Prayers for Robert.

When editor and activist Robert Drake was beaten almost to death in Ireland, his gay family rallied to bring him home, Now Drake's longtime coeditor, Terry Wolverton, writes about his ongoing fight for recovery

It's a hazy, white-sky afternoon in Los Angeles, that slow, surreal week between Christmas and New Year's 1998, and I am talking on the phone to Robert Drake. It's midnight in Dublin, where he sits at his writing desk.

For the past decade Robert and I have worked together, editing nine literary anthologies of work by gay and lesbian writers. We might not describe what we do as activism, but if that notion is about the urge to make change, then we have certainly worked to expand and deepen the literature of our community, to add to the range of voices heard from, to hone those voices into a precise and incisive art.

We don't talk on the phone as much since Robert moved to Ireland this past summer; we rely mostly on frequent but terse E-mail messages detailing the tasks outstanding for our two upcoming pairs of anthologies. Our conversation today has been more personal--my heartbreak over a failed love affair, his missing the longtime partner in the States from whom he's separated, despite his happiness with his new Irish lover. Inevitably, though, our conversation strays back to work, the strongest thread that connects us.

"Do you realize," he says pensively, "that these are probably the last anthologies we'll do together?"

The afternoon is blueing toward darkness, and as he asks this, I realize how much I am going to miss working with him. I savor this pang of regret, never suspecting that our collaboration will soon be disrupted by a much more sinister event.

I never aspired to be an editor. When I first met Robert, in the summer of 1989, I was working on a novel and teaching creative writing classes at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. My students were giving a reading, and Robert came. Afterward he introduced himself to me, a tall dark-haired man whose wire-rim glasses called attention to a distinctive profile. He was an agent, he explained--one of only a handful at that time interested in representing lesbians and gay men. He talked too fast, the way agents do, but with more sincerity. "I'm really impressed with a lot of what I've heard today," he told me, "and I wonder if you'd like to work with me."

His idea was to produce a volume of new fiction by West Coast gay and lesbian writers. "Several editors have told me that California is where the hot new writing is coming from," he said. Robert believed that I could help him locate some of that "hot new writing," and I agreed to try

That first volume, Indivisible (Plume, 1991), expressed a value that was central to our work together, that the gay and lesbian literary communities could benefit from cross-pollination, that we need to be reading each other's work. This stance confounded the segregated marketing structures of gay and lesbian publishing. When we approached publishers about a second volume, everyone refused us; no one could figure out how to market it.

We then proposed a series of companion volumes, His and Hers, coedited by both of us, released simultaneously. In 1998, after several nominations for our previous volumes, His 2 received a Lambda Literary Award. Robert was in Ireland, so I accepted on our behalf. An inveterate fan of The X-Files, Robert always joked that he and I are the Scully and Mulder of gay and lesbian letters; he is the true believer, while I am the hard-eyed pragmatist. What we share is a burning commitment to a diversity of voices, to craft and literary quality, and to the idea that gay and lesbian literature should stand beside the classics of world literature.

On January 31, 1999, in Sligo, Ireland, Robert was gay-bashed by two men who would later claim that they were "the victims of a homosexual pass." Those who know Robert are aware of how patently ridiculous is this assertion: Robert had moved to Ireland because he was madly in love with a young medical student he'd met on holiday in Dublin--and even single, Robert was neither drawn to straight men nor likely to proposition two men at a time.

Even as I refute his attackers' defense, I think, So what if it were true? Is making a pass such an offense that someone should be beaten to death in response? Whatever happened to just saying "No, thank you"? If women could get away with this justification, would there be a straight man left alive?

Until Robert can tell us, we can't know the details of his attack. Robert had been seen earlier that Saturday evening drinking in a pub, and he left to go home after midnight. He was found early the next morning--bleeding and unconscious on his kitchen floor--by his boyfriend, who'd been to visit his parents in Donegal overnight. There was no sign of forced entry and no evidence of robbery. Given his attackers' "defense," the attack can be read only as a hate crime. The two men beat him unconscious, and from the extent of his head injuries, his boyfriend tells me, "they meant to kill him." The men have been charged and are free on bail, awaiting trial. Robert remained in a coma for several weeks, battling infection and renal failure; still unconscious, he was flown back to Philadelphia in late March.

It is a horrifying irony that Robert's first novel, The Man (Plume, 1995), is about a man who, having watched his lover die in a gay-bashing incident, becomes a superhero bent on avenging hate crimes. The men who love Robert--Scott Pretorius, his longtime partner and a fellow in Magnetic Resonance Imaging at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and Ciaran Slevin, with whom Robert was living in Ireland--have rallied to work cooperatively toward Robert's care and recovery.

Scott and Robert are registered domestic partners; it is through Scott's insurance that Robert has received his care. Ciaran has taken an extended leave of absence from medical school to return with Robert to the States and remain by his side. And the people touched by Robert's life and work have worked exhaustively to publicize his circumstance, raise funds for his care, and demand justice from his attackers. The Sigma Nu fraternity at UPenn, which Robert sponsored when he lived in Philadelphia, made buttons saying simply, ROBERT, which they sold to raise funds to bring Robert back to the States.

I visited in early May and found my friend and colleague wizened, unable to speak, and not fully in control of his motor functions. I watched him struggle to lift a baseball cap from his head--each brain function summoned by will, each movement separate as stop-time photography--and to put it on again.

He appeared to understand a great deal of what was said to him and worked hard to respond. When I told him "I love you," he cried.

Shocking as it was to see him, his fierce will seemed intact; I could see that he is determined to recover. Shortly after my visit, he was moved to a rehab facility, and he is making good progress. At the beginning of June, I received this update from Scott: "Physically, Robert is able to sit in a wheelchair and maintain his own balance. He is lifting his torso out of bed and can use his hands for gross movements such as holding a stuffed animal. Robert is not yet able to speak, although he has begun to make sounds and is visibly frustrated by his inability to talk. Most encouraging of all is that Robert has become very reliable at nonverbal communication, such as answering yes/no questions with head nodding. Robert is aware of what has happened to him and is understandably sad much of the time. He cries a great deal. I have seen him laugh on a number of occasions. He and I were watching The Simpsons, and Robert was laughing at the appropriate times. Humor is a very high brain function. Although we clearly have a very long way to go, Robert is still progressing in the right direction."

In the wake of Robert's attack, the path of my activism has been clear: I am working to finish our last two projects together, painstakingly trying to recreate his vision from a fragmentary set of notes and files that were shipped to me from Ireland, determined to keep alive the legacy of his vision.

And I am keeping faith in the hope that Robert will recover fully, that we will again converse on the phone, mingling work and gossip, on a desultory late-winter afternoon.

Wolverton is author of the novel Bailey's Beads and two collections of poetry, Black Slip and the upcoming Mystery Bruise. Her most recent anthologies with Robert Drake are His 3: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Men and Hers 3: Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbians. She is the founder of Writers at Work, a creative writing center in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles.