I have written this before, but after reading the two archived articles above, one in People and one in the SFO paper, I feel like repeating it.

There is no romanticizing their relationship, their wedding , the marriage and the divorce. Both of them are deeply flawed people who each have some redeeming qualities. Burt is a loyal and generous friend to those he loves(all his male buddies) and Loni--well there must be something he liked about her.

Burt had a horrendous drug problem. Not heroin or cocaine, but all prescription drugs. It wasn't quite Elvis level addiction to pills, but it was enough to completely control his life. Forget all the bullshit stories about TMJ, thrown chairs and the like. All pill freaks(including me at one time) have excuses up the wazoo and we are great at making them seem very believable.. Burt like everyone who lives on pills, he was using in order to kill the constant emotional pain. What was the source of the pain? There were several reasons for him feeling the need to quash the constant aching.= and emptiness.

His dad, Big Burt, was a very handsome and well liked man. He was very tall and striking--a veritable Marlboro Man with his cowboy boots and Stetson hats. He was not the warmest of fathers to young "Buddy" as Burt was known in this area. Like many fathers, he was not one to shower Buddy with praise or outward displays of affection. And the older Buddy got, the more he craved the love and approval of his dad. He played football at FSU and did a lot of stereotypical "man's man" endeavors to please BB, but that approval never came. I want to make it clear: BB was not physically abusive to his son.

Then there is the issue of how Buddy saw himself vis a vis his sexual desires. I word it that way intentionally, because if he had been hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked, "What is your sexual orientation?" he would have said "I like girls. I am a normal, heterosexual man."

And he would pass that polygraph test too. Buddy never saw himself as a gay man, rather he was a straight man who had desires he could not understand nor control; and most of the time he just went with what he felt at the time, all the while never accepting that he might be happier in the long run with the men he loved. Again, in some sense his brokenness over his unreciprocated love for BB may have figured into this confusion. Did he crave the love and approval of men because that was missing in his relationship with his dad? Or did he deny his feeling for men because he would sooner die than disappoint BB by being "less than the man" that was BB? Either way I firmly believe that BB was the root of his pain.

Did he ever actually tell me any of that? Oh heck no. I watched, listened and observed over the years...and of course I listened to all of the people in this area who had known him for 35+ years. I could be wrong about my conclusion...but it sure does gin up with his steady decline over the years. Percodan, Halcion, every benzo known to man and speed will mess up every relationship be they heterosexual or homosexual. Hence, none of his really had a chance.

He's in peace now, and that has been a long time coming.