Remembering Kathleen — The Queen Who Helped Raise Me

 I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Kathleen this month. Funny thing is, I can’t tell you the exact moment we met. You’d think I would remember, because Kathleen was not the kind of person you missed. She was large, loud, confident, and gloriously impossible to ignore — a drag queen who could command a room just by breathing in. But somehow, the moment itself is fuzzy. The friendship, though? Crystal clear.

I met her either through my friend Rodney — and trust me, there’s a whole other story coming about Rodney one day. Or it may have been through my friend Lee. But for now, this is about Kathleen… or, as she was born, Kenneth Wayne Pittman, March 16, 1957. To me, she was always Kathleen first.

Rodney and Kathleen - New Years' Eve 1987

We crossed paths sometime in 1983 or 1984, back when I was still playing keys for the Rex Nelon Singers. When she found out I played for the Nelons, she absolutely lost her mind. That queen loved gospel music with her whole heart, and she loved the Nelons even more. Suddenly, I wasn’t just some shy, scrawny evangelical boy trying to figure out who he was — I was a VIP in her world.

And somehow, in the middle of Atlanta nightlife, drag shows, and the chaos of our twenties, Kathleen and I became family. She became my drag mom — the one who painted my face, cinched me in, and sent me out into the world for Halloween 1986 looking like someone who had no business looking that good on their first try. We partied together, got way too drunk together, celebrated birthdays and holidays, and laughed until our ribs hurt.

My drag alter-ego, Christina Carlisle

She even met my mother in full drag, and my mom thought she was a woman. Kathleen dined out on that story for years.

But she wasn’t just fun. She was steady. She was protective. She was the kind of friend who showed up in the small ways that end up being the big ways. She cut my little brother Michael’s hair when he needed to look respectable for a part‑time job. She comforted me when I left the Nelons — a loss that gutted me more than I let on at the time. She held space for me when I didn’t know how to hold it for myself.

When I moved from Atlanta to Sacramento in 1988, we stayed in touch the way people did back then — a phone call once a year, maybe twice if we were lucky. I visited her in 1991, and that ended up being the last time I saw her in person. Life has a way of stretching the distance between people you love, even when the love stays put.

In 2010, I was planning a trip to Atlanta with my friend Anne‑Marie. I told everyone I was coming, and word made its way to Kathleen. We were so excited — after nearly twenty years, we were finally going to see each other again. I could already hear her voice in my head, loud and dramatic as ever, giving me grief for taking so long.

But on May 1st, 2010, Kathleen — now going by Kenny again, long retired from drag — was killed in an automobile accident near Centre, Alabama.

Just like that, she was gone.

But here’s the thing: she never stopped being Kathleen to me. Not once. Not for a second.

This month, she’s been on my mind more than usual. Maybe it’s the season I’m in. Maybe it’s the way grief circles back around, tapping you on the shoulder when you least expect it. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about the people who helped shape me — the ones who stood guard around my tender, terrified younger self.

Kathleen was one of the fiercest protectors I had when I was coming out — a scrawny, shy, naïve young evangelical gay boy who didn’t yet know how to stand up for himself. She stood up for me until I learned how to do it on my own.

I like to imagine her now, flying high with the angels, teaching them about hair and makeup, showing them how to contour for the heavenly spotlight. I hope she’s laughing that big, booming laugh of hers — the one that made you feel like everything was going to be okay.

I miss you, Kenneth Wayne Pittman.

I miss you, Kathleen.

Thank you for loving me into myself.

Happy 64th Birthday, Craig

 

I haven’t written much about my middle brother, Craig. Maybe because some stories take a lifetime to understand, and even longer to tell with any kind of tenderness. But today is his 64th birthday, and it feels right to honor the whole truth of who he is — who we were — and who we somehow still are to each other.

Craig was born on March 12, 1962, just fifteen months after me. We were so close in age we might as well have been Irish twins. I don’t remember a life before him. In those early years, he was simply Bubba — the name I called him until I was six. Then he became Brother for a while, until I finally graduated to calling him by his actual name around age eight. His full name is Dewey Craig Fisher, named after our paternal grandfather, Dewey Christmas Fisher, who really was born on Christmas Day in 1902. Our family never did anything halfway.

Some of my sweetest memories are of the two of us growing up in Weldon, North Carolina, in that tiny duplex that somehow held our whole world. We played together constantly. We had a photo album full of Christmas mornings — the two of us tearing into presents, laughing so hard the camera practically caught the sound. Those pictures still feel like little windows into a time when everything was simple and we were just two boys who adored each other.

But something shifted when we hit our teenage years. Suddenly we were oil and water. Craig had a temper that could fill a room and then blow it apart. We fought — loudly, often, and sometimes dangerously. Once, during one of those explosive arguments, he leveled a loaded shotgun at me. That moment is burned into my memory, not because I believed he would pull the trigger, but because it showed how far we had drifted from those laughing boys in the Christmas photos.

Craig got mixed up with the wrong people. Addiction took hold. He spent time in juvenile facilities, then adult ones. At 26, he had the first of his two children with an underage mother. He fought constantly — with others, with himself, with the world. He’s been beaten, stabbed, and wrecked more cars than a NASCAR driver on a bad day.

And then came 1998.

Craig murdered a man — struck him in the head with a hammer, stabbed him repeatedly, hid the body in the woods, and walked around for weeks as if nothing had happened. He was high on drugs. He was out of his mind. And yet the consequences were real, devastating, and irreversible. He was sentenced to life in prison. He’s lucky he didn’t get the death penalty, though if we’re being honest, that had more to do with him being a white man in the South than anything else.

He’s been incarcerated for 28 years now. Nearly half his life.

And here’s the complicated truth: I talk to him every week. I send him money for his trust fund. I haven’t seen him since our mother died in 2017, but our conversations have become a strange kind of lifeline — for him, and maybe for me too.

Prison has taken a toll. He’s had five or six heart attacks and a stroke. But it has also forced him into sobriety, into mental health care, into reflection. He is remorseful. He is clear‑headed. He is facing death with no real future ahead of him. And yet, in some ways, I feel like I have my brother back — the one from the Christmas photos, the one who laughed with me before the world got its claws in him.

I’m sharing all of this because families are complicated, and love is complicated, and sometimes the people we come from carry both light and shadow in equal measure. Craig has done terrible things. He has also suffered. He has also loved. And he is still my brother.

So today, on his 64th birthday, I want to say this plainly:

Happy birthday, Craig.
Even with everything — maybe because of everything — I’m still glad you’re my brother.

Celebrating Momma: Shirley Diane Carlisle Fisher

Every March, when the world starts waking up again — when the air softens and the light stretches a little longer — I find myself thinking of my mother more than usual. She was born in March of 1939, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and she carried that early‑spring energy with her all her life: steady, hopeful, stubborn in the best way, and always ready to bloom again no matter what winter had thrown at her.

Momma — Shirley Diane Carlisle Fisher — lived a life stitched together with grit, humor, and a kind of love that didn’t ask for attention but quietly held everyone up.

She grew up in and around Roanoke Rapids, graduated from William R. Davie High School in 1958, and by the next year she had met and married the love of her life, my daddy, Horace Ray Fisher Sr. Together they built a family: me, Craig, and Michael. And like so many women of her generation, she worked hard — really hard — weaving at J.P. Stevens until she retired in 1991 after Daddy passed. That job wasn’t glamorous, but she did it with pride, because it helped build the life she wanted for us.

And then, in one of the bravest chapters of her story, she and my dad adopted her first two grandchildren, Lacey and Josh, and she raised them as a single parent after dad passed away. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t complain. She just opened her arms and did what needed to be done. That was Momma in a nutshell: love first, questions later.

She loved her family fiercely — her parents, her children, her grandchildren, her sisters Sandra and Doris, her brothers James, Danny and Butch, and the whole Carlisle‑Fisher constellation of nieces, nephews, cousins, and lifelong friends. If you were hers, you were hers. And if you weren’t hers yet, she’d probably feed you until you were.

And let me tell you: Momma loved a cruise. Mexico, Hawaii — if there was a ship, a buffet, and a deck chair with her name on it, she was ready. She worked hard her whole life, and when she finally got the chance to travel, she embraced it with the joy of someone who knew she had earned every minute.

For more than 40 years, she was part of the Harvest Temple Pentecostal Holiness Church, and that church family was woven into her heart. She sang, she served, she prayed, she laughed — and she loved those people deeply. They were her community, her anchor, and often her joy.

But the person who walked beside her most closely in her later years was her sister Sandra, her caregiver, her confidante, and her best friend. Their bond was something beautiful — the kind of sisterhood that feels like a lifelong duet.

When I think of Momma now, I don’t think about the day she left us. I think about the way she lived:

• The way she’d laugh with her whole face.

• The way she’d tell you exactly what she thought — whether you asked or not.

• The way she loved her children and grandchildren with a devotion that could move mountains.

• The way she held our family together through losses, storms, and seasons of rebuilding.

• The way she found joy, even after heartbreak.

• The way she kept choosing life — again and again.

I think about her hands, always busy.

Her voice, always warm. Her laugh, always infectious.

Her heart, always open.

And I think about how lucky we were — how lucky I was — to be her son. I think about the nights we'd talk for hours on the phone telling her my deepest problems; the night I told her I was gay and she said, "Yes, I know. I was waiting on you to tell me."

Momma lived a full, complicated, beautiful life. She loved deeply, worked tirelessly, and gave generously. And even now, years later, her legacy is still unfolding in the lives of her children, her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, her remaining siblings, and everyone who ever felt the comfort of her presence.

Every March (and every day, really), I celebrate her.

Not her absence — her life.

Her laughter.

Her strength.

Her stubbornness.

Her tenderness.

Her faith.

Her love.

Happy birthday, Momma.

Thank you for everything you poured into this world.

We’re still carrying it.

We always will.