If Ed Hunter hadn’t been born, he would have to have been invented.

Born and raised in a dirty little beach town that nobody wanted to live in (Santa Monica!), he quickly developed a unique talent for being photogenic in any situation, even sitting on the potty.

Floyd and Teresa had him later in life, a good 17 years after their first son Leland(Jim) was born, and clearly didn’t know what to do with him. So they showered him with love and gifts (and later cars and money), in a desperate attempt to stop him from becoming a juvenile delinquent. It didn’t work.

After a couple of attempts to prove his manhood with women he loved (hi Connie, hi Joyce), he discovered quaaludes, the Odyssey, and boys, and began to party like it was 1999 (except it wasn’t, it was 1978).

He spent the next 15 years in a variety of different places and jobs. He was, for a while, the Teddy Bear of the Royal Court of Orange County (look at him, do you think he could have done drag himself?).

He helped both Floyd and Teresa pass on in the latter half of the 1980s. He moved for a short time to be with Teresa and his Aunt Sue in Oklahoma, but….he missed the lights and shiny objects he could only find in Los Angeles.

So he came back and eventually moved to WeHo where he quickly became the Queen of Kings Road, covered in leopard skin, with his cats Fairfax and Melrose. Fairfax was the smart one and ran away very early on. Melrose was more codependent and stayed for 20 years.

It was at this time he met his mentor, Sylviane, who became his employer, surrogate mother, and disciplinarian. He also met his sister from another mother, Debbie ("Ducks"), and kidnapped her from 1994 until now.

In the year 2000, Ed partied a little too much and, after having accidentally made Sylviane fly home from Seattle to sign paychecks in his absence, he tried to clean up his act a bit. Not much, but a bit…..

So, that’s why he was at the church at Hollywood and Highland on a wet November night, drinking awful coffee and sitting in candlelight sharing experience, strength and hope. And that is where he met “Mikey”!

There was an instant connection. Ed was the most Anglophile person you ever met - the accent and pale translucent skin somehow seduced him. Ducks and Mikey were his Brit Awards.

But he made “Mikey” wait for another year before accepting the inevitable and falling in love. He also insisted on flowers on his work desk once a month, and dinner and a movie every Wednesday at Universal. Oh and diamonds. But they came later.

At the end of that year, and despite having been taken to Portugal at Christmas to meet Mike’s mum ("Mother Magpie") and insisting that “we’re just friends” (oh, really?), Ed&Mike (the HP's) became joined at the hip. For EVER!

They bought a house in the burbs, Ed changed jobs to work at the same darn company as Mike (I’m so sorry to Sylvianne and to everyone who worked at DSG….), and they traveled the world to the obvious envy of everyone they knew.

While they were each other's "love of their life", they built a life together with "Mia Familia": the Andrades (Androids) - his Ducks, Toddzilla, Ally McNally, Nick Nick, and Clo-Clo - and the Potentier-Neals with Jane (sorry, is that screamy, yelly thing?), JoJo and BenBen; and celebrated holidays and life events to the maximum extent allowed by law (and then some). The Halloween and Christmas decorations are a thing of myth - never had Santa Clarita seen anything like Ed with a ladder and thousands of twinkly lights.

In the last months of his life, one of his joys was the reconnection with his cousins and his brother, Jim. If Ed believed there was a heaven, he’d be up there kicking himself for not having had more time with them. But the only Heaven he believed in was the club in London.

Everyone who met Ed quickly found out he was loud, brutally honest, incredibly supportive, and 100% committed to whatever took his attention. While he could be a psychopath if you crossed him, if Ed liked you, you knew it: he was a friend you could depend on, absolutely, and he never treated anyone without respect, no matter who they were.

Ed was taken too soon but he left an indelible stain on everyone he met, and you will all spend the rest of your lives figuring out that no amount of detergent or bleach will remove him from you.

Ed will get what he wanted - a long-lasting legacy, in your memories. And for that, Mikey is very grateful. Booboo, I love you soooooooooo much!

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