Not many people who lose a partner can keep them alive, unless you’re a writer.<\/p>\n
Anthony Nocera was at university and doing a subject on electronic writing in 2015 when he decided to combine that with his love life, by testing out dating apps.<\/p>\n
It was there he met Jamie Anderson, a larger-than-life character who was 24 years older than him.<\/p>\n
“He was like, ‘Are you a good writer?’ and I was like, yeah, and so we went on a date and I read him some of my writing and that became seven years of my life,” he remembered.<\/p>\n
It was during that time that his play Log Boy started to take shape.<\/p>\n
Nocera’s inspiration and writing were based on Jamie’s Tuesday catch-ups with his close friend Justin, conversations that Nocera thought were so ridiculous and funny that he began surreptitiously recording them on his phone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anthony Nocera spent seven memorable years with late partner Jamie Anderson (left). (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“There was a quality to them in that they were haunted by a lot of the loss that they’d experienced by virtue of the fact they came to sexual prominence during the AIDS crisis,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“It was quite a chaotic time, they’d lost a lot of people and they’d lost a lot of time in their life.”<\/p>\n
Thus was born his manuscript, with the three main characters; Anthony, Jamie and Justin.<\/p>\n
Holding a full-time job in the arts as a publicist and marketer, Nocera would find any spare moment he could to work on it.<\/p>\n
“Quite often he [Jamie] would fall asleep before me and I would sit in bed next to him writing it and then the next day I would give him scenes and he’d read it and be like, ‘You’ve made me into a monster darl,'” Nocera laughed.<\/p>\n
“But he loved it, it was something we did together and something he was really excited by.”<\/p>\n
In the play, the character Anthony loses his fiance Michael.<\/p>\n
It was based on the playwright’s thought of one day potentially losing Jamie, given the big difference in their ages.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anthony Nocera’s breakthrough play Log Boy holds a special place in his heart.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 (ABC News: Guido Salazar)<\/p>\n
Then the play came horribly to life in late 2022. Jamie had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and responded well to chemotherapy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But he later picked up an infection and passed away from complications.<\/p>\n
While grieving, Nocera knew he could not put his project on hold.<\/p>\n
“After he passed away I completely rewrote the play to reflect my own experience of loss,” he said.<\/p>\n
Ironically, Nocera had always had Jamie as the third character in Log Boy, because he could not bear the thought of killing him off.<\/p>\n
“While the character of Jamie in Log Boy is very different to the real Jamie that lived, the idea that he can live on in a small way as a little testament to him and the immense impact he’s had in my life is really special,” he said.<\/p>\n
Jamie still has a unique place in Nocera’s everyday life.<\/p>\n
“I also just feel him around, like I live in a house we built together, his ashes are in the house and I still keep some of his clothes, he’s still the wallpaper on my phone and I hear him every day,” he admitted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anthony Nocera and Jamie Anderson living it up in New York. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
But that connection has not stopped Nocera from finding a new partner.<\/p>\n
“One of the strangest things about meeting someone new after you’ve lost someone, is the one thing I really want to do is tell Jamie about it,” he said.<\/p>\n
“About the fact that I’ve met a really great guy called Billy and I think they’d really get along which is kind of nice and very strange,” he said.<\/p>\n
Log Boy will be part of State Theatre South Australia’s 2026 season, with Nocera continue raising some of the funds to stage the production.<\/p>\n
The playwright can see there being an extra audience member when the curtain goes up in early October.<\/p>\n
“Jamie loved attention, so absolutely, I will feel his presence, he’ll definitely be there to see that we’ve done him justice,” Nocera said with a chuckle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not many people who lose a partner can keep them alive, unless you’re a writer. Anthony Nocera was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[115167,437,3190,146,85,46,115168,115166,115169,8971,106027,57168,12739,26182],"class_list":["post-205537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-anthony-nocera","tag-arts","tag-death","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jamie-anderson","tag-lgbti","tag-log-boy","tag-loss","tag-performing-arts","tag-playwright","tag-state-theatre","tag-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}