We Love You, Taylor Negron

We are heartbroken over the loss of Lowbrow friend and contributor Taylor Negron. He died at 57 after battling cancer, but in our minds he was forever 25 and as healthy as a child. Taylor was preternaturally funny, smart, generous, and warm—the kind of guy you were always excited to hear from. He was monstrously charismatic. Seemingly everybody in New York and Los Angeles, the cities he bounced between, was friends with him. About a year ago, Taylor started working on “My Name Is Julio: I’m So Bad, I Should Be in Detention,” an essay about filming Easy Money that appeared in last year’s Lowbrow Reader issue. He worked on the piece in his Upper West Side apartment, the now-closed West Village vegetarian restaurant ’sNice, and, bizarrely, a five-star cruise traveling from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans by way of the Panama Canal. (Naturally, while onboard, Taylor did a reading of the piece in progress.) We were so thrilled to publish his beautiful essay; we are so sad that we will never again get to see Taylor.

Illustration by Doreen Kirchner