and I first met in the early 2000s when I was six or seven years away from having been a student at New York University. Rick had been there, too, working as a reference librarian. There’s a Rick Bowes story in that fact somewhere, a time slip where we can look back and see my lost, wandering queer self among the stacks of Bobst Library (a place in which I spent more time than I did my dorm room), and in the same building Rick Bowes, who to his own great amusement had ended up as a librarian without any official qualifications for such a role. Rick’s first three novels had been published by that time, but he was just beginning to publish short stories; I wasn’t reading much SF at that point, having read piles of it when I was a bit younger, and was instead immersed in avant-garde theatre and experimental fiction. I imagine Rick walking out of the library one day while I walked in. The two figures don’t know each other, but some force beyond them plants metaphysical seeds, intertwining these separate lives in the shared space, so that not too many years later they will find each other, recognize each other, and a sudden friendship will feel strangely old, deep. Because we did find each other, and that friendship sparked with magic.

We had other connections, we discovered. Rick was a few months younger than my father and had grown up about twelve miles east of where both my parents grew up in Massachusetts. The last time my mother was able to visit New York, I made sure we had lunch with Rick, and they spent the whole time sharing stories of the world of their youth. It’s entirely possible that their paths crossed on a bus, a train, a city street when they were kids. My mother would die a year or so later, and Rick’s memory troubles would begin to interfere with his life around that point.

It is a cruel irony of existence that severe memory loss would fell someone so committed to history and remembering as Rick. Our last conversations were ones where he called on the phone and a lot of the details of my life were gone for him, but he remembered that I lived in New Hampshire and he didn’t understand why I would choose that instead of a city (the only city, New York). “What are you doing up there!” he said emphatically, then laughed. “I’m corrupting the farmers, Rick,” I said. “Oh good, oh good, keep it up,” he said.

Rick was one of the greatest storytellers I’ve ever known. Simply by living the life he did where he did, he ended up “in history’s vicinity,” as he titled a piece he wrote for my blog in 2009 for the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He came to writing later than many people do, which is perhaps why even his earliest work has a weight of experience most early publications do not. He possessed a sharp sense for the exact details that bring stories to life—I will never forget him talking about how the Fashion District during the day was full of racks of dresses being pushed up and down the sidewalks and streets; about how boring Andy Warhol was (the problem with David Bowie’s portrayal in the movie Basquiat, he said, was that David Bowie couldn’t help but be vastly more interesting than Andy Warhol ever was); about the people leaning out the windows of the Women’s House of Detention on 6th Avenue and yelling at passersby. I was skeptical of this last story, thinking it felt a bit too colorful to be true (what kind of prison in the later 20th century has open cell windows looking onto the street?!), but then I read Hugh Ryan’s 2022 book The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison and sure enough, it was true.

I want to tell you all Rick’s stories, but he told them best himself. Though always a writer who drew deeply on his experiences and world, with the 1990s stories about Kevin Grierson that eventually became the mosaic novel (his favored term for it) Minions of the Moon, Rick began overtly to mine his own life and experiences for science fiction and fantasy, creating something like speculative autofiction. He had learned to write like he talked, and the voice in the stories is not far from the voice that told similar (if a bit more reality-bound) stories to friends.

The Grierson stories were huge for a few of us of the generation after Rick’s, aspiring writers seeking some niche for ourselves, with an interest in both literary and genre fiction, yearning for queer models. I used to carry around books by Samuel Delany and Nicola Griffith like talismans, hoping their power might infuse some small part of my life. Though it was a time when gay fiction was proliferating (I went to A Different Light and The Oscar Wilde Bookshop all the time and found plenty of novels and story collections), it was written primarily in a social-realist mode. To pick up the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and find a story like Rick’s “Streetcar Dreams” opened a whole universe of possibility. These were stories with a New York I knew, a queer sensibility infusing every sentence, and elements of unabashed irrealism—and it wasn’t in the pages of a tiny gay zine or obscure literary journal, it was in a venerable magazine that had published Shirley Jackson, Ursula Le Guin, Stephen King, James Tiptree, Isaac Asimov, and countless other luminaries.

Many writers fizzle out as they age, but Rick’s work only got better. “There’s a Hole in the City” is the single best piece of fiction I’ve read about the experience and aftermath of the September 11 attacks, working as both a memoir of what he lived through and a heartbreaking ghost story. Rick’s particular talent was to know exactly how much fantasy we need to contrast with reality in fiction, strengthening both in a yin/yang relationship that makes his work so much more powerful than most outright realism or genrified fabulism. Because of this, for me his masterpiece is 2013’s Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, a mosaic novel that ought to have won every award it was eligible for, including the Pulitzer, because it is the story of America, of New York, of Rick, of life, of dreams, of all that we might have been and might still be.

Perhaps the secret to Rick’s extraordinary late work is that he never disconnected himself from young writers, never threw a moldy old toy rocket ship at the kids on the lawn. He loved to play the curmudgeon, but it wasn’t the right role for him, because even though he wouldn’t want to admit it, it enlivened him to see what younger writers were up to, and he loved being included in the fun. He introduced many of us to each other and to older writers, spinning networks of affinity like Indra’s net, each jewel reflecting the whole.

Now, in his absence, our job is to carry forth Rick’s work—to keep his words in print and available and celebrated, certainly, but also to help keep human connections strong, to look out for each other, to be present for struggles as well as triumphs, and to remember that we are, all of us, together in history’s vicinity.

This morning most strangers who saw me crying in the street looked away and hurried past. But a few souls paused and pitied and wondered why. With your permission, this is for them.

—the final words of “Streetcar Dreams” by Richard Bowes (1944-2023)

—Matthew Cheney

It’s a good time to be queer in speculative fiction.¹

LGBTQIA+ authors are getting book deals, winning awards, and connecting with massive audiences.

But it wasn’t always this way.

For a long time, queer authors struggled to find audiences. Publishers and editors either didn’t see the value of queer stories, or couldn’t convince their bosses and marketing departments to take a chance on an amazing story whose queer content might provoke hostility in what they imagined to be their audience.

For a long time, there were only a handful of queer authors telling their own stories on their own terms. I won’t even attempt to list them, because (a) I know I’ll leave folks out and feel bad about it, and (b) I am confident that there are lots of renowned science fiction / fantasy / horror authors throughout the history of the genre who never felt comfortable being out.

Rick Bowes was a bold lone voice in the wilderness, telling his own wild weird queer stories unapologetically.

Wikipedia can give you the raw facts of his incredible career. The TL;DR is that Rick was an accomplished, incredible writer—and he worked hard to welcome and nurture and support the LGBTQIA+ writers who came up after him.

I was proud and honored to be part of his brood; I knew we were a multitudinous crew, but I had no idea how numerous we were until his passing, last month, at age 79, when suddenly so many of my queer comrades had Rick Bowes stories to share.

This is a mess, btw. It’s not a good essay. I’m sorry. I’m not good at essays; I need the web of lies of fiction, so I can hide my feelings behind the masks of my characters.

I owe Rick so much. He helped me get into my writer’s group, the incredible Altered Fluid, which made my short story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” into something more excellent than I could ever have made it on my own—and it ended up becoming my first pro sale, and it won me a Shirley Jackson Award. His feedback gave a big boost when I was revising the manuscript of what would become The Art of Starving, the novel I succeeded in selling as my debut after SIX previous novels failed to find a home.

Above all, he made me feel safe and welcome in all my weirdness.

Rick was that most rare and special of creatures, for queer folks of my generation: he was an elder. He had borne witness to the whirlwind, the years and years when our best and brightest and most beautiful artists died horrible lonely deaths while the government looked the other way, or applauded AIDS for exterminating people they didn’t consider fully human.

He had seen it, and he had survived.

“One Christmas,” Rick told me once, “all the famous store windows of Bergdorf’s and Saks and Bloomingdale’s—they were all empty. No displays, no nothing. Because all the people whose job it was to make the windows magnificent were gone.”

He said it more beautifully than that, but you get the picture. I’d read a hundred novels and memoirs and stories and poems about the plague years, and I’d never heard that haunting detail.

His fiction is like that. The lyrical, unsettling observations of a sensitive creature in a cruel world, protecting himself with a mask of ironic aloofness.

Rick’s work resonated extra-deeply with me because his stories were often tales of addiction and recovery. As a sober alcoholic, it meant the world to me to see speculative approaches to these narratives I hadn’t been able to get my head around.

Rick was kind and Rick was inappropriate; Rick was hilarious.

This is a mess. I’m sorry. I’m sad we live in a world without Rick, but I’m blessed beyond belief to have known him, and to live in the world he helped make.

And so are you, even if you never met him or read his work. I suggest you start with “There’s a Hole in the City,” his response to 9/11, and then his book Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, or Minions of the Moon.

We did a reading together, once, at the LGBT Community Center in NYC, and he read a beautiful shivery story about a character called the Duchess, who was fond of butterflies, and was beloved by them in turn. Wherever she went, against all logic, they flocked to her. At the story’s end, the protagonist learns that she’s passed away, in a distant place, under less-than-regal circumstances. He stops to take a breath, remarking at the beautiful summer weather that surrounds him, seeing for the first time a world impoverished by the loss of his friend but forever changed by her.

Rick delivered the story’s brilliant last sentence casually, like a glancing sword-swing you wouldn’t know was fatal until you saw the blood. “The air,” he said, “was full of butterflies.”

—Sam J. Miller

¹ I don’t mean to imply that we don’t have a long way to go. To name just two examples: trans people are under violent genocidal attack; ace folks are still not seen as part of the queer family by many. The speculative fiction community can and should do more.

A Lifetime of Stories – In Memory of Richard Bowes

I’m fairly certain I met Rick Bowes at a Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on November 15, 2006. That night, Lucius Shepard and Catherynne Valente were reading. This may seem awfully specific, but I have proof. Ellen Datlow captured this moment in a photo that resides on her Flickr stream. For a Halloween party I’d bleached my hair and dressed up as Roy Batty from Blade Runner. In the photo, Rick leans in, hands pressed like a sage, telling me something with authority, while I, with my Billy-Idol-blonde hair, listen rapt. (In the background, Rajan Khanna, whom in this moment I have yet to befriend, stares at the camera.) And this is how I will remember Rick. Telling stories. His depth of knowledge always astounded me. Right away, I knew I was in the presence of a sharp mind.

One frigid afternoon not long after we became friends, the two of us stood talking on the corner of MacDougal and West 3rd, outside Caffe Reggio, a stone’s throw from his West Village studio apartment. It must have been twenty degrees. An icy wind whipped down the street, but I was so held by Rick and his words I didn’t feel the cold. He didn’t seem to mind it either. We talked in the frigid air for a good while. He had this way of holding your attention, keeping you rapt. And though we had only recently become friends, I told him some very personal things—things I’d told few others—because I felt safe with him. Empathy radiated from him like a furnace. I didn’t want to go home. Rick would deny it if asked, or misdirect with a joke, but he cared more about people than he let on.

The first time I visited his studio apartment on MacDougal, he got on the floor and started playing with these antique toy soldiers. “You probably think I’m strange,” he said, “this sixty-five-year-old man playing with dolls. But I wasn’t allowed to play with dolls when I was a boy, so I like to make up for it now.” But I didn’t think it strange. It delighted me. Too many people lose their childhood spirit as they grow. But Rick’s inner child only blossomed as he aged. In nearly every photo of Rick you’ll see him and everyone around him laughing. (Seriously, go look.) His secret power was irreverence. His sense of humor knew no bounds. He liked to poke fun at people, but he was playful, never cruel. His favorite target was writers: “There are people,” he would exclaim, “and then there are writers!”

Between 2003 and 2010 I published a magazine called Sybil’s Garage. I asked Rick for a story and he sent me “The Cinnamon Cavalier.” I ended up not taking it because I thought it was too whimsical for my magazine’s more somber tone. Rick never let me live it down. He told me it was his only rejection, that he had sold every story he’d ever written. (I don’t know if this is true, but it’s easy to believe; Rick’s stories always had an effortless fluidity and polish.) “The Cinnamon Cavalier” went on to be published in Fantasy Magazine, to high praise, and I ended up publishing a reprint of, “On Death and the Deuce,” one of his Kevin Grierson stories, in Sybil’s Garage No. 4. I’m glad I got to publish a Rick Bowes story, but sometimes I wish I’d taken the original.

Rick soon befriended the members of Altered Fluid, our Manhattan-based writing group, and he joined in the late aughts. It was an easy fit. Everyone loved Rick’s wit, humor, and especially his writing. His stories were usually told in the first person, barely altered versions of himself, with heavy sprinklings of supernatural hijinks. He imbued his stories with his deep knowledge of New York, his childhood growing up in South Boston, his experience living as a gay man, surviving colon cancer, living through the AIDS epidemic, his past addictions to alcohol and heroin, and his journeys through some of New York’s darkest corners. These experiences gave his stories a verisimilitude that made me sometimes question if magic were real. His critiques were short, sharp, and insightful, and Rick taught me things about writing that I’m still using today. I learned a lot from his critiques, but I learned much more from him.

After our Altered Fluid meetings, we’d go out to dinner, and Rick would speak at length about the writing industry, sharing endless and entertaining personal anecdotes. He knew everything about everyone. And we got all the dirt. No one was spared his skewering. He was hilarious, but sensitive to people and the world. There wasn’t much that slipped his attention.

After my first book King of Shards was published, I told him he’d been a mentor to me. “Oh, not really,” he said. “That was all you.” But he was my mentor. Maybe not officially or explicitly. He helped without needing acknowledgment or thanks. In a way, he was a mentor to all of us in Altered Fluid, a person whose deep wisdom we valued and adored and learned greatly from.

The last time I saw Rick in person was during one of the COVID lockdowns in 2020. I knew he was struggling with memory issues. He lived alone, and I was worried about his prolonged isolation. We sat outside his building in one of those curbside cafes that had been hastily thrown up during that first year of COVID. Over coffee, we discussed writing. I was working on a series of interlinked novels and stories, and he said, “Oh, if you do that they’ll love you forever.” We talked about the success of his novels Minions of the Moon and From the Files of the Time Rangers and his many short stories. We talked at how the publishing industry had changed over the years. We talked about old New York, how his West Village neighborhood had morphed and changed, but still somehow held the magical aura of the 19th century (police still occasionally patrolled its streets on horseback) and how Rick had been there, at the epicenter of things, forever. He loved New York City with his whole soul. Time had passed, but you could see in his eyes he was still right there, in the past, in his memory. It brought him so much joy. The past was present for him, alive.

A year before this day, we were sitting in his small studio apartment, Haydn was playing in the background, and the smell of Irish breakfast tea infused the air. We were talking about writing—what else?—and success and how one builds a name. Rick said, “When a writer dies, people will usually take a renewed interest in their body of work.” He didn’t mention himself explicitly, but I knew this is who he meant. He’d been having health issues by then, and it was obvious to me he was pondering his own mortality. (“Don’t get old!” he daily admonished us.)

Rick’s fiction has been widely appreciated by many. He won both the World Fantasy Award and The Lambda Award. And his story, “There’s a Hole in the City,” is widely acknowledged as one of the best post-September-11th stories of New York ever written. But his rich body of work deserves more consideration by a wider audience. He was one of the rare greats, a true genius, and there are few, if any, like him.

I wish I could have another conversation with Rick. I wish I could sit in his apartment and have him tell me another fascinating story about his childhood. I wish we could have another lunch at the Vietnamese place across from his apartment on MacDougal Street. I wish we could do another reading together, like that one absurd time in Brooklyn where a man, painted head to toe in silver, serenaded us with Bowie songs. I wish I could see him put a curved finger to his lip when he was pondering a thought. I wish I could read a new story from him and I wish I could hear his thoughts on a new one of mine. I wish I could hear his child-like chuckle—like a hiccup—when something delighted him.

As I write this, last night was the January 2024 Fantastic Fiction reading series, seventeen years and two months since I first met Rick. No longer just an audience member, I now co-host the series with Ellen Datlow. Our guests were P. Djèlí Clark and Eric Schaller, and the place was as packed as it gets. Standing room only, people waiting outside the door. Yet for the entirety of the first reading, there was an empty chair beside me, the same chair I sat in when I first met Rick, from the same table Rick always sat at. I thought to myself, Folks just didn’t see the chair. Surely at the break someone will spot the empty seat and sit down. But no one did. Despite the crowd, the chair remained empty for the entirety of the night. This is true.

I call myself a skeptic, but there’s enough magic in Rick’s stories to make a person doubt. I like to imagine Rick was there, sitting in that chair, gently mocking us all while softly nodding and giggling to himself. This was Rick telling us he’s not really gone, just present in a different way. He was there in the warm remembrance Eric Schaller opened his reading with. And he was there in the memories that Ellen Datlow and I and all his friends have of him. And he was there in the ways he made us laugh and encouraged us to take ourselves less seriously. And he was there in all the people he helped and and mentored and influenced and inspired. And he was there in our minds and memories and hearts. But even if you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Rick, even if you never spoke with him, you still can. Rick is still present in the hundreds of thousands of words he leaves behind, a lifetime of stories. Go read them. I promise you’ll be delighted.

No, that chair last night wasn’t empty. Rick was sitting there, hands pressed together, leaning in, like he did that night seventeen years ago, telling me another story.

— Matthew Kressel

© 2024 Uncanny Magazine