CLIFF BOSTOCK: An Atlanta voice goes silent

Atlanta has lost a great voice. A great writer. A great thinker. Cliff Bostock has died. A former editor of Creative Loafing many times over — he kept coming back and was always welcomed with open arms — he was also a columnist for the paper, writing about food in his Grazing column — though anyone who read it knows it was about so much more than food. As so many of his Grazing columns dealt with his psychoanalytical view of the people he encountered, he also wrote a second weekly column, Headcase, which delved deeper into psychology and the human condition.

In 1978, Bostock was acknowledged as Atlanta’s “first openly gay columnist,” a distinction which brought him both widespread acclaim and derision. He soldiered on. While a contributor to Creative Loafing for over 40 years, he also wrote for and/or edited many other Atlanta publications, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday Magazine and Atlanta Weekly, Etcetera magazine, Georgia Trend, and The Georgia Voice, among them. But it was with Creative Loafing that he was inextricably linked.

Bostock was witty. Satirical. He had the ability to delve deeply into personality, extrapolating the essence of those he encountered while exposing their strengths, weaknesses, doing so with an empathy that knew no bounds. Every read by Cliff Bostock was a good read. Whether you agreed with him or not. He possessed a brilliant mind. And used it to celebrate the eccentricities and expose the atrocities in this world. He was the first to write about many of the outside artists throughout the South who would later become folk heroes, spending nights at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden interviewing the self-taught artist and reverend years before he was catapulted to fame by R.E.M. and Talking Heads, and staying with St. EOM at Pasaquan decades before that Georgia-born artist’s colorful work would decorate the corner of Courtland Street and Ralph McGill Boulevard in downtown Atlanta.

Bostock was always interested in the different. Some might say the weird. But for him the eccentrics and eccentricities were the better part of life. To be extolled and revered, not hidden in shame by society.

Just as important in his work was Bostock’s focus on the ongoing fight for civil rights and equality, whether for people of color or the LGBTQ+ community. Through his writing — imbued with sexual politics, gay liberation, the socio-economics of this city he called home, his chronicling of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in this city, and his views on what it meant to be gay that he personalized so eloquently in his recap of fifty years of Atlanta Pride — he taught us how to see people for who they are, and to embrace differences. Of course, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t savagely rip apart a restaurant or a waitron (a term which he applied to servers for many years). We all have to be held accountable. Yes, he was brutally honest.

While it was our careers that first brought us together, each time our paths crossed it was our ongoing friendship and mutual respect for each other that strengthened our bond. Bostock was my first editor decades ago at the Atlanta Gazette. When I was hired to write at Creative Loafing not long after the Gazette’s demise, he would become my editor two, maybe three more times. When I returned to write at Creative Loafing after what turned out to be a twenty-year sabbatical ⎯ like Cliff, when I quit I thought it was for good — his byline was no longer in the pages of the paper. After returning to the managing editor position, I worked to get Bostock back on staff. He soon returned, much to the chagrin of the sales staff. In effect, I was his editor, though no one ever really edited Cliff Bostock. His copy always came in clean. Perfect. You just read it, savoring the fact that you were the first to read the pearls of wisdom, the diatribes, the much madness as divinest sense, that flowed from his mind into the written word.

The last year Bostock wrote for Creative Loafing, he didn’t. He kept saying he would. Every week, I would phone him early in the morning — before he rushed off to the gym or ensconced himself and his computer at some new, in-town coffee shop — to determine the status of his column.

“What?” he would demand, bellowing the word as if it came from Zeus himself, as he answered the phone.

Undaunted, I would start, “Well …” but he would never commit to a deadline.

Invariably, we would talk about anything and everything — other than Creative Loafing deadlines and copy.

Before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, before he knew exactly what was wrong with him, we would discuss at length the problems he was facing, the blackouts he was encountering, and the fact that, at the time, the doctors had no idea what was going on inside his brain. How could anyone have any idea what was going on inside of that brain of his? What a brain he had. Cliff was one of the most intelligent people I have ever encountered. For something to be wrong with his brain was anathema to his brilliance.

One morning, we got on the subject of legacy. This was well before he knew he was ill. I asked him if, through all the years and all of the articles he’d written, documenting the many facets of Atlanta and its people, he had kept copies of his writings.

“No, I never did,” he answered, not reluctantly, not remorsefully, but with an air of indifference. “I never thought about it.” It was then that he started detailing the facts and stories regarding many of the pieces of which he was most proud.

His answer was not surprising. Cliff lived in the now. Perhaps it was due to the Buddhist principles he discovered in his early AA days, when it was suggested he needed a higher power, that is, something greater than himself. Maybe it has nothing to do with that. Or any belief system to which people cling. Indeed, it’s more likely that Cliff Bostock was just too busy moving forward to hold onto the past. He had too much to say in the time he had with us.

Rest in peace, Cliff. You’ve left us with a giant hole, one never again to be filled with your razor-sharp wit, your wisdom, your unique observations and interpolations on life. You made us laugh. You made us cry. You made us think. Ever perceptive and unyielding. You never held back. —CL—