This might be the last time I can write about the man I call “Larry.” He may become too well-known for me to be sure that I can preserve his anonymity.

I first wrote about Larry in 2005. He was the home health aide on duty when my dad died in New York City, and I wrote about him as the most caring, sensitive aide my family employed.

He also may have been the most mistreated — in other areas of his life. Larry is a good-looking African-American man who is obviously gay. Potential employers regularly rejected him as their home health aide, often rudely, in a repeat of bad treatment he endured as a child.

When Larry was in grade school, his dad thought he was girlish and began beating him. His dad even gave a son from another relationship the same name in a sick attempt to start over.

At 17, Larry moved to a gay safe-house in New York, eventually finding work at an airport facility, but he left after co-workers repeatedly harassed him. He missed out on the gay pride movement, had a bad image of himself, and got stuck in poverty.

At the time I met him, his life was circling like a plane with nowhere to land. Someone had encouraged him to go to college, but he was 36 years old and didn’t feel capable. I was lucky to become his friend at the right moment to reinforce the college suggestion. “Land there,” I urged. “It’s not too late.”

But when school began it was like a wind blowing against him. He enrolled at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, a mostly African-American branch of the City University of New York. Once again, he didn’t fit. His sexual orientation and his huge effort to succeed academically didn’t go down well with his classmates who were mostly younger and less-motivated. He couldn’t seem to make friends.

I encouraged him to go to office hours and make contact with his teachers.

At the same time, I noticed that he was seriously beginning to read. It was Larry who told me about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a fabulous novel I read on his recommendation. Larry spent many hours alone, reading, and when he moved to a rent-reduced apartment in Harlem, he began checking out the Manhattan branch of City College and going to the Apollo Theatre.

We no longer kept in close contact, but every now and then I’d receive an email.

September 2009: “I sent you excerpts from two fictional stories I am writing, and also plans for a club that I am founding for my school.”

January 2010: “I forgot to tell you that I received an A+ in my Fiction Writing class for the semester.”

December 2010: “Just received wonderful news I have all A’s on my report card again. I am absolutely elated; yayyyy.”

I can hardly contain my excitement when I read emails like this.

Recently Larry’s interests veered to poetry. He told me that he had started going to public poetry readings and participating. He won a poetry contest in connection with a black writers conference at his school.

He sent me poems and last fall a video of him reading his poetry in front of a class. It moved me to learn that his parents had come to hear him.

Two weeks ago, he sent another email telling me his poems are slated for publication in three small journals and that he is this month’s featured poet (under a pseudonym) on a black poetry website. As a result of this success, he has been asked to speak at his college.

I still worry about him, just as I did when I first became his friend, but the focus of my worry has shifted in an unanticipated direction. I worry that the first rungs of success as a student poet have been relatively easy and that later he’ll get stalled out or stumped by the older intellectual community. He still has problems with punctuation and verbs.

And I worry the way a parent of any student who chooses an English major might worry. Will he find a job?

And yet I look at the video he sent me and I see that he is figuring out how to dress and maneuver in academia and how to speak in public. I can picture him someday as an administrator or teacher.

Meanwhile, in his personal life, Larry is making discoveries about his family, which turns out to have white and nearly white members. He embraces and befriends these people, just as he accepted and included me. I see all these things as potential material for his poetry.

I have been lucky to be able to watch his experience, through his eyes of course, but I trust those eyes. By writing about him, I’ve let long-term readers of my column watch him soar, too. I haven’t told Larry that I write about him, which seems OK since I use a pseudonym.

Larry continues to use one, too. But someday his success might motivate him to start speaking and writing and finding recognition in his own name in literary journals —and elsewhere.

If so, my columns about him will end, but only for happy reasons.

— Marion Franck lives in Davis with her family. Reach her at [email protected]

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