By Ann Rostow–
My heart stopped when I saw that Chris Lennon was calling me at one in the morning the Sunday before last. Back in the 1990s, when I worked and wrote for the Bay Times, Chris and his twin sister Camille were being raised by the publisher, Kim Corsaro. I watched them grow up from about four years old, and let’s just say I knew Chris wasn’t calling me to say hello at that odd hour. Kim had died on Saturday.
I couldn’t sleep for hours. I was surprised at how strange the world felt without her. Her health was terrible and I had thought she was on her deathbed several times in the last few years. Heart attacks, surgeries, weird lengthy hospitalizations, many medical emergencies with ambulances. Oh, and kidney failure, never a good thing.
Kim was living in Ohio at the time but I would hear from her frequently on Facebook Messenger and I’d often get these horror stories after the fact. Yet, somehow, she always pulled through and I was amazed that she managed to get back to San Francisco earlier this year. I’m grateful that she was able to see how many friends she had through their generosity on the crowdfunding page that allowed her to make the move.
Kim was extraordinary.
Brilliant, with a sometimes antic sense of humor that I shared and loved, she questioned current events and aspects of gay politics that others would digest without a thought. She had an intellectual courage that occasionally found her in opposition to our community’s common wisdom, most significantly when she endorsed Nancy Pelosi in her first run for Congress against the (less qualified) gay primary candidate, Harry Britt.
She was also a tyrannical boss, so infuriating that many of her friends and colleagues threw in the towel. She could talk money out of a stone; she left no stone unturned, and she rarely repaid a dime. That said, she usually used the cash for the newspaper or the kids. And some of that tyranny was expressed in pursuit of excellence. But still, she was not an easy person.
For me, it was her humor that kept our friendship alive. When the twins were little, she would let them select birthday cards from the entire display. They would pick golden anniversary or sympathy cards, or scrawl their names at the bottom of something that said, “To My Favorite Grandson.” One year in my late thirties when I was feeling particularly old, they dutifully spelled out Happy 46th Birthday with their crayons on Kim’s instructions.
To amuse the kids, she and I would pretend to be possessed by aliens, and developed an entire language. Until recently, we continued to use “mip!” the alien word for “I don’t feel well.” We also created a mischievous character named “Donkey,” who communicated with nuanced brays and who would do things like fill up an entire grocery cart with carrots and arrive at the checkout line looking for money. Over the years she continued to send me articles about donkeys, wondering if Donkey was aware of some news story.
I’m telling you these random anecdotes because, of course, for me, this whole rich absurd world also died with Kim. Second, this is a side of her I don’t think anyone else will memorialize. And third, the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that humor was probably our most durable connection.
I remember many nights putting the newspaper to bed when Kim and I would have tears running down our cheeks at our hysterical (to us) photo captions. “What a knee jerk!,” we wrote for a shot of the Knee Jerk Dance Project. “It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part,” we wrote under the photo of some other arcane lesbian production. We walked a thin line between ridiculing some of our gay sisters and brothers and entertaining the majority of readers.
And Kim gave me the green light to create Nan Parks, the hapless Marin housewife who tried to give Bay Times readers the “straight point of view.” Again, she and I would laugh ourselves giddy while editing this stuff, not to mention our glee over the outraged letters from those who failed to recognize the satire. Keep in mind that back then, there were a lot of people out there who took themselves very seriously. Because it was indeed a very serious time, a very tough time in terms of social disapproval, AIDS and antigay politics. But that’s exactly when you need a transcendent sense of humor to keep you connected to the rest of humanity, isn’t it? It’s when you’re waiting for the rest of humanity to open its eyes to you.
The day before she died, she sent me a photo of a woman in Wales giving a TV Zoom interview, captioned: “If you’re having a s–t day, at least you didn’t go on BBC news with your dildo on your bookcase.” Two days earlier, she sent a cartoon of three dogs playing poker. One dog’s tail was wagging furiously and the other two dogs were saying “fold.” Our messenger exchanges were mostly jokes, with the occasional health crisis, often accompanied by one word: “Mip!” She was brave about sickness and pain.
Tim Kingston, the top reporter for the Bay Times back in the day, wrote an incredible goodbye to Kim that captured her complicated nature, her journalistic integrity, and her formidable character. Google his name and hers for a much better picture than I can draw for you. And I’m kind of a wreck about it, frankly. In the last ten days I’ve thought of texting her a dozen times. There’s a TV show with Jack Reacher coming soon (Kim read every one Lee Child’s novels). I’m sick of hearing about Tom Brady (and know, as a big NFL fan, she would have agreed). I got my last two wordles in three tries (she started sharing her wordle results with me every day). The list goes on. And it will continue for a long time.
Published on February 10, 2022
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