Ari Emanuel‘s brashness is the stuff of Hollywood legend — but Mayor Rahm Emanuel‘s little brother showed his sensitive side with a touching tribute to his late cousin Gary.
Honored by the Los Angeles LGBT Center with a Vanguard Award over the weekend, the showbiz superagent spoke about how his cousin, who was gay, moved in with the Emanuels when he was a teenager because “he wasn’t welcome in his own home.”
“My mom ran an open house, and often people stayed over, even for months at a time, if they were having troubles in their own home,” Emanuel said.
Being gay “wasn’t something that many people talked about openly in the 1970s,” he said. “I loved Gary. He was our oldest and closest cousin. We had been hanging out, going on trips, going to movies, going to the beach with my grandfather since I was born.”
The Emanuels’ cousin — who served as Rahm Emanuel’s best man at his wedding to Amy Rule — died of AIDS-related complications shortly after President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993.
But “Gary dressed in a floor-length gold-brown fur coat” to the inauguration, Emanuel said to laughter, adding, “The cruelty of AIDS back in those days wasn’t just the suffering … there was the silence, the feeling that … it was a source of shame and embarrassment.”
Dedicating his award to his cousin’s memory (the Obamas’ first friend Valerie Jarrett was also honored), Emanuel joked that “nobody comes into my office for unconditional love,” but said that the entertainment industry has a responsibility to depict marginalized communities.
And he said: “Of the three Emanuel brothers, Zeke was always the brainy one, Rahm was the shrewd one and I was just the last one. I wish it was funny at the time.”
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