The Todd Glass Situation (7 page)

The excitement lasted two minutes. Then fear set in.

I fought through my nervousness and opened the show with my best ten minutes. The middle was Tom Wilson, visiting from L.A., where he'd moved to pursue his career. Then I returned for two more minutes to do a few more jokes and to introduce the headliner.

Jay stepped out on the stage and raised his hands to quiet the cheering audience. Watching him work those nights was like going to school for me, if school had been a place where I actually learned something. Jay was a total pro—you knew it from the moment he spoke. I had already seen plenty of comedians who began their set by trying to excite the crowd: “How's everybody doing?” But Jay simply walked out, waited for the crowd to get quiet, and moved right into his routine. “I see Nancy Reagan won the Humanitarian Award this year. Good for her, I'm glad she beat out that conniving bitch Mother Teresa.”

What followed were fifteen minutes of joke after joke, barely giving the audience a chance to breathe. When he finally paused to say, “How ya doing, Philadelphia?” the crowd erupted.

“And how about that Todd Glass,” he said. “He's a young kid, asked me for advice. Didn't know what to tell him. Stay out of prison?”

I looked out at the audience, spotting my parents and friends. I felt great. I'd finally found a place where I belonged.

The
end of my senior year was approaching. I knew I wasn't going to graduate with any kind of diploma, but that didn't seem as daunting or scary anymore. The fear of not knowing what to do was gone. I couldn't wait to get started with my new life.

Comedy Works had become a regular paying gig. It was starting to feel strange living at home with my parents, so I decided to move into an apartment in Center City with some other young comedians from the club. There were only two problems with the new arrangement: Parking was a nightmare and the apartment was on Spruce Street.

Spruce Street, I quickly learned after moving in, was Philadelphia's gay street. It sounds so funny—somehow different
cities end up with different streets that are notoriously gay. And somehow, as chance would have it, I ended up living there.

Everywhere I looked, guys were holding hands with guys. Girls were holding hands with girls. When I couldn't find a parking space nearby, I'd have to walk four or five blocks through this scene.
Is this who I am?
I thought to myself.
Is this who I'm going to be?

Again, keep in mind that it was 1983. AIDS was emerging as a deadly disease, but we had a president who wouldn't even mention it by name.

If everyone had been able to be open about who they were, I would have known that gay people come in all stripes. But the few gays I saw on TV or in popular culture tended to feel like caricatures to me, all affected speech and effeminate mannerisms. The people I passed on Spruce Street seemed to behave the same way.

“I don't care that they're gay,” I complained one night to my roommates. “But why do they have to be such a parody?”

“I'm sure there are all kinds of gay people,” one of them replied. “There are all kinds of straight people, too.”

Living in an openly gay neighborhood with clearly open-minded roommates, you'd think that this would have been a perfect opportunity for me to come out. There was another young comedienne named Ro who occasionally crashed on our couch. One night, after one of my roommates tried to hit on her, Ro confessed that she was gay.

“She was actually afraid that I wouldn't want to be friends with her anymore,” my roommate later told me, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, I couldn't believe that Rosie (last name: O'Donnell) would even be worried about something like
that. It crushed me that she would think it would even matter.”

But I understood why she was afraid. At least she had the guts to be honest about it with her friends.

I think it drove me crazy to see so many openly gay people around me, especially the ones who were my age—I secretly admired them for living honestly, while secretly hating them for acting so differently from me.

Eventually it got to be too much. I moved back home with my parents in Valley Forge, a development I found myself explaining one night to Paul Reiser.

Everyone who worked at Comedy Works loved Paul. He was hilarious, a rising star who, despite having just done the movie
Diner
, always hung out with us after his shows, taking a genuine interest in our lives. One night he asked me where I lived.

“With my parents at home,” I explained. Paul seemed confused—I still looked a lot older than I was—so I quickly added: “But I'm nineteen. That's where I belong.”

Reiser laughed and, like the nervous wreck I am, I kept going. “I used to live on Spruce Street, but, you know, it was hard with all the gay people swarming around. You know Spruce Street.”

I'm mortified now by what I felt and said back then. Clearly I was looking for some kind of response. I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised by the one I got.

“Well,” Paul said thoughtfully, “maybe someday we'll evolve enough as a society that they won't have to all live on one street.”

When
I was around thirteen, we had a pet parrot. You can train parrots to say just about anything, but the most interesting things are the words and phrases that the bird picks up on its own, a kind of fun-house mirror reflection of the home it lives in. Our bird had two favorites:

“Paul [my dad], do me a favor.”

“Maureen [my mom], I'm thirsty.”

My aunt Lil was a human being, not a parrot, but at times she seemed a little confused at what separated the two species. “Maureen,” Lil said to my mom one day, “you need to give your bird some water. He's really thirsty.”

As a thirteen-year-old, this was about the most hilarious thing I'd ever heard. “Why is that so funny?” Lil demanded.

When I stopped rolling on the floor long enough to explain to her that talking birds weren't actually using human cognitive skills to put a sentence together, but mimicking what they've heard people say, Lil got indignant. “Okay, okay!” she said. “It's not that big a deal!”

Even now, as an adult, Lil's reaction to the bird still cracks me up. I like to imagine how the conversation between her and the parrot might have continued if we hadn't enlightened her:

“Paul, do me a favor.”

“Has anyone seen Paul? The bird's looking for Paul, Maureen. Do you know where he is? The parrot needs a favor.”

“Paul, do me a favor.”

“Paul's not here right now . . . My name is Lil. Maybe there's something I can do for you?”

“Paul, do me a favor.”

“I'm heading out to the store right now. Is there something you need?”

“Paul, do me a favor.”

“I just told you—Paul isn't here.”

“Paul, do me a favor.”

“Look, I'm trying to help. But you're making it really hard.”

“Maureen, I'm thirsty.”

“Fine! I'll get you some water . . . What, you don't say thank you?”

“Maureen, I'm thirsty.”

“You know, for a bird, you're a real asshole.”

Then again, maybe there aren't as many differences between people and parrots as we think. As a teenager, I was surrounded by open-mindedness—people like my parents and Paul
Reiser. But I still felt miles away from being able to talk to any of them about my sexual feelings.

Okay,
I'd occasionally admit to myself,
you're gay.
But that was as far as I got. I buried whatever thoughts and feelings I was experiencing as fast as I could. When I look back and wonder why I felt like I had to hide from everyone, one reason stands out above all others: From a very young age I heard the word “gay” used as a pejorative term. The word—along with others like “fairy,” “homo,” and “fag”—was almost always used to express dislike or distaste, a substitute for “different,” “weird,” or “out of the ordinary.”

“That car is so gay.”

“What are you, a homo?”

“Don't be such a faggot.”

I don't think that I was being oversensitive—these were the facts, a reasonable conclusion I'd drawn from the environment I grew up in. Every time someone said those words, it felt like a paper cut. The little wounds kept building and building until all I could hear was:

“Gaygayfaggotgaysissygayhomogayfairypansygaygay . . .”

You get the idea. The crazy part, at least with the benefit of hindsight, is that most of the people who were using these words weren't really homophobic, which makes the whole situation feel even more sad. I mean, if you're a full-on homophobe, at least you're speaking in a way that's true to your feelings. But the majority of people—people who never would have consciously meant to hurt me—were using these words in a way that did. The vibe they were sending out to the world didn't match what they were carrying in their hearts. Kind of weird to think that, when it comes to words like these, the
homophobe is the one who's doing a better job of articulating his true feelings.

Even though a lot of comedians I was surrounded by were evolved and open-minded, there were plenty who weren't. I heard countless gay jokes told on and off the stage. Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay made jokes in their specials about homosexuals—sometimes even AIDS—and got big laughs.

As a comedian, you have the right to talk about whatever you want. That's the point of what we do. But at the same time, you can still be judged for what you say, by time, by your peers, or both. Watch those old Eddie Murphy specials now—there's no doubting his comedic genius and abilities, but do you think those gay jokes have really withstood the test of time? There's nothing wrong with getting into topics that are taboo or controversial; the real test is in your approach. Are you going after an easy laugh by perpetuating an old stereotype? Or are you coming at it from a new angle, using comedy as a tool that can shatter the old stereotypes and make people look at a situation in a different way? You don't have to spend money going to a comedy club to hear the same old takes on worn-out stereo-types—that kind of ignorance is easy to find in the real world.

Hearing my friends (and sometimes the people I looked up to) making those kinds of jokes just made me withdraw even more. I figured that as long as I stayed in the closet, those jokes weren't about me. I didn't fit the stereotype. Maybe it's more accurate to say that the stereotype didn't fit me, a relatively straight-acting guy who happened to be attracted to other guys. In fact, I was so sure those jokes weren't about me, I added a bit to my act where I imagined what it would be like to get pulled over by an overly effeminate cop with a lisp. I figured that if I
was really gay and the joke didn't bother me, then it was probably okay for me to use it.

Clearly I was wrong—in hindsight, it's easy to see that I was guilty of perpetuating the same stereotypes that left me so confused about my own situation—but in these early stages of my career, I was still trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Fortunately, I was getting plenty of opportunities. Comedy Works was going bananas, pulling in 300 people a night. Between there and the “one-nighters”—local bars that offered weekly comedy nights—I was performing several times a week.

I hadn't yet learned that doing good comedy means tapping into the personal, talking about the things in your life that you're passionate about. God forbid I mention how I liked things to be perfect or clean—that might give audiences the wrong (right) idea. Jokes about dating were obviously off the table, because dating wasn't something that I knew anything about.

Man, I was frustrated. I would see guys I was attracted to and couldn't say a word about it to anyone.
Just focus on the comedy,
I told myself.
You can live without the rest.

One night, after a show, I was out with some comedians getting a cheesesteak. I noticed a guy who was looking at me. I looked back at him. I don't know how I knew, but I
knew.
Or at least I thought I did.

Nothing was discussed openly. You thought you made a connection with someone and you hoped you weren't wrong. “Gaydar” hadn't been invented yet, so most of the time it was just a waiting game to see who'd make the first move.

By the way, while we're speaking about gaydar—the ability that some people claim allows them to spot a homosexual from a mile away—I think the people who say they have it are full
of shit. Everyone's quick to tell you about the time their gaydar “worked,” but I can't tell you how many people have bragged about their gaydar to me who had no idea that I was gay.
Really?
I'd think to myself.
You picking anything up right now? I bet yours needs new batteries. That's the problem . . .

Back to the cheesesteak: When my friends got up to go, I told them that I was going to walk back to my car. Instead, I just sat there for another half hour, making eye contact with the guy.

He seemed normal. A regular guy. Not overly tough, not overly feminine. I remember thinking,
This guy can't be gay.

Eventually, one of us spoke. “How ya doin'?”

“Good . . . How are you doin'?”

We made small talk for maybe another half hour before he offered to drive me back to my car. If he had been more direct, it probably would have turned me off. He would have seemed too comfortable. But the longer we sat there, feeling nervous, the more I was attracted to him. His hand somehow found its way to my knee. That was it—just a quick touch, then he took it away.

“Sorry. Did that make you uncomfortable?” he asked.