I had been in a few serious relationships before joining the group. In Ft. Lauderdale, I was with someone for two years. After that, it got harder. I guess this is a big part of my story as well. I knew I was gay since I was young. I didn’t know what it was called or anything but I knew it was considered wrong. At night, before I’d go to sleep, I’d start thinking about men I saw on TV and how nice it would be if they held me or if I could touch them. So I’d put these holy cards under my pillow and try to get the thoughts to go away. And they did for the most part. So that’s where the secret began. Somewhere around age 6 or 7. The first time I actually screwed around with a guy was when I was home from college on Christmas break. I was 19 and scared to death. I turned white as a sheet. I remember thinking that everyone would see it written all over me – what I had done. But they didn’t. Then, in college, I always hung around in big groups, guys and girls and we all just did our own thing and at the end of the night, everyone just went their own direction. But I’d get really drunk and there would be some other guy that was really drunk and we’d screw around and stuff… but it was after everybody got so drunk that no one knew what anyone else was doing. It took me an extra quarter to graduate, so that summer, after 90% of my friends had graduated, I went back down to Cincinnati to work for the summer. That’s where I went to my first gay club. That was it. I found out there was a whole world out there. Cincinatti was a pretty gross place to come out… pretty dark. But… when I went back to school that fall in Columbus, it was better. It was like Candyland. My old friends had gone, I was there alone. I was out. And I loved it. This was around 1981.
Around the time I first came out, my boyfriend took me to a party at this guy’s house. His name was Buck. He was this wealthy older guy. Old money. An allergist by trade but that was just a smoke screen really. He used to love having straight guys around him (he was not out) and he had this whole posse. He started inviting me to do things with them. I think for me, it was exciting to peek outside of the Ohio mentality. I was definitely attracted to people that had a worldly vision and could teach me more about the world. And he helped me in that. Also I think because I didn’t know my father very well and didn’t have anyone guiding me in that role, I think he filled that hole. When he traveled, sometimes I would go. He wanted to drive across the country once so I went with him and two other guys. No one wanted to actually drive so I told him I would. He lived in Ohio and I was always living somewhere else so I was never really around him unless he came into town. And then he’d take me and a bunch of my model friends out to dinner. That’s what I could do for him. Just be one more pretty boy he was seen with. But then it started to really hammer on my self esteem. After spending time with him, I saw how he kept setting himself up… getting these guys that were going to screw him over and then being surprised and complaining about it when it happened. It was sort of self destructive and I would always shy away from people that were self destructive. Without even thinking about it. But I started having this gross feeling inside, like I was one of the guys that was using him. Using his car… while I was in Florida, he loaned me a car to use. And when I first moved to New York he sent me money to help with my rent. And when I went to L.A., he loaned me a car to use there too. Anyway, my thoughts weren’t as clear as I’m saying right now. There was just an inner gross feeling of something I didn’t know how to deal with and it was an issue.
Luckily the universe took care of it. One night, when I was living in Laguna with a guy Buck was putting through college (a straight guy), I was driving his Datsun 280Z and some surfer dude pulled out of this dive shop off of Pacific Coast Highway. It was the middle of the night and he plowed right into me and wrecked the car. So I limped the car home. Don’t know how. And had to tell Buck the car was wrecked. Somehow this guy found out through the registry that the car was owned by a doctor, so he saw money and started saying he was going to sue Buck for all this money. Even though it was his fault! Buck was calling me up saying he was going to claim the car was stolen and all this stuff… he totally flipped out. And I thought, this is it. This is it. I knew I had to get away from that situation.
In Florida, my life was great. I’m this new model down there. I was getting all the good jobs. I was getting really ambitious. I had this beautiful boyfriend and lived right off the beach. I picked out this great jeep that Buck was loaning me (that I was planning to buy from him) Everything seemed so clear and great. And I was out also. The night life was wonderful. It seemed like my life was just a big celebration of who I was. I went to Europe for 4 months to model. Things went great there. But then when I came back to Florida, everybody said I needed to go to NY if I was going to further my career in modeling. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to make money to help my parents out. ---- At this point they weren’t doing well. Earlier my dad made good money, until the last time we moved. After he had been there a year they let him go for some “office politics” reason. He was crushed. He was 55 and it really killed him. He got really dark. ---- So anyway, I saw this as a really positive and potentially lucrative move for me. So I moved to New York.
Shortly, I met this guy visiting from LA. After his visit, he was calling me every day saying that I HAD to move out to LA. The Olympics had just happened there and he said LA is “where it’s all happening. This is the place to be. I live on the beach in Venice… come here, it’ll be great.” So I did. And it wasn’t great. This was a really bad time for me. My whole time in L.A. was a really dark time for me. This guy turned out to be a coke addict that thought we were going to have a relationship. He was really unstable and started doing this whole number on me. I had moved my whole life out to LA… trusting my instincts that that was what I should do. But my instinctual choices were getting worse and worse. I moved to LA from NY but the modeling thing wasn’t working out there (print work wasn’t really the thing you do in LA.) So I was getting more confused about what to choose and what was going on. And everything was starting to get freaky and scary. Then I moved to Laguna Beach for a while and coached girl’s gymnastics until I got a big commercial and moved back to L.A.
