Best Sex Writing 2006

The first thing to know about me and my audition for John Cameron Mitchell’s Sex Film Project is that I am not an actor. I’m not exactly a writer, either, although I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of a million words over the last nine years. I even had a literary agent, one of the best in the business. She didn’t quite manage to sell my first book, or to like any of my others, and last year I found myself delisted by her agency after submitting an experimental narrative about an affair I had with a married couple, my age, who resembled my parents.

I’m one of those people in what Hedwig would describe as their late early thirties who have not quite decided what they are going to be when they grow up. I am sufficiently panicked about that fact, and enough of a supplicant to the American cinematic cult, to have submitted an audition tape for Mitchell’s online cattle call to star in a legitimate movie with hard-core sex.

Mitchell’s planned movie wouldn’t be the first to marry artistic ambition and porn-worthy sexual explicitness. French directors in particular have been doing it for years, in movies such as Baise-Moi and Pola X. Mitchell dismisses those precedents as “de-eroticized and pretentious,” and promises to do for sex in the movies what Hedwig and the Angry Inch did for the rock opera: reinvent it. “Why can’t there be a movie that tells a strong story, is full of humor and pathos, is packed with powerful performances, and features a lot of explicit sex—hard-ons, cum and all?” ask the filmmakers on the Sex Film Project website. “We, as filmmakers, respect and love the complexity of sex and we feel it’s been cinematically hijacked by people who don’t.”

To cast the project, Mitchell invited anyone and everyone to submit a ten-minute videotape describing a real-life sexual encounter. I made a movie about my affair with the parent figures, starring me and a couple of matching X—rated blow-up dolls. I closed the tape with a clips reel that juxtaposed snippets of my violin recitals at Juilliard, where I studied for three years in my early twenties, with an erotic video I’d made of myself shaving my head and jerking off into my shorn hair. After viewing four hundred audition entries, the filmmakers invited seventeen New Yorkers and seventeen out-of-towners, including me, for a week of callbacks. The producers gave me permission to publish my diary of the experience daily on Salon.com.

Once I arrived in New York for filming, I had voice mail from John Cameron Mitchell. I called him back immediately and, overriding an internal note of caution, asked him out for a drink. He demurred—he’d been on the phone calling out-of-towners all day and into the night, answering questions and assuaging fears, and was too tired to go out. But would I like to come over to his place?

In the 0.4 seconds it took me to answer this invitation by the director at approximately midnight, my brain processed a staggering number of moral and strategic calculations. Foremost among these concerned the absurd timing with which I had managed to find a boyfriend and fall in love with him mere days after starting work on the audition tape.

In a third-date conversation about monogamy, this twenty-five—year—old beauty and philosophy Ph.D. candidate said something wildly generous, and to my ears romantic, to the effect that while he was naturally monogamous, he wouldn’t want for either of us to have sex only with each other for the rest of our lives. “That would be so limiting,” he said.

It wasn’t exactly carte blanche—carte grise maybe—but coupled with the fact that I had only known this person a week or so, and that I wanted so feverishly to be in John Cameron Mitchell’s new movie, it seemed ample justification to continue working on the audition tape. The boyfriend even helped me make it, earning credits as “assistant director #3” and “fluffer to Mr. Festa,” and played an uncredited role in which by several accounts he steals the entire movie.

But once this wave of giddiness washed away, I found myself pestered, if not plagued, by guilt. In the final days before my departure, as the reality of the audition set in, the boyfriend began to change his tune. “The thought of you having sex with someone else makes me physically sick,” he said.

Guilt accompanied me to New York, and dined out on the story of not only how I planned to betray my boyfriend, but how I would mortify my parents. How would they react when they found out I’d been engaged in a vaguely literalized Oedipal investigation these past several years of my psychotherapeutic, private, and literary life?

How would the married couple, still friends of mine, react when they found out that our affair was the subject of both my unpublished book and the audition tape I sent to JCM—incidentally, the husband’s idol? Did I flatter myself to think they might be flattered? Was I operating under the delusion that everyone would forgive me my trespasses because a few motes of residual pixie dust might float their way after I returned from my glamorous week with the crew and aspiring cast of this X—rated movie?

The dilemma was complicated by my long-standing crush on John Cameron Mitchell. Ten years ago, I felt the first jolt of starstruck longing when I saw his picture on the cover of Larry Kramer’s play The Destiny of Me. Hand pressed to chest, sensual mouth open in midsentence, his gaze aloft in a pang of youthful pathos, the actor seemed so open, so vulnerable, and so beautiful that even without my chronic problem with star-fucking, which years of therapy and fifty milligrams daily of the libidicide Zoloft have brought somewhat under control, I would have been helpless to resist him.

So how would I fare, face to face with him? If those lips wanted to kiss mine, could I refuse them? Would this be a curricular or an extracurricular kiss? Which was worse? Would I be kissing an open, vulnerable, beautiful face, or would I be kissing a director? Would I tell my boyfriend? Would I tell you?

Ten minutes past midnight, I arrived at the director’s second—floor walk-up in the West Village. All the strategic and moral calculations inspired by his invitation were briskly erased as the director extended his hand, gave me a businesslike handshake, and after showing me into the cluttered living room of his one-bedroom apartment, offered me an array of nonalcoholic beverages. I opted for water in a coffee mug, which I managed to spill on the carpet and couch only three times in the next ninety minutes.

Seated beside John Cameron Mitchell on his sofa, I had some of the typical responses to meeting a screen actor for the first time—that is, in addition to repeatedly flinging tap water all over his apartment. He’s shorter than I would have imagined. How strange, I thought, that he doesn’t walk around his apartment in a bloodstained fur coat and feathered blond wig, making lewd wisecracks and periodically breaking into heavily German-accented heavy metal. But there was also the thrill of recognition, that this was the same voice, the same eyes and sensual lips, the same prominent, virtually equilateral nose. Once or twice Hedwig peered out at me, and winked.

We talked about my fears, particularly the one about the boyfriend and his sudden metamorphosis from audition-video assistant director #3 to victim of somatic jealousy symptoms. The boyfriend was under the impression, I explained to the director, that as part of the filmmaking process cast members were supposed to become involved with each other, in an extraprofessional capacity, to establish a sexual and romantic relationship from which to build the movie.

The director gave me a look indicating that this was crazy talk and offered to call the boyfriend and assuage his fears. I dialed the boyfriend’s number and handed my cell phone to the director, who spent the next several minutes talking casually about the project, saying nice things about the audition video and the boyfriend’s cameo, and inviting him to call anytime if he had any concerns.

Thursday afternoon, a cast of thirty-four hopefuls met at the Anthology Film Archives at the corner of 2nd Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, where we spent five hours watching each other’s audition videos. After John Cameron Mitchell answered a few questions, the producer handed out three-page questionnaires that listed the thirty-four cast candidates along with four ratings: NEVER POSSIBLY, I THINK SO, DEFINITELY. With each video we were to rate the candidate based on his or her sexual attractiveness. Under each rating was room for written comments.

I understood why the filmmakers had us do this, and in fact it inspired less dread than the cast-member “dates” for which we were keeping our Friday through Sunday nights free. But as the videos started playing and people began scribbling on their ratings sheets, I began to feel almost as if I’d been duped. I’d made my video with the obvious purpose of interesting the filmmakers in me as an actor, as a storyteller, and as a sexual person. But now my peers were about to watch what I’d done and rate me based on something related but entirely more specific, which boiled down to that quintessential Internet-time courting query that my generation and adjacent ones will go to their erotic graves asking: “Hot or not?”

This was not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, supposedly voting on my artistic vision and technical prowess; it was three dozen peers contemplating whether they wanted my penis and other appendages penetrating their various orifices while John Cameron Mitchell’s crew immortalized the images for an international audience. Had I known this, would I have devoted my video to the affair I’d had with a married couple who resembled my parents?

By the time we’d watched excerpts from all the tapes, I was exhausted. How had they screened four hundred of these? When it was over, the group had undergone a palpable change; we now knew one another. We knew who the hookers were, the sluts, the creative masturbators, the Left Coast hippies, the fallen Hassidim, the Freudian basket cases. We knew whose lover was in jail; we knew who ate his own cum. We knew who looked like a girl but knew he was a boy. We knew who had been raped as children. Some videos were better than others, but each one revealed some charisma, some presence, some poignancy. “I learned from every one of these,” John said when the screening was through. “That’s why you’re here.”

When our Thursday-afternoon screening at the Archives came to an end, we were under the powerful illusion that we were family, that we would all be working together on a vital mission, and that each of us had something to offer it. For the moment the crass and consequential aspect of rating one another’s sex appeal fell to the background, as did the fact that we were not collaborating with but competing against one another, not just for a role but for John’s approval, not just for John’s approval but for John’s love, not just for John’s love, but for each other’s.

Friday morning, I woke up two hours before my first audition. Shaving in the shower, wolfing down two overcooked pork chops for breakfast, riding the 2 Express from Chambers to 14th Street, hiking across town and up to the casting office on Madison Square, I chanted mantras to myself, They like me, this is fun, this is fun, they like me, this is fun, this is fun, this is fun….

“OK, let’s have you—” He pointed to “Keith,” a burly, conventionally handsome LA guy who in his video had sat naked in front of a huge American flag and narrated a kidnapping fantasy come true. “—and you.” He pointed to me.

We sat down and John gave us our first scenario. “You’re in the waiting room out there,” he said, “and you’ve just watched the audition videos. And you know that once you’re called into the room, you’re going to have to kiss.”

The conversation started off woodenly as we compared notes on the videos and gave each other our vital stats. “How old are you?” he asked. “Thirty-two,” I answered. “What about you?” “Oh, I’m thirty-six,” he said. “I’m really old.”

My second audition was with the only other San Franciscan candidate, a boy in his mid-twenties named Jarrad whom I’ve kissed at a few parties and clubs back home. Jarrad, whose alter ego Suppositori Spelling is the reigning Miss Trannyshack, has no recollection of those encounters, but, acknowledging some alcohol-induced memory loss, doesn’t categorically deny they took place.

After Jarrad and I had performed the same initial exercise, discussing the tapes and our upcoming audition, John pulled me out into the hallway to give me my instructions for the next scene. The premise was that I was calling up a phone sex line to enact a rape fantasy—that is, that I wanted to be raped. Jarrad, playing the phone sex operator, was given his own instructions out of my earshot.

I started off trying to take this one seriously. I adopted all the poses of low status—eyes downcast, toes pointed inward, brow furrowed—and with great pathos tried to convey the message, without spelling it out, that I wanted the phone sex operator also known as Suppositori Spelling to take me against my will.

As if that wasn’t a steep enough challenge, Jarrad had suddenly become the improv partner from hell. He blocked me at every turn. Every offer I made, he dismissed; the best I could get from him was indifference. He was only following directions, it turned out—his assignment was to be a phone sex operator at the end of a long day, who’s bored with his job in general and anxious to finish up with this call in particular.

Before leaving the office, I was assigned my first date—with Jarrad. I suggested that the two of us meet for drinks at 7:30. An hour later, waiting for Jarrad to show up, I found myself struggling to justify some of the audition week activities, particularly the hazily defined liaison Jarrad and I had been assigned.

Shortly before ten P.M., my phone started vibrating in my pants pocket. JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL read the LCD. I had left him a message earlier, when Jarrad first showed up, to ask him exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing on this date. “Oh, it’s no big deal. Just get to know one another, see what the chemistry is like,” he’d said.

Deep, personal material? Overwhelmingly exhausting deep personal material? I scanned quickly over my auditions: A flat joke about John’s age. A rape fantasy with an uninterested rapist. Meanwhile the others had sat on that dingy love seat unpacking their souls and overwhelming him with pathos. This is fun, this is fun, this is fun, I had insisted all morning and into the afternoon. Perhaps I should have had a little less fun.

I was still preoccupied with what John had said about the afternoon’s auditions and quickly set about dulling that anxiety at the open bar of a club in the East Village where a number of Sex Film Project dates were ending up. In addition to our colleagues, several of New York’s most illustrious cross-dressers were there. After an hour or so I found myself crowded into a photo booth with a few others, including the legendary Justin Bond—a great performer and a genuine pseudocelebrity—as a little dime bag of cocaine made its way around. I was busy passing the bag when I felt my black cotton pants being yanked down and saw Justin Bond, seated on the photo booth stool, closing in on the kill.

I suppose I was asking for it, wearing those summery cotton pants with no underwear. A wide range of other hands, most of them attached to Sex Film Project candidates, had found their way underneath them already that night, including those of the burly, handsome Keith, whom I spent some time kissing next to the photo booth, and Jarrad, and two or three or four guys who were hanging around Jarrad. After two or three hours, the combination of the loose pants and loose guys playing in them resulted in the worst case of blue balls I’ve ever had in my life.

At around three in the morning, with Jarrad, I limped in acute pain back to the East Village apartment of a new friend of his, someone so well connected he was going to be in the Sex Film without even having to audition. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough not to feel guilty about heading back to an East Village apartment with a Sex Film cast member and candidate, but in a number of conversations with the boyfriend that day I had come to what I thought was a practical compromise to govern my sexual behavior for the week. So I explained to Jarrad that I was in a relationship with a really amazing guy at home, and that while he was tolerating this week and this date, I would have to rein it in on our date tonight: kissing and jerking off were my limits.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Jarred whispered to me as we entered his new friend’s tiny fourth—floor walk-up. I appreciated the sentiment, but it was entirely academic, because all I was capable of doing for the first twenty minutes while Jarrad and his friend went at it next to me on the bed was to hold a refrigerated bottle of Rolling Rock to my aching testicles, which were swollen to the size of Meyer lemons. Once the swelling went down and the beer was at room temperature, I jerked off, coming on Jarrad, his new friend, and his new friend’s ceiling. Then I gathered my things, kissed my date good-bye, and walked through the crisp spring dawn back to TriBeCa.

Saturday, after waking late in the afternoon, I spent the remaining daylight and early evening hours writing in this diary. Then I set out for the East Village, where I was assigned to meet, for a date, a dirty-blond, tanned guy about my age who knew the parent doppelgängers portrayed in my audition video. I was late meeting him at the Wonder Bar on East 6th Street, and worried that this had something to do with the fact that he seemed approximately as enthusiastic about being on a date with me as, say, fishing cigarette butts out of the East River with a tea strainer.

“Hot!” the friend said. It was now about eleven o’clock, and the narrow bar had filled up with Sex Film candidates and other loose characters. Auditions continued on Sunday, but this gathering in the Wonder Bar was in essence the closing ceremonies, the last official Sex Film activity for this group. For that reason, and because a number of us had seen the sun rise in unfamiliar neighborhoods that morning, the mood was several shades darker than it had been the night before; in addition to being hungover, we were starting to get paranoid. We were making calculations, weighing rumors, sizing up the competition, wondering darkly about that guy who used to be on 3rd Rock from the Sun, counting up the number of auditions and dates we were called for, trying to divine our respective futures from everything John said and the way he said it and how it compared with what he had said to the others.

My friends among the candidates were confident of their failure. Keith hadn’t been asked to audition again and was sure he’d been eliminated. Jarrad had another audition scheduled, but no date. I, by contrast, felt pretty good about being two and two for dates and auditions—I had been called to appear again at noon the next day. Then, at the Wonder Bar, a guy told me he’d been called to audition all three days, had had two dates, and had been interviewed in private by HBO for their documentary about the auditions. Into this schedule I read my doom.

No longer were we all one big happy family working in concert toward some bold and noble goal of artistic and sexual liberty. Now we were thirty-four dirty-minded siblings competing for the attention and love of a single parent who was unfailingly affectionate but neglectful by virtue of his miraculous potency, charisma, and popularity. The dinner hour was upon us, and the competition for the four or five servings of John’s stew of art, achievement, and notoriety was now as acute as our hunger for them.

I’d underestimated the seriousness of this whole venture until now. I had fallen for John’s ruse, had let him lull me into thinking this was sex therapy improv camp instead of an audition that would determine the course of the rest of my career and the rest of my life. He had lulled us, sitting in that theater at the Archives, into thinking that we were embarking on this daring adventure together, when of course most of us would be left behind. The drug of his presence and charisma was starting to wear off, and the reality of the audition, of the rejection and disappointment that were inevitably in store for most of us, was starting to hurt. As I sidled through the crowded bar, all I could remember from the week were the idiotic things that had come out of my mouth, the sentences in this diary I cringed to think he’d read. The cycle is familiar because it is so much like love, or the phase of it in which we contemplate the possibility that we are no longer loved in return. We did not come to New York to date each other; we came to New York to date John. Now we waited by the phone.

Having been shaken off by my date, the self-involved dirty blond, I milled around, making conversation with the other candidates. The flow of available small talk quickly grew infinitesimal before running completely dry. The awkwardness was keenest with the other gay guys: the most direct competition and, I increasingly thought, the most vulnerable. Throughout the week the project had produced a kind of gay superiority complex, in which we fags were chummy with John and with each other and enjoyed, if not flaunted, our majority status and our instinctual, gay-given comfort with the whole idea of fucking strangers on the one hand and fucking on film on the other.

The illusion that this majority status benefited us was one of Saturday night’s first casualties. In my conversation with John at his apartment, he had mentioned female ejaculation at least twice and said how he was becoming more and more interested in having the movie explore female sexuality. How many women, and straight men to fuck them, did the candidate pool offer John to choose from? At best a handful. Now, at the Wonder Bar’s closing ceremonies, I started envying heterosexual odds. Transgendered odds wouldn’t be bad either. If the cast list didn’t include the young blond hooker whose midvideo sex switch had mind-fucked even this gender-jaded group, I’d eat my chromosomes.

Milling around the Wonder Bar, all my gay male comrades could talk about was casting anxiety. I had a fairly long talk with “Plato,” a guy I’d met one night about a year before along with several other skinny white twentysomething chem-friendly photographers, circus performers, hookers, and drug dealers at the Los Angeles mansion of an art- and artist-collecting corporate lawyer. I’d been instantly attracted to Plato, not least because, in addition to having those smoldering rent-boy good looks, he was a writer. At the Wonder Bar we commiserated for a while about the psychic brutalities of writing, and then about the building anxiety of the week’s audition process.

Plato’s anxiety, it turned out, was more severe than my own. One of the other candidates was his boyfriend, which offered two distinctly horrifying scenarios in which one would be cast and not the other. And then there was Plato’s long-standing friendship with John, which had already weathered the director’s decision, after Plato had given what all agreed was the best audition of his life, to cast someone a little younger as Tommy Gnosis in the Hedwig movie. How would the friendship weather another disappointment at John’s hands? How did that consideration affect the chances of the rest of us? What must John be going through, weighing friendships with people he’d disappointed before, matching sexual orientations and chemistries between close friends on the one hand and people he’d never met on the other, between people who live in this atmosphere and others like me who were giddy with the novelty of it?

I was preparing to leave the Wonder Bar when Jarrad arrived, so resplendent in Suppositori Spelling drag that no one recognized him. His powder-blue knee-high fuck-me pumps added at least six inches to his height, and the makeup and colorless Wonder Woman armored top and bikini underpants with no tuck completed the metamorphosis. I was relieved to see him, then dismayed, as it became apparent that the bond we’d formed had succumbed to the oddsmaking calculation and anxiety that had poisoned the rest of the candidate pool. Jarrad fretted. Why hadn’t John assigned him a date? I shrugged my shoulders. Our subsequent small talk could have fit comfortably into a dime bag.

At a loss for words, I looked around and saw the back of a head of spiky brown and white-pepper hair on a petite frame: John. I resolved to avoid him—any interaction with the director in this crushing atmosphere could only result in misbehavior, foot-in-mouth outbreaks, and regret. A minute later the crowd had shifted so that he was right in front of me, the nape of his pale neck exposed and beckoning to me in the obscurity of the bar like a spinning aluminum lure in a murky pond. That skin seemed so naked, so inviting, so vulnerable, that my resolution to avoid John transformed into a considerably more powerful desire to kiss him, and before I could think through my actions, my lips were feeling the warmth of his neck and my tongue tasting the salt of his skin as I sucked lightly, came up for air, then kissed the spot once more.

John turned around, inquisitive but not necessarily surprised, then smiled broadly as he recognized me. He backed into me and drew my arm forward around him so that we were spooning standing up, then ground his bottom into my groin in time to the music, all the while maintaining his conversation with a woman I didn’t recognize. He bummed a puff of her cigarette, and I squeezed him to give me one too. He didn’t get it at first, until I said, into his ear, “Hook me up.” Was that pushy? He held the cigarette to my mouth and I drew in smoke, exhaled, and released him.

Walking home from the Wonder Bar, I heard something rustling in a garbage can, freshly lined with a blue plastic bag. I stood before it awhile, contemplating the hours of hunger and thirst it would take for that bag to become still. Then I did something I can only confess now that I am three thousand miles from New York and New Yorkers: I removed the liner and liberated a small rat, which scurried into the dark recesses of the West Village to scavenge and breed.

“OK, the deal is that you’re calling a sex line—” Fuck me. “—and what you want this guy to do is reenact an ideal sexual scenario you always have in your mind, a sexual touchstone for you. And the scenario could be real or imagined.”

Before he’d finished saying this into my ear I had my image. It was of the hermaphrodite in Fellini’s Satyricon. I saw this beautiful young person (not, perhaps, as illegally young as Fellini portrayed him) lying naked, exposing his pale breasts and body and micropenis, pubic hair transformed into a white froth in the refulgent summer sun on a wide slab of granite in the Yuba River where it flows through the Sierra foothills and where I spent three days one summer without leaving. I barely moved from that rock in those three days, and that’s how I envisioned the scenario with the hermaphrodite, willfully stranded in this exalted aerie, thirty feet above a diving pool in the river. Only a glimpse of this image came to me in that moment, accompanied by the beats of pipe-organ dissonances shimmering in the air like heat rising from the rock, but it told me down to the last detail everything I had to say and do for the next twenty minutes.

Oh, it started off veering toward farce, just like the others—I repeatedly had to ask Plato to make his deep voice higher, and I wound up talking dirty to him about his “little clit of a dick.” This made the director laugh out loud, as Plato is famed across nine time zones for being distinctly not little. But from hormone and dick jokes Plato’s gravity pulled us down, and at that lower altitude I was able to say a number of very involved things about the way loving him had made me feel whole, because his manifest conflict between sexes reflected the less visible conflicts within my own identity—between ways of being, self-presentation, even my passionate (not necessarily sexual) orientations. We shared the experience of feeling “neither here nor there.” I barely remember a line of the dialogue now, only this resonant memory of what it was like to feel that the words coming out of my mouth to describe my longing for this person who once loved me were having a palpable effect on the temperature and atmospheric pressure of the room.

Plato was right there with me, and I with him, feigning this heartbreak while he pretended to be the sex worker pretending to be a hermaphrodite. The dialogue went on for a long time. At Plato’s perfectly timed cue, it got dirty. Then it became sad, and I began to suspect, without saying anything about it, that the reason I missed the hermaphrodite was that the hermaphrodite was dead. Plato said something to buck me up, and I smiled painfully through an upwelling of tears. When it was over, there was a good fifteen seconds of silence. Finally, John spoke, in a husky voice, blinking back tears of his own. “That’s what this movie has to be about,” he said. “Because that person could be anybody.”

The following Monday, I flew back to San Francisco. I was not home two days before I ran into a friend—a documentary film—maker and friend of John’s for many years—who welcomed me back and asked cheerfully how the audition went. Oh, and had I heard? The movie was cast. There were only four leads. One of them was Jarrad, another was that guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun. But the information was fifth—hand, he added, so I should take it with a grain of salt.

If there’s one thing three years at the Juilliard School trained me to do, it is to smile and continue a conversation amicably after having had the wind knocked out of me by disappointment, and this is what I did with the documentary filmmaker.

That night, I lay in bed in an agitated wakefulness that exhausted not only me but my boyfriend, who had given me an ecstatic welcome home and now lay beside me, awake, as I tossed and turned. I found myself in the difficult position of begging solace not only from someone who was immensely relieved by the news that had hurt me, but from someone whom I had spent that matchless week in New York hurting.

Still, I confided in him, and he listened and did his best to comfort me. Some of his responses stung, though, as he held up a mirror before my feelings of rejection and envy. I confessed to him that as much as I wanted to be happy for Jarrad, all I could think was how difficult it would be to hear him talk about the monthlong improv workshop, about John this and John that, about the shooting schedule, the parties, the premiere.

Near dawn, I got out of bed and brought my computer to the hallway, where I e-mailed John. If my sources had it right, I wrote, I wouldn’t be coming back east for the workshop, and so I wanted to thank him for inviting me to one of the strangest and most wonderful challenges—certainly among those filed under “audition”—of my life.

Then I slept. When I woke up a few hours later there was a reply in my inbox: “Paul, I don’t know who your sources are but I AM leaning towards different people right now—partly because they are in relationships already (those things are a big deal as I discovered and you know). But absolutely nothing is for sure right now. I’m truly right in the middle of it all. Which is not to take away from how wonderful you were. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock almost killed me it was so beautiful. Thank you so much and we’ll talk. Love, JCM.”

First I felt that kick in the gut again—of course I was hoping he would refute the rumor entirely. Then I naturally enough took the intended solace in his praise, which on second glance brought me a new rush of pride. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock. The director hadn’t merely found it beautiful, he had bought it. With some stolen help from Fellini, from the transgendered blond Sex Film candidate, from those luminous bars of remembered organ music, even from John Updike (whose hooker in Rabbit, Run had a “brass froth” of pubic hair), and aided by Plato’s openness and immediacy, I had spontaneously written and performed a fic—tion and passed it off as memory. If only for a twenty-minute audition, I’d surpassed my most grandiose fantasies about this venture. I did not leave New York a celebrity, pseudo or otherwise; I didn’t even leave with a part. But for those twenty minutes of sex and pathos on that battered love seat next to Plato, I was an actor.

The days went by, the sting of rejection dulled, and the final cast list came out. (Plato and his boyfriend, the transgendered hooker and the boy who fucked his bleeding girlfriend, the guy who had three audition calls, two dates, and a private interview with HBO, the Chinese-Canadian woman who had played Korean in the Hedwig movie, the guy who sent in an audition tape because he was “a complete whore” and a few more for good measure, but not Jarrad and not that guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun.) I couldn’t help thinking about another homosexual ingenue from the provinces who came to New York hoping to rise to stardom on the stage with the help of her forty-year-old idol.

Wasn’t I a slightly less evil twenty—first—century version of Eve Harrington? I’ll grant that the antiheroine of All About Eve plotted her course with malice and subterfuge, and that she, unlike me, completed it successfully. But both of us sat on a couch on Broadway and told our idol a startlingly sad story of love lost, made that idol cry, and made that idol believe our lies.

And though Eve fed off souls greater than her own for the sake of her career and artistry, while I merely held out my hand for that nourishment in earnestness and hope, we shared a dangerous instability. Both of us were searching for an identity we could not manifest on our own, but had to have conferred: by our respective mentors, by the stage, by fame. Both of us were a fraud, or felt like one, skilled at imitation, a personal palimpsest onto which any character or effect could be written.

Initially, I wondered whether this audition would expose me, my fraudulence, my incapacity to act truly under the imaginary circumstances of the play or in the reality of my own life. Or would they discover me—see me for who I really was and make me a star?

“Honey, there’s a step in between, which is ‘I accept myself as a real person,’ ” a close friend told me in response to all of this. I did, and I do, on some level. But there is something in me, the part of me hung up on celebrity and John’s praise, the part of me crushed by his rejection, that does not accept the reality of who I am.

The theatrical fable of Eve Harrington’s encounter with the great Margo Channing is told as a lesbian vampire story, the younger actress sucking the creative and erotic life out of her mentor. The passionate feelings I felt for John were real—but they were also inextricable from the work he did and the gifts he could have chosen to bestow on me. As a lifelong collector of mentors, of substitute parents—whether movie directors or musical pedagogues or swinging bisexual couples, all of whom I feel compelled to write about in public and in intimate detail—I both hate this conflict of motive and passion and accept it as the inevitable consequence of being called. As for the pleasures and hazards of being chosen—those are once more deferred.