Thomas Rolanti, known to many as Bunny Lake, one third of the band Rubberlegs, passed away Sunday night after a long fight with liver disease. He was 51. His friends and family will miss him tremendously.

It's hard to believe that I've known Thomas for almost 30 years. He was one of my very first gay friends after I came out and moved to New York, in the late '70s. Anyone who knew him knows how much he loved people and what a total social butterfly he was. He could charm the pants off just about anyone, and Anthony and my other straight New Jersey friends were no exception. A lasting friendship began in 1981, when Thomas and his friend Guy started inviting me out clubbing with them. Our first real connection was a musical one in club Berlin, at the Reggae Lounge, where we danced all night to amazing underground new wave music, and where Thomas introduced me to my first love, Bob.

When Bob and I moved in together and started writing electronic music and songs, Thomas was very interested in being part of the music-making process. He was a budding new wave deejay, and used to play our parties, with his two turntables on an ironing board. Bob and I both sang and played synthesizer, and Thomas became our sound shaper and mixer, quickly becoming expert at live signal processing. He played the digital delay like an instrument, adding polish and excitement to our live at-home experimentations. In two short years, thanks to his insistence on recording everything, we accumulated a large cassette library of jams and ideas that are still being developed into Rubberlegs songs.

Life was often tragicomically hard for Thomas, and in 1985 we experienced his first disappearance. He was missing for almost two years, a gut-wrenching experience for all. On his return, we had the good fortune of another golden musical period in which we developed our sound even further, though we still never played outside of the apartment. Bob had a dream in which we were on tour in a big bus, with the name of the band (back then it was the "Busy Bodies") on the side. The bus was towing a small pink caboose with Thomas sitting inside, and on the side of his trailer was written "and ... BUNNY!" Thus Thomas became Bunny, and he appended the Lake surname in fondness for the 1960s Otto Preminger film "Bunny Lake is Missing." In 1990, Ms. Lake went missing again for a couple of years, and on his reappearance, we were unable to successfully resurrect the music-making process together. It was a difficult time. We lost friends and lovers to AIDS, including Bob in 1995.

Thanks to Thomas's persistence, the two of us started producing Rubberlegs songs again in early 2000. We launched our first web site and posted our material on the internet, in memory of Bob. A couple of years later we were inspired by new friends in Outmusic to put together our first live performance outside of the apartment, and this began an amazing new era for us in which we learned how to truly be a "band." Thomas knew his way around a keyboard and could read music, but was frustrated by bad habits, ingrained in his childhood by not-so-good teachers. In fact his very first instrument had been the accordion (as in the Gary Larson cartoon "welcome to heaven, here's your harp / welcome to hell, here's your accordion!"). So Thomas became my first and only pupil, and we've spent the last few years in a fascinating process of discovery, finding root causes of his performance dysfunctions and ways to work around them. It sounds like therapy, and in fact many of our discoveries triggered epiphanies in his real therapy sessions. We both learned a tremendous amount from this break-it-down-to-basics period, and were able to make Rubberlegs come alive again, in an entirely new way.

Thomas suffered from recurring bouts of pathological fears, which would cause life to come to a screeching halt every few years. And yet he managed during his best times to put himself out there and push his boundaries, and I feel very honored to have been allowed to help him work through performance anxieties, so symbolic of all his fears. I know that Thomas felt most alive when he was immersed in music, and there is no question that from day one he has given me some of my most alive musical moments, all the more special for being shared with him. We spoke the same language, a language that is not often spoken or understood these days, and I've lost my musical soul brother.

Peace,
Gordon