Remembering Longtime Professor Steve Lemere

Characters are inconvenient. We all love to regale our friends with stories of the characters we’ve known. But in the moment, characters can be frustrating, difficult – they make our lives work. For many students in graphic arts at UW-Milwaukee, Steve Lemere was a character.

While sitting with Steve on barstools, I mentioned that I was returning to college. He responded by telling me something that has proved extremely valuable. “I always tell my students,” Steve said, “Your teachers should know your name. If they don’t know who you are, you’re either a horrible student or you’re in the wrong major. They should know you because of your work and because you participate in your own education.” That stuck with me, and I think of it at the beginning of every semester.

Steve offered tough love for creators, critiquing work that didn’t live up to the assignment or the student’s potential. He would routinely tell people that he didn’t think they were in the right major. This, of course, can be crushing in the moment, but it’s worse to learn it after four years of debt and no job prospects. Behind Steve’s irascible opinions were honesty, and a mindset that offering the bitter medicine as soon as possible is a generous mercy.

Two weeks ago I happened upon a few people crying with their cigarettes and drinks on the steps of a neighborhood bar. “Ed,” they asked me, “did you hear? Steve died.” They said they were surprised by the news, but I must say that Steve dying didn’t surprise me in the least.

Knowing Steve as a bar patron, a neighbor, and a friend, if anything I’m surprised he lived to 58. As a gay man who survived the HIV/AIDS 1980’s, only to later go through cancer, his relative longevity defied odds. He’d told me as much; that he felt fortunate to have made it out of those years when he witnessed so many friends succumb to, what in the 1980’s, was often derisively called GAIDS.

Before I went back to college, I was a doorman/bartender who wrote poetry. Steve liked my work and asked if I would send him poems to use in assignments. He would assign the poems to beginning graphic design students, explaining that their layout had to fit the style of the writing. I was flattered. The idea that poetry written by some bartender would be used as a teaching tool made me feel like I was part of an inside joke.

Every so often I’d be working the door and end up in a conversation with some young patron. My name would sound familiar and they’d realize I was the guy who wrote the poetry in one of their assignments. Their face would blossom with surprise, developing into disappointment that this is what I did for work. It was as if they felt tricked that they’d spent energy arranging the words of some bouncer, instead of somebody possessing a more legitimate curriculum vitae. Sorry kid, poetry don’t feed nobody – tips do.

But Steve didn’t see the world in terms of pecking order or arbitrary delineations. In his eyes, if your work had merit, or if your heart possessed a deepness of soul, he was your advocate – and would unequivocally tell you when you were wrong.

Steve was a character. Steve had character. He wasn’t always convenient. Is anyone, whose name is worth knowing?