Walk Out the Door
Music: I Will Survive
Artist: Gloria Gaynor
Shared by: Daniel for a Film Critic
“Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” rocked the church as we filed out, and every time I hear the song now I think of him, of his friends sobbing without restraint in the aisle that day, and the loss of so much intelligence, kindness and talent.”
I did not know Jay Scott (née Jeffrey Scott Beaven) very well personally, but I attended his funeral in 1993 because I so highly respected him and his work as film critic for Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper. (I should add that I respected him even after he'd savaged me on television for an ill-considered reference I'd made to Jean-Luc Godard.)
I admired him for his sly wit and understated erudition, and for his young-Brando style as, leather-jacketed, he scooted from screening to screening on his motorcycle.
Among the many striking facts of his life is that he'd been raised by Seventh-Day Adventists whose doctrine prohibited moviegoing, yet he became so well-known and so admired that, among other accolades from the world of film, Clint Eastwood sent an unsolicted donation to the city's Casey House AIDS hospice in his memory.
He was not the first person I was acquainted with who died of AIDS-related causes in the '80s and '90s, but the outpouring of grief at his funeral left me stunned. In a time of lingering conservativism and persistent censuring of homosexuality, his death gave public face to a tragedy that so many other people had suffered anonymously.
Gaynor's "I Will Survive" rocked the church as we filed out, and every time I hear the song now I think of him, of his friends sobbing without restraint in the aisle that day, and the loss of so much intelligence, kindness and talent.