I looked at the significant relationships in my life — and I saw how I was almost always the one supporting the other guy, financially or materially.
Sometimes, it was really blatant — as with the straight guy who I met when I first moved to New York in I literally paid his rent, bought him a piano, moved him to L. The lure of sex and money began haunting me when I was 16 and my schoolmate offered to pimp me and then the first man I had sex with offered me money and that became really clear in speaking with Paul. He was tremendously supportive by preparing a script based on what I said and when I saw it, I was flabbergasted!
He had taken what I said and turned it into something authentic and beautiful. When I first delivered what Paul had written, I was moved to tears. The process of rehearsals was sometimes grueling, sometimes fun and certainly being a part of an ensemble had its fair share of challenges as each of us went through different spaces.
There was joy, upset, concern, irritation, laughter, frustration, fulfillment and anger. When we finally got into the last few weeks, something magical happened and everything seemed to come together…almost! One of our cast members was really unsure if he could deliver his piece; another was fraught with concerns with whether he even wanted to continue….
I realized that as much as this was about performance, it was also very much about my real life. About stepping away from what has haunted me and affected my whole life since I was That all the excitement of street life, of hanging out with prostitutes, living with escorts, at one point pimping, buying sex myself…well, at the end of the day, was leaving me unfulfilled.
