The Cupid Enigma...

What is it that attracts people to Bobby? Was he the John Barrymore of the 60s? Yet this swash-buckling, charismatic soul carried a sheath knife and borrowed a gun from Spahn's...

He's a Left Brain fighting with the Right Brain kind of juxtaposition, no?

What lies beneath that controlled, chiseled- cheek exterior that would make a rising music talent throw everything away for a smarmy, dirty 5'2" tall quasi-guru ex-con?

Of all the Family, Cupid's fate seems the saddest.

Or is it that I'm 45, in a mid-life crisis and fantasizing about jumping his bones?

No, it's more than that. There's something not right about a man-boy who can spew Manson rhetoric, saying "It was all good" in 1973 to "I was not then nor am I now a member of the Manson Family" and admitting "Yeah, I'm sure he's (Manson) fucked a few fat butt boys, yeah. so have I. In that respect, maybe I'm homosexual, you know?" in 1981. There is more to Bobby Beausoleil than any camera can capture. I'm just not sure what "That" is...

One thing's for sure, he had a way of worming himself into the lairs of closeted gay men, like Bundy wormed his way into college dorms. Anger, Hinman, Manson and God knows how many more unaccounted for limped-wrists knew the essence that was Bobby.

I think he was John Barrymore on the outside and Liberace on the inside and the outside despised the inside all his life.

Can you have such chiseled cheek bones and such penetrating eyes and find the biceps of other male "artistes" still arousing? Well, if you're Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift, and Robert Beausoleil, then yes, I guess you can.

I wonder if his wife Barbara has figured this out...?

Bobby claims that the number one tragedy to the Hinman slaying was that the world only knows him as a killer and not as a musical genius. I've heard his recordings and Bobby, you might as well have been a killer because a musical genius you are not. But the female chromosome in me cries a little each night knowing that the films Bobby should have starred in buck naked were never made.

Does that yearning for Bobby flesh diminish the horror which was Gary's death? No way! Cupid had no backbone as was no kind of man when he put Manson's needs above his own and above the life that Gary lived. His John Barrymore looks seem to melt away with the slash of Gary's cheek and the torturous pain of those two days and that pitiful last stab through the heart from his knife.

Cupid stabbed Gary's heart with his deadly arrow, his wings forever stained with blood and his future as dead as his victim. And the questions yet remain of what has been and what could have been.

Why Bobby, why? And for what, Bobby, what?

And the suffering goes on...

Did you dine at the El Coyote, too, Bob, the haunt of closeted gays?

John Barrymore would spin in his grave....