Sometime Saturday night, between 11:00 PM and midnight or so, I’ll engage in a weekly ritual for the last time. I’ll log onto nytimes.com before heading to bed (or while taking a break from the dishes that have amassed during a Saturday night dinner with friends over) and I’ll read Frank Rich, one last time.

I will miss this tradition incredibly. I can’t believe this time has come already.

Frank will be fine, of course, as he heads off to New York magazine. And for his loyal readers, they’ll be getting a nice dolop of him monthly, weekly pieces online and (most exciting, for readers and writers) the chance to see him working as an editor as he crafts a whole section of the magazine around the theme of his essay.

But Frank has long been a hero of mine, and he is one of those people who, when I had the chance to meet him and have him review my portfolio, was even more wonderful in real life than I’d ever dreamed my role model could be.

In 2004, I was in a metamorphosis. I was sort of on the upswing, but it was such a period of transformation it involved a great deal of pain. My father had died the year before, I had realized I was gay, and I’d lost 100 pounds in about five months. Largely unemployed, I had been staying with my mother in Oxnard, spending a great of that time huddled in the fetal position on the floor, annoyed to be stuck in the strawberry capital of the world, thousands of miles away from the action in the Big Apple.

Then I got up.

Then I started running.

Then I came back to New York.

When I did, it was even harder to get by than when I’d first arrived as a 17 year old freshman at the Tisch School of the Arts, some nine years earlier. I didn’t have a stable place to live. I felt farther from my goal of living as a writer than ever. I took any odd job I could – some quite dangerous – and volunteered on the Kerry campaign in Pennsylvania. I eventually wound up on my feet – even if the nation, subjected to another Bush term, nearly did not – working at an architecture firm as a copy writer and general Boy Friday.

There was one thing that clearly made sense to me during that time, though: Frank Rich. I hadn’t read him regularly until then, and I couldn’t wait for Sundays to read him (in print). Something about him spoke to me so intimately. I know many readers feel this – indeed, one of the most touching blessings of being a published writer myself now has been hearing from readers about how they sometimes feel like I’m speaking directly to them. Still, there was something about Frank that spoke to me that made me feel, despite his honest assessment of the state of the world, that everything was going to be OK. It was a balm to me in those tumultuous years.

Frank and I come from very different worlds. Indeed, especially at that time in my life, we little to nothing in common. He was a straight, caucasian, middle-aged Jewish writer for the New York Times. I was a gay, biracial, Christian, unpublished writer. He’d worked long as a theater critic. At film school, I’d grown not to have a great deal of love for critics. And yet, Frank’s worldview felt so similar to mine. I felt like he said the things I’d say if I had an audience. I loved the way he saw the political in the theatrical and the theatrical in the political. He is one hell of a great historian of the gay struggle for civil rights in America, as well as of the struggles of African Americans and women to achieve equal rights.

But it’s the warmth of his writing – knowing without being sarcastic, truth-telling without being hopeless, observing with the eye of a poet – that’s kept me, and so many others, coming back to him year after year.

So it was with great trepidation when, five years after I returned to New York and had been published in the New York Times for the first time, that I reached out to Frank, and inquired if I could ask him some questions via email.

Not only did he respond with enthusiastic encouragement, he invited me to come meet him for coffee at his office at the Times.

It would be several months before we actually met. But that meeting was a day I’ll never forget. Frank was not just a hero to me, who bowled me over by taking interest in a kid to whom he owed nothing. He was the first professional writer to ever treat me like a peer and take me seriously. The boost that gave to my self esteem, given at a critical moment in my career when I was on my way but with no path towards financial stability or even a writing job, was invaluable. I will never forget the feeling of having someone I’d been reading weekly for years talking to me like I had things to say and treating my prose as if it had value. Frank may never know how much that meant to me.

But then, from what I hear, he is that way with a lot of young writers. There are legions of people who’ve had experiences like the one I had, and that doesn’t make mine feel any less special. All it means is that Frank is that rare mensch who encourages people and helps them, even (and especially) those who seem the least likely to receive such encouragement. I wrote him blindly. I was not the child of anyone well connected. There was nothing I could do for him. Writing a 1,700 column every week is a tough grind, and Mr. Rich certainly had more pressing concerns than to meet with me or respond to my emails. And yet, Frank couldn’t have been kinder or more solicitous with his advice and counsel over the past couple of years.

It’s been a wonderful thing to be connected, in a small way, to a voice so thoroughly bold in tough times. I have loved reading his brave writing about race  in America and gay rights in the age of Obama.

When I won the AVP Courage Award, it meant all the more to me because he had won it years ago.

It is in the spirit of Frank’s continuous evolution in which I am excited not just to read him at New York, but to see him edit others’ writing in a monthly package he’ll be overseeing every month. I will miss him dearly at the Times, and will miss my weekly routine (which eventually shifted to after midnight, then before midnight on Saturday evenings.)

But I will forever be grateful for the years that I got to read him weekly, for the chance to have shared just once the Op-Ed section of the Times with him, and for the chance to have him validate my journey as a writer.

And now, at the height of his success, he’s an inspiration to me and writers the world over, showing us that no matter how successful you are, you can always challenge yourself to reinvent and explore.

Bon courage, Frank.