For 5 Years, I Endured LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy. It Was A Living Hell.
Last week, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to end federal funding for LGBTQ+ conversion therapy, the therapy I endured in my 20s that left me contemplating suicide.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was different, even before I heard the word “gay.” I wore a ballerina leotard and red tutu when I was 5, in 1960s Selma, Indiana. I was practically an alien, beamed down to the cornfields from some exotic drag planet.
My well-intentioned parents, homophobic before that word even hit Indiana, didn’t know what to do with me. I was a bright-eyed, precocious, singing, dancing dervish with no interest in sports, Hot Wheels or toy guns. They hoped I’d grow out of it.
I learned the label for what I was when I snuck into my father’s bathroom to read the 1969 bestseller “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask.” I devoured every lurid detail about these so-called “homosexuals” and the tragic, furtive lives they were doomed to lead. It was cold comfort, but at Ieast I finally knew there were others out there like me, even if we could never be happy.
The childhood campaign to make me a Real Boy included forced work as a dairy farm hand when I was 6, military summer camp at 10, and spending sixth grade exiled to Nazareth Hall Catholic Military school. As my father hetero-splained, the discipline there would “cut the apron strings,” i.e., make me not gay. What it really made me was full of anger, afraid of straights and fiercely distrustful of authority figures and organized religion.
It was also a perfect introduction to the cruelty and bullying to come in school and in real life every time our community is trotted out to be demonized (for example, by Ron DeSantis and his “Don’t Say Gay bill,” etc.). I renounced the Straight White Male Patriarchy even before I knew those words.
My adult conversion therapy was triggered when my sister Nikki died unexpectedly following an epileptic seizure. She was 24 and I was 21, just finishing my junior year of college. Our already-dysfunctional family was both broken and broken open by her death.
I’d already come out officially, attending the first-ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights at 19; one of the proudest, most transformative events of my life. I chose a national stage to exit my closet, never to reenter it.
Or so I thought.
Most people hear “conversion therapy” and think of organizations like Exodus International. Sham counselors and therapists in private practice can be just as dangerous. Enter Bea, the architect of my conversion therapy.
My parents met Ecuadorian expats Bea and her husband Carlos while flirting with learning Spanish, hoping to become missionaries somewhere. I met Bea the summer before my senior year of college. Bea was a therapist, and even more so than my parents, deeply religious. She was also one of the most fascinating, funny and entertaining people I’d ever encountered, a bubbly confection of Charo and Dr. Ruth.
She was so fun to be around. It totally escaped me that behind her funny stories, she was studying me like a lab rat.
Once, she invited me over to meet a boy and girl my age under the guise of a casual social gathering. Years later, I discovered each was undergoing conversion therapy, and I was there like a freak in a sideshow, modeling the “before” they were each trying to leave behind while she helped them achieve their heteronormative “after.”
“The thing was, I truly needed and wanted therapy. I just didn’t know how to separate the parts I needed from the parts I didn’t.”
Days before moving in with my first boyfriend, Ken, friends of my parents threw a dinner party to celebrate our new life together, and Bea attended. I didn’t realize the real reason for the party was for Bea to find a way to invite Ken and me over the next day to launch my conversion therapy.
The next day, we sat at her table and she asked us some questions. She had us each draw a figure, give it an age and name, and write down what the figure was feeling. Based solely on that, she delivered her pronouncement: I was not gay.
According to Bea, I chose to be gay when I was 14 and needed a strong male role model. If my life were balanced and I had the chance to choose again, I would choose to be straight. Finally, even if I was gay, I couldn’t have picked a worse partner for myself than Ken.
Lying on the blue carpeting in my parent’s living room, sobbing with grief and confusion, feeling the most betrayed and violated I’d ever felt, I vowed never to see her again. Ken and I left the next day to start our lives together, still stunned by what had happened.
My fall quarter flew by. Ken and I barely made it to Christmas before breaking up, we were so haunted by Bea’s words. The one time I saw my parents, they came to see me in a production of “Sweeney Todd” and tagging along was Bea, the last person in the world I wanted to see.
Bea apologized to me for her words the previous summer. She only wanted to be friends. She encouraged me to tape my feelings and send them to her if I wanted her counsel on anything.
Back at school, I made one cassette tape about my feelings during winter quarter. I still didn’t know what to make of Bea or how to proceed to be around her. The thing was, I truly needed and wanted therapy. I just didn’t know how to separate the parts I needed from the parts I didn’t. A childhood spent raising your alcoholic parents and being bullied doesn’t usually lead to strong boundary-setting skills.
During spring break, I saw Bea every day for eight hours. She made her case against homosexuality — how it wasn’t natural and couldn’t be found anywhere in nature. She wore me down with biblical passages for every one of my challenges. We did hypnosis and desensitization and aversion exercises.
I returned to college for my last quarter a preemie-heterosexual, hoping the right exercises and prayers would make it stick. I cut all contact with my gay friends and classmates. I even had sex with a close girl friend. I moved to NYC, still pretending to be straight — but in truth, asexual, deeply wounded and totally confused.
I spent the next five years trying to maintain the pretense, ignoring my unhappiness and loneliness. Things finally erupted with Bea when I moved back to Indiana and continued therapy with her. I challenged her one day about the private information she indiscreetly shared with me about other clients of hers I knew, wondering what she told them about me. She burst into tears, and I left, totally freaked out and unsure of what to do next.
That was the last time I saw her.
A couple of years later, I mustered the courage to call a national radio call-in show to tell my story to psychiatrist Dr. Harvey Ruben. He took a deep breath, sighed, and I could hear the sadness in his voice as he offered a deeply compassionate apology for what had been done to me in the name of therapy.
He informed me that I had been the victim of serious psychological and sexual abuse, and he shared his hope that someday I could trust another therapist enough to seek help.
I hung up the phone and burst into tears, feeling heard and validated for the first time in my 30 years, the first ray of hope that I might find a way back to my true self someday.
I eventually saw a miraculous therapist (did I ever rake him across the coals during our first session). I came out again. I became a certified therapist myself, and I moved back to NYC, ostensibly to perform, but really for the gay finishing school I sorely needed.
It took me 15 years before I was able to fully explore my authentic sexuality, in my 40s.
I confronted my fears about sex and my extremely negative body image. I became a body worker, pleasure activist and sex educator — for 20 years, women (and a few men) have paid me to teach them how to give great head (and their boyfriends have thanked me!).
I’m 61 now. Eleven years ago, I moved to Madrid to marry my husband, a loving, beautiful man who is also a National Living Cultural Treasure of Spain as a flamenco dancer.
We live in the world’s largest gay neighborhood in a country that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. I launched my first music video as DaddyB, a daddy bear singer/dancer/songwriter. I’ve fully embraced the richness of my history and my place as a gay elder. I am both a warrior and a lover on behalf of my community.
I wish I could say what I went through is a relic of the past, but it’s not. For every parent who celebrates their child’s diversity, there are hundreds who support the anti-gay laws being proposed in 20 states. Twenty-nine states don’t fully protect queer Americans from discrimination. Texas Republicans just approved a platform that labels homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Gay marriage is still illegal on the books in Indiana and in many other states.
Still, Biden’s executive order against conversion therapy is an extraordinary declaration on behalf of LGBTQ+ people. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of how it could’ve helped me. It also gives me great hope for the LGBTQ+ youth now and in the future, that they may always be allowed to be their authentic selves.
"For Twenty Years, I've taught women how to give great head, and their boyfriends have thanked me!"
“Good morning, class. Welcome to Blowjobs 101. Please get out your zucchinis, put on your knee pads and let’s get started.”
Today’s instructor (me) is the last person you’d look at on the street and think, “There’s a blow job champion!” Even I find my story hard to swallow (sorry).
Whatever I’ve called my classes over the past 20 years, I’ve taught women (and a few men) how to give world-class head while also becoming self-empowered and having a blast.
It started in 2002, when I was acting at a major regional theater.
One night in my dressing room, I spilled the tea to two girlfriends on the crew about my previous night’s hot sex. I casually mentioned how this guy gushed that my blow job was “the best I’ve ever had, I swear!” (It was his second gushing that night. But not his last.)
Truth: I’m really skeptical of claims like that. When a guy’s getting blown, he’ll say practically anything. He’ll speak in tongues as long as you keep using yours.
Still, the percentage of guys who have repeatedly sworn !oh!my!god!you’re!my!best!blow!job!ever! surprises even me. If there was a commercial for my blow jobs, it would sound like those old-time toothpaste commercials: “95 out of 100 men surveyed prefer Me!”
Reviews aside, my friends got really interested when I divulged my secret: The whole time I was boning up on going down, I faked liking it ― I only learned to like it later. They begged me to teach them what I know. I invited them to come over the next afternoon. And to bring some bananas.
Suddenly I realize: If I’m going to teach them what I know, I’ll have to reveal way TMI about my triple-X sex life.
I’m not an accidental sexpert. I’ve been a very intentional slut, starting in my 40s. It’s how I counterbalanced the totally screwed-up sexual wasteland of my first 30 years.
Growing up gay in 1960s rural Indiana, a survivor of conversion therapy, I was sex-phobic, inexperienced, self-armored with excess weight, extremely lonely and deeply unhappy. That part of normal growing up where you go through all the awkward stages of dating and sexual discovery? Never had it.
I realized I had a lot to learn to become the kind of confident, out, proud, sexual gay man I wanted to be.
I take an erotic bodywork class in Chicago precisely because it terrifies me. Twenty-five strangers trading genital massage and full-body orgasms? Cringe-worthy.
But the reality? Ineffable joy and involuntary tears, mourning the pleasure I’ve denied myself all these years. I’m reborn. It’s my first lesson in one of my life’s guiding mantras: My greatest growth almost always lies in the direction of my deepest fears.
If my first 30 years were like the five stages of grief ― denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance ― then I proclaim a sixth stage for the rest of my life: Celebration!
I can’t keep living in Indianapolis, where “promiscuous” means “You’re having the sex I wish I was having” or “You’re having the sex I won’t let myself have, so you shouldn’t have it either.” Not a safe place to spread my wings or my legs.
Friends thought I was moving to New York City to pursue performing (and I did), but the real reason? I needed a gay finishing school, a place to pursue my doctorate in me.
I live (appropriately) in Hell’s Kitchen, a block from Times Square. It’s the secret to my sex life: “Location, location, location.”
I practice erotic and tantric bodywork between acting and singing gigs. I confront my body shame. I shed some weight along with my inhibitions. I enjoy more amazing lovers than I can count, and I finally realize there’s no Sky Monster waiting to swoop down to punish me for my porn-worthy life. You can fight me on this, and I’ll win: Sexual intimacy is one of the most spiritually and emotionally rewarding gifts life offers us.
I learned how to give head that usually ends with my partner exclaiming, “What the $%!# did you just do to me? Where did you learn to do that?” Usually I have no idea what I did; I’m just surrendering to the moment (and making mental notes for later).
Now I need those notes for my lesson plan.
Back in 2002, my theater friends were my very first class of oral students. I welcomed them with a bottle of wine, lighted some candles (even though it was daylight), and we got comfy. I asked what they thought about oral sex: their beliefs, experiences, fears, questions, etc. Once the nervous giggling subsided, they had a lot to say.
They had lots of insecurity about their abilities. Seems nobody (especially men) talks about this stuff with most women. I reassured them this wasn’tabout one more way for women to take care of men without getting their own needs met. Who needs a class in that?
I offered a basic male anatomy lesson (hello, bananas). Turns out most women know as little about men’s anatomy as most men know about women’s. We talked hygiene, gag reflex, deep-throating, swallowing (or not). And pillows! Pillows are your friends ― you can never have too many pillows. If you aren’t comfortable yourself, ain’t no way you can focus on someone else’s comfort.
I reminded them that the entire body is an erogenous zone, not just the obvious parts. I gave prostate massage a deep dive (see what I did there?) and discuss how to really create sexual fireworks.
I related what it is like to be on the receiving end — how intimate and vulnerable it is for a man, and the power that women possess in that scenario. I shared my favorite tips and tricks, both physical and mental.
We talked about power exchange and role-play. My Gestalt training, my lovers and my bodywork clients have taught me that sex is one of the richest playgrounds for self-discovery.
I was painfully frank about my own experience. I proudly claimed my own promiscuity, whoreishness, sexual power ― and I gave my students a safe space to claim theirs. I suspected they wanted permission, but it wasn’t mine to give. I urged them to give themselves any permission they needed. We shared sexual fantasies, and I cheer them on.
Most important, I listened. I gently encouraged my students to initiate this same kind of talk with their boyfriends. You can’t have truly great sex without great communication.
We finally reached a good place to stop ― after all, this was an entry-level course. We toasted to their future oral prowess, ate the bananas and parted ways.
The next day I felt like a deer in the headlights when each of their boyfriends tracked me down to thank me. Twice, on the same day, a straight man I didn’t know let me know he knows: (A) I’m an accomplished cocksucker, and (B) his girlfriend and I have discussed their sex life. And now I knew what they were up to last night.
I was speechless and … proud! I wracked my brain to imagine what Miss Manners would advise as the protocol for concluding this conversation.
Those encounters perfectly illustrate why I continue to teach these classes. Why I choose to walk into this awkward, vulnerable, edgy space, risking judgment to declare what I know: Everyone deserves this joy and freedom and deep communion.
Now I advertise my classes by — you guessed it — word of mouth, and usually offer them at least once a month (I keep a waitlist). Small groups, Zoom classes, private coaching or consulting—whatever works for each person and their budget.
Participants have ranged from small-town girls in their 20s who’ve never had someone to talk with to women in their 50s seeking out a temporary GBF (gay best friend) for counsel, etc. I even offer classes sometimes for gay men (sometimes I’m a present from their partners).
Some of the content has changed since 2002, and much of it has stayed the same. A gifted therapist and an expert lover share a common gift: They know how to meet, illuminate and inspire their partners where they are.
I’ve known from an early age that I was born outside “the box.” I stupidly tried to fit into that box, and thankfully I failed. Now, living outside that box is my superpower, and the box is my Kryptonite. If I can use my powers for good, sharing my truth, empowering sexual intimacy and willing the best for everyone’s relationships, well …
As long as my superhero Lycra is black, my cape has vertical stripes (slimming), my breastplate is embossed with a Swarovski banana and I have matching knee pads, I’m ready to be of service!
"I Ran Away to Disney World by Myself at 14. It Saved My Life."
Every great animated Disney film begins the same way, with someone longing: to be up where the people are, to go the ball, to find true love, to discover or recover some strength or power... Suddenly, something sparks in them, and they decide to pursue a dream, make a change, take a chance, risk a journey, and we accompany them, cheering them on.
When their happy ending comes (and of course it does, ’cause Disney) it reminds us of when our dreams have come true. For me: my first real kiss, my wedding day, my first music video release… indelible. We treasure and remember the happy endings.
But the beginnings, happy or otherwise?
It’s easy to forget that “spark” moment, when a dream first chose us (and I propose: we don’t have dreams; dreams have us). Can you remember any of those sharp-involuntary-intake-of-breath moments? Some before-it-had-words “aha”? That literal inspiration before reality let doubt creep in?
I can.
Even though it happened 50 years ago, I don’t even have to consult a calendar to recall the exact date, time, and location when my most life-changing dream had me.
Friday, Oct. 29, 1971, at 8 p.m., in Grand Rapids, Ohio.
I was 11.
We were only allowed to watch television three times the entire sixth grade year I spent in boarding school. The nuns of the Ursuline Sisters of the Sacred Heart didn’t usually allow such frivolity among the cadets of Nazareth Hall Military Academy. (Yes, I know, nuns and military school. Anyone else see the therapy bills in that future?)
I was enrolled in (read: exiled to) Catholic military school “to cut the apron strings,” or so my father hoped. I knew what that was really code for. You couldn’t grow up gay in 1960s rural Indiana with alcoholic parents (and a suicidal mother) without developing certain survival skills: a precocious sensitivity for subtext, and a keen eye for subterfuge. I overheard the whispers and caught the knowing glances between my father and Sister Mary Patrick, the principal (most definitely not my p-a-l). I recognized the military drills and mandatory early-morning masses for what they were: an all-out assault to discipline the “different” out of me and make me (gasp!) normal. I was conscripted into a system that demanded conformity: heads buzzed, shoes shined, belt buckles and buttons gleaming, and beds made with sheets so taut you could bounce a quarter off them.
I despised every part of it.
Until that fateful night.
We weren’t told what we were about to watch that autumn evening, but I knew it had to be something big.
The nuns marched us single-file in our pajamas down to the library and sat us on the floor in front of the console Zenith TV to watch a special Friday night broadcast of “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on NBC. Exactly what my spirit yearned for in the bleakness of that grayscale gulag: something unashamedly “In Living Color” (cue the peacock, flute, and harp).
I watched, intrigued, as Glen “Rhinestone Cowboy” Campbell hiked through unidentifiable scrubland, strumming his guitar and singing. I scanned anxiously for clues to his location, impatient for the “special” part to be revealed, when suddenly he stopped and looked up as a monorail passed overhead and the announcer trumpeted “The Grand Opening of Walt Disney World.”
Disney World? There was something beyond Disneyland?? How could I not have heard of this entirely new magical destination? I was so transfixed, I don’t think I even hazarded a breath. Mind. Blown.
Sad fact: growing up in the Midwest, only really rich kids got to visit far-off, magical Disneyland. I was from Muncie, Indiana, pathetically the most average town in America. Our family took sensible, educational vacations. Indian Mounds. Old Forts. Caverns. The Liberty Bell was almost too extravagant for us.
I don’t know what it was about that night: the Dickensian boarding school, knowing my father’s idea of a perfect family life didn’t include an unindoctrinated me, or realizing that I didn’t fit in anywhere (and probably never would)–-but right there and then, I decided–-no, I knew: I was going to Walt Disney World someday, no matter what it took.
And I was going to go there by myself.
Maybe it was divine inspiration. Maybe some queer angel looked down and knew this lonely, misunderstood gay boy needed a magical life-preserver to cling to during the oncoming storms of adolescence, bullying, and conversion therapy. All I know is I started acting like it was the most natural thing in the world for an 11-year-old boy to go around telling everyone he could about his upcoming solo trip to Disney World, reality be damned.
I started planning. And saving. And budgeting. Paper routes, odd jobs, and washing dishes in the school cafeteria so I could pocket my lunch money. Family friends gave me leftover Walt Disney World ticket books with the A-, B-, C- and D-tickets intact—I only had to buy my E-tickets (90 cents each). Park admission each day was—I’m not kidding—only $5.25.
Saving to stay in pricey Disney hotels would’ve delayed my trip by years, so I found the closest off-property hotel with transportation to the park, The Ramada Inn Maingate. The internet didn’t exist even in Tomorrowland, so I made my reservations by landline and paid by mail with traveler’s checks (remember those?).
I also researched everything to do with Disney World. I won’t say for certain, but if you check the main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library for magazine articles on Disney World published between 1965-1974 and can’t find any, I might know who still has them in storage in his four “My Disney World” scrapbooks.
I knew more about Disney than most of its employees.
Did you know that when Disney World opened, it boasted the ninth-largest navy in the world? I knew. That the Magic Kingdom is actually built on the second floor, with a basement full of cafeterias, costumes and characters underneath (“Utilidors”)? I could draw you a map. That water bridge they built to carry boats above cars driving below? The first of its kind in the world.
You get the picture.
It was almost 3 years (34 months and 4 days, to be exact) between that TV special and the magic carpet Eastern Airlines flight from Indianapolis to Orlando that carried me away on Monday, Sept. 2, 1974.
Five entire days at Walt Disney World, all by myself. At 14.
I’ve told this story hundreds of times, and this is where incredulity always kicks in and I hear, “Your parents let you DO that?!”
I never asked them.
They were both in the throes of their alcoholism. Home life was chaotic on the best of days. No one was clearly in charge. I’d made my plans perfectly clear for almost 3 years and worked like crazy to make them happen, and they never said I couldn’t go. As far as I was concerned, they couldn’t suddenly play their Parental Authority Cards. I certainly wasn’t going to invite them along. They would’ve been the ultimate buzzkill at T.M.M.P.O.E. (The Most Magical Place on Earth).
Nothing was going to ruin my dream. Not even school–I missed the first four days of ninth grade. I figured if I was smart enough to make this trip happen, I was smart enough to catch up on whatever I missed.
My parents drove me to the airport. I don’t know whether he did it out of support or in resignation, but my Dad surprised me as I got out of the car when he pressed a hundred dollars into my palm, gruffly telling me to be careful.
My nose was glued to the window the entire flight, hoping I could glimpse Cinderella’s Castle from the air before we landed (you can’t). The then-terminal was little more than a brick shed with oversized garage doors on one side (now it’s just used for international baggage).
I’d pre-booked Mears car service to the hotel. The front desk clerk who checked me in didn’t bat an eye–I had pre-paid, I was tall for my age, and very self-assured. I dumped my luggage and raced to catch the next complimentary van to the park. We bypassed the iconic parking lot toll booths, approached the Transportation and Ticket Center, and I got out.
After 1,039 days of planning, hoping and dreaming, I had arrived.
I recall every single moment like it was yesterday.
The monorails. The feeling of walking through the gates and realizing I was really there. Seeing Cinderella’s Castle for the first time. Walking–no, skipping–no, prancing down Main Street, U.S.A. I didn’t care who was watching or what they thought of me–this 14-year-old positively joyous chubby gay boy, finally living out his ultimate Disney fantasy. I felt like I’d just tried on the glass slipper, and it fit perfectly. I was the happiest boy on earth, in T.M.M.P.O.E.
It was heaven. I arrived every morning before opening and stayed til after closing. I rode the rides and the monorails again and again. Visited each of the hotels. Rented a little speedboat and explored the lakes. Pretended to be a guest so I could swim in the pool at the Polynesian (you could hear the music underwater!). Filled an empty suntan bottle with water from the Seven Seas lagoon, and a used Disney soft drink cup with sand from the beach to take back to Indiana (I still have both). I went wherever I wanted to go and did whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it. I was free.
I wanted to stay forever.
And before I forget: Fairy Godmothers are real. My first day there, waiting in line for The Haunted Mansion, I met Jean, an 18-year-old off-duty ticket seller searching for her boyfriend Dave, who worked inside. We struck up a conversation and she ended up riding with me. We eventually found Dave and they took me down into the Utilidors (OMG!), under their wings, and home for dinner. I saw them every day. Not only have they been two of my closest friends ever since, each of their children (and grandchildren) knows by heart the story of “Mr. Bill” and how he ran away to Disney World and became part of their family.
They say all dreams come to an end.
They lie.
I’ve visited Disney World more times than I can count (Disneyland, too). I snuck into the Disney Studios in the ’80s, had lunch in the commissary, toured the archives, and might even have snagged myself an employee nametag. I finagled (ok, appropriated) press credentials to both the grand re-opening of Disneyland’s new Tomorrowland in 1998 and the Grand Opening of the Disney/MGM Studios in 1989 (I even appear briefly in their grand opening tv special on the Disney Channel–talk about full-circle). I’ve sung in two Disney films, Pocahontas and Mulan, and in an EPCOT attraction as a singing faucet (it was embarrassingly bad). Marvin Hamlisch granted me permission to be the first artist to record his and Howard Ashman’s “Disneyland”, for my first CD–they could’ve written it about me. So many Disney stories.
I celebrate that little boy’s grit and determination–so daring and unstoppable–and sometimes I also mourn the childhood he was so desperate to escape, and the parents who were so absent (or understanding?) that they let him go.
And.
Without that suffering, I might never have longed deeply enough to summon that “spark,” take on that dream, and risk the journey that brought me the happy ending that saved my life.
I never realized that in doing so, I’d become the hero of my own Disney movie.
Some people deride impossibly happy endings with a dismissive, “That’s so Disney,” but not me. Not only do I believe in impossibly happy endings, I will proudly tell you that mine was perfectly Disney.
Last week, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to end federal funding for LGBTQ+ conversion therapy, the therapy I endured in my 20s that left me contemplating suicide.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was different, even before I heard the word “gay.” I wore a ballerina leotard and red tutu when I was 5, in 1960s Selma, Indiana. I was practically an alien, beamed down to the cornfields from some exotic drag planet.
My well-intentioned parents, homophobic before that word even hit Indiana, didn’t know what to do with me. I was a bright-eyed, precocious, singing, dancing dervish with no interest in sports, Hot Wheels or toy guns. They hoped I’d grow out of it.
I learned the label for what I was when I snuck into my father’s bathroom to read the 1969 bestseller “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask.” I devoured every lurid detail about these so-called “homosexuals” and the tragic, furtive lives they were doomed to lead. It was cold comfort, but at Ieast I finally knew there were others out there like me, even if we could never be happy.
The childhood campaign to make me a Real Boy included forced work as a dairy farm hand when I was 6, military summer camp at 10, and spending sixth grade exiled to Nazareth Hall Catholic Military school. As my father hetero-splained, the discipline there would “cut the apron strings,” i.e., make me not gay. What it really made me was full of anger, afraid of straights and fiercely distrustful of authority figures and organized religion.
It was also a perfect introduction to the cruelty and bullying to come in school and in real life every time our community is trotted out to be demonized (for example, by Ron DeSantis and his “Don’t Say Gay bill,” etc.). I renounced the Straight White Male Patriarchy even before I knew those words.
My adult conversion therapy was triggered when my sister Nikki died unexpectedly following an epileptic seizure. She was 24 and I was 21, just finishing my junior year of college. Our already-dysfunctional family was both broken and broken open by her death.
I’d already come out officially, attending the first-ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights at 19; one of the proudest, most transformative events of my life. I chose a national stage to exit my closet, never to reenter it.
Or so I thought.
Most people hear “conversion therapy” and think of organizations like Exodus International. Sham counselors and therapists in private practice can be just as dangerous. Enter Bea, the architect of my conversion therapy.
My parents met Ecuadorian expats Bea and her husband Carlos while flirting with learning Spanish, hoping to become missionaries somewhere. I met Bea the summer before my senior year of college. Bea was a therapist, and even more so than my parents, deeply religious. She was also one of the most fascinating, funny and entertaining people I’d ever encountered, a bubbly confection of Charo and Dr. Ruth.
She was so fun to be around. It totally escaped me that behind her funny stories, she was studying me like a lab rat.
Once, she invited me over to meet a boy and girl my age under the guise of a casual social gathering. Years later, I discovered each was undergoing conversion therapy, and I was there like a freak in a sideshow, modeling the “before” they were each trying to leave behind while she helped them achieve their heteronormative “after.”
“The thing was, I truly needed and wanted therapy. I just didn’t know how to separate the parts I needed from the parts I didn’t.”
Days before moving in with my first boyfriend, Ken, friends of my parents threw a dinner party to celebrate our new life together, and Bea attended. I didn’t realize the real reason for the party was for Bea to find a way to invite Ken and me over the next day to launch my conversion therapy.
The next day, we sat at her table and she asked us some questions. She had us each draw a figure, give it an age and name, and write down what the figure was feeling. Based solely on that, she delivered her pronouncement: I was not gay.
According to Bea, I chose to be gay when I was 14 and needed a strong male role model. If my life were balanced and I had the chance to choose again, I would choose to be straight. Finally, even if I was gay, I couldn’t have picked a worse partner for myself than Ken.
Lying on the blue carpeting in my parent’s living room, sobbing with grief and confusion, feeling the most betrayed and violated I’d ever felt, I vowed never to see her again. Ken and I left the next day to start our lives together, still stunned by what had happened.
My fall quarter flew by. Ken and I barely made it to Christmas before breaking up, we were so haunted by Bea’s words. The one time I saw my parents, they came to see me in a production of “Sweeney Todd” and tagging along was Bea, the last person in the world I wanted to see.
Bea apologized to me for her words the previous summer. She only wanted to be friends. She encouraged me to tape my feelings and send them to her if I wanted her counsel on anything.
Back at school, I made one cassette tape about my feelings during winter quarter. I still didn’t know what to make of Bea or how to proceed to be around her. The thing was, I truly needed and wanted therapy. I just didn’t know how to separate the parts I needed from the parts I didn’t. A childhood spent raising your alcoholic parents and being bullied doesn’t usually lead to strong boundary-setting skills.
During spring break, I saw Bea every day for eight hours. She made her case against homosexuality — how it wasn’t natural and couldn’t be found anywhere in nature. She wore me down with biblical passages for every one of my challenges. We did hypnosis and desensitization and aversion exercises.
I returned to college for my last quarter a preemie-heterosexual, hoping the right exercises and prayers would make it stick. I cut all contact with my gay friends and classmates. I even had sex with a close girl friend. I moved to NYC, still pretending to be straight — but in truth, asexual, deeply wounded and totally confused.
I spent the next five years trying to maintain the pretense, ignoring my unhappiness and loneliness. Things finally erupted with Bea when I moved back to Indiana and continued therapy with her. I challenged her one day about the private information she indiscreetly shared with me about other clients of hers I knew, wondering what she told them about me. She burst into tears, and I left, totally freaked out and unsure of what to do next.
That was the last time I saw her.
A couple of years later, I mustered the courage to call a national radio call-in show to tell my story to psychiatrist Dr. Harvey Ruben. He took a deep breath, sighed, and I could hear the sadness in his voice as he offered a deeply compassionate apology for what had been done to me in the name of therapy.
He informed me that I had been the victim of serious psychological and sexual abuse, and he shared his hope that someday I could trust another therapist enough to seek help.
I hung up the phone and burst into tears, feeling heard and validated for the first time in my 30 years, the first ray of hope that I might find a way back to my true self someday.
I eventually saw a miraculous therapist (did I ever rake him across the coals during our first session). I came out again. I became a certified therapist myself, and I moved back to NYC, ostensibly to perform, but really for the gay finishing school I sorely needed.
It took me 15 years before I was able to fully explore my authentic sexuality, in my 40s.
I confronted my fears about sex and my extremely negative body image. I became a body worker, pleasure activist and sex educator — for 20 years, women (and a few men) have paid me to teach them how to give great head (and their boyfriends have thanked me!).
I’m 61 now. Eleven years ago, I moved to Madrid to marry my husband, a loving, beautiful man who is also a National Living Cultural Treasure of Spain as a flamenco dancer.
We live in the world’s largest gay neighborhood in a country that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. I launched my first music video as DaddyB, a daddy bear singer/dancer/songwriter. I’ve fully embraced the richness of my history and my place as a gay elder. I am both a warrior and a lover on behalf of my community.
I wish I could say what I went through is a relic of the past, but it’s not. For every parent who celebrates their child’s diversity, there are hundreds who support the anti-gay laws being proposed in 20 states. Twenty-nine states don’t fully protect queer Americans from discrimination. Texas Republicans just approved a platform that labels homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Gay marriage is still illegal on the books in Indiana and in many other states.
Still, Biden’s executive order against conversion therapy is an extraordinary declaration on behalf of LGBTQ+ people. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of how it could’ve helped me. It also gives me great hope for the LGBTQ+ youth now and in the future, that they may always be allowed to be their authentic selves.
"For Twenty Years, I've taught women how to give great head, and their boyfriends have thanked me!"
“Good morning, class. Welcome to Blowjobs 101. Please get out your zucchinis, put on your knee pads and let’s get started.”
Today’s instructor (me) is the last person you’d look at on the street and think, “There’s a blow job champion!” Even I find my story hard to swallow (sorry).
Whatever I’ve called my classes over the past 20 years, I’ve taught women (and a few men) how to give world-class head while also becoming self-empowered and having a blast.
It started in 2002, when I was acting at a major regional theater.
One night in my dressing room, I spilled the tea to two girlfriends on the crew about my previous night’s hot sex. I casually mentioned how this guy gushed that my blow job was “the best I’ve ever had, I swear!” (It was his second gushing that night. But not his last.)
Truth: I’m really skeptical of claims like that. When a guy’s getting blown, he’ll say practically anything. He’ll speak in tongues as long as you keep using yours.
Still, the percentage of guys who have repeatedly sworn !oh!my!god!you’re!my!best!blow!job!ever! surprises even me. If there was a commercial for my blow jobs, it would sound like those old-time toothpaste commercials: “95 out of 100 men surveyed prefer Me!”
Reviews aside, my friends got really interested when I divulged my secret: The whole time I was boning up on going down, I faked liking it ― I only learned to like it later. They begged me to teach them what I know. I invited them to come over the next afternoon. And to bring some bananas.
Suddenly I realize: If I’m going to teach them what I know, I’ll have to reveal way TMI about my triple-X sex life.
I’m not an accidental sexpert. I’ve been a very intentional slut, starting in my 40s. It’s how I counterbalanced the totally screwed-up sexual wasteland of my first 30 years.
Growing up gay in 1960s rural Indiana, a survivor of conversion therapy, I was sex-phobic, inexperienced, self-armored with excess weight, extremely lonely and deeply unhappy. That part of normal growing up where you go through all the awkward stages of dating and sexual discovery? Never had it.
I realized I had a lot to learn to become the kind of confident, out, proud, sexual gay man I wanted to be.
I take an erotic bodywork class in Chicago precisely because it terrifies me. Twenty-five strangers trading genital massage and full-body orgasms? Cringe-worthy.
But the reality? Ineffable joy and involuntary tears, mourning the pleasure I’ve denied myself all these years. I’m reborn. It’s my first lesson in one of my life’s guiding mantras: My greatest growth almost always lies in the direction of my deepest fears.
If my first 30 years were like the five stages of grief ― denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance ― then I proclaim a sixth stage for the rest of my life: Celebration!
I can’t keep living in Indianapolis, where “promiscuous” means “You’re having the sex I wish I was having” or “You’re having the sex I won’t let myself have, so you shouldn’t have it either.” Not a safe place to spread my wings or my legs.
Friends thought I was moving to New York City to pursue performing (and I did), but the real reason? I needed a gay finishing school, a place to pursue my doctorate in me.
I live (appropriately) in Hell’s Kitchen, a block from Times Square. It’s the secret to my sex life: “Location, location, location.”
I practice erotic and tantric bodywork between acting and singing gigs. I confront my body shame. I shed some weight along with my inhibitions. I enjoy more amazing lovers than I can count, and I finally realize there’s no Sky Monster waiting to swoop down to punish me for my porn-worthy life. You can fight me on this, and I’ll win: Sexual intimacy is one of the most spiritually and emotionally rewarding gifts life offers us.
I learned how to give head that usually ends with my partner exclaiming, “What the $%!# did you just do to me? Where did you learn to do that?” Usually I have no idea what I did; I’m just surrendering to the moment (and making mental notes for later).
Now I need those notes for my lesson plan.
Back in 2002, my theater friends were my very first class of oral students. I welcomed them with a bottle of wine, lighted some candles (even though it was daylight), and we got comfy. I asked what they thought about oral sex: their beliefs, experiences, fears, questions, etc. Once the nervous giggling subsided, they had a lot to say.
They had lots of insecurity about their abilities. Seems nobody (especially men) talks about this stuff with most women. I reassured them this wasn’tabout one more way for women to take care of men without getting their own needs met. Who needs a class in that?
I offered a basic male anatomy lesson (hello, bananas). Turns out most women know as little about men’s anatomy as most men know about women’s. We talked hygiene, gag reflex, deep-throating, swallowing (or not). And pillows! Pillows are your friends ― you can never have too many pillows. If you aren’t comfortable yourself, ain’t no way you can focus on someone else’s comfort.
I reminded them that the entire body is an erogenous zone, not just the obvious parts. I gave prostate massage a deep dive (see what I did there?) and discuss how to really create sexual fireworks.
I related what it is like to be on the receiving end — how intimate and vulnerable it is for a man, and the power that women possess in that scenario. I shared my favorite tips and tricks, both physical and mental.
We talked about power exchange and role-play. My Gestalt training, my lovers and my bodywork clients have taught me that sex is one of the richest playgrounds for self-discovery.
I was painfully frank about my own experience. I proudly claimed my own promiscuity, whoreishness, sexual power ― and I gave my students a safe space to claim theirs. I suspected they wanted permission, but it wasn’t mine to give. I urged them to give themselves any permission they needed. We shared sexual fantasies, and I cheer them on.
Most important, I listened. I gently encouraged my students to initiate this same kind of talk with their boyfriends. You can’t have truly great sex without great communication.
We finally reached a good place to stop ― after all, this was an entry-level course. We toasted to their future oral prowess, ate the bananas and parted ways.
The next day I felt like a deer in the headlights when each of their boyfriends tracked me down to thank me. Twice, on the same day, a straight man I didn’t know let me know he knows: (A) I’m an accomplished cocksucker, and (B) his girlfriend and I have discussed their sex life. And now I knew what they were up to last night.
I was speechless and … proud! I wracked my brain to imagine what Miss Manners would advise as the protocol for concluding this conversation.
Those encounters perfectly illustrate why I continue to teach these classes. Why I choose to walk into this awkward, vulnerable, edgy space, risking judgment to declare what I know: Everyone deserves this joy and freedom and deep communion.
Now I advertise my classes by — you guessed it — word of mouth, and usually offer them at least once a month (I keep a waitlist). Small groups, Zoom classes, private coaching or consulting—whatever works for each person and their budget.
Participants have ranged from small-town girls in their 20s who’ve never had someone to talk with to women in their 50s seeking out a temporary GBF (gay best friend) for counsel, etc. I even offer classes sometimes for gay men (sometimes I’m a present from their partners).
Some of the content has changed since 2002, and much of it has stayed the same. A gifted therapist and an expert lover share a common gift: They know how to meet, illuminate and inspire their partners where they are.
I’ve known from an early age that I was born outside “the box.” I stupidly tried to fit into that box, and thankfully I failed. Now, living outside that box is my superpower, and the box is my Kryptonite. If I can use my powers for good, sharing my truth, empowering sexual intimacy and willing the best for everyone’s relationships, well …
As long as my superhero Lycra is black, my cape has vertical stripes (slimming), my breastplate is embossed with a Swarovski banana and I have matching knee pads, I’m ready to be of service!
"I Ran Away to Disney World by Myself at 14. It Saved My Life."
Every great animated Disney film begins the same way, with someone longing: to be up where the people are, to go the ball, to find true love, to discover or recover some strength or power... Suddenly, something sparks in them, and they decide to pursue a dream, make a change, take a chance, risk a journey, and we accompany them, cheering them on.
When their happy ending comes (and of course it does, ’cause Disney) it reminds us of when our dreams have come true. For me: my first real kiss, my wedding day, my first music video release… indelible. We treasure and remember the happy endings.
But the beginnings, happy or otherwise?
It’s easy to forget that “spark” moment, when a dream first chose us (and I propose: we don’t have dreams; dreams have us). Can you remember any of those sharp-involuntary-intake-of-breath moments? Some before-it-had-words “aha”? That literal inspiration before reality let doubt creep in?
I can.
Even though it happened 50 years ago, I don’t even have to consult a calendar to recall the exact date, time, and location when my most life-changing dream had me.
Friday, Oct. 29, 1971, at 8 p.m., in Grand Rapids, Ohio.
I was 11.
We were only allowed to watch television three times the entire sixth grade year I spent in boarding school. The nuns of the Ursuline Sisters of the Sacred Heart didn’t usually allow such frivolity among the cadets of Nazareth Hall Military Academy. (Yes, I know, nuns and military school. Anyone else see the therapy bills in that future?)
I was enrolled in (read: exiled to) Catholic military school “to cut the apron strings,” or so my father hoped. I knew what that was really code for. You couldn’t grow up gay in 1960s rural Indiana with alcoholic parents (and a suicidal mother) without developing certain survival skills: a precocious sensitivity for subtext, and a keen eye for subterfuge. I overheard the whispers and caught the knowing glances between my father and Sister Mary Patrick, the principal (most definitely not my p-a-l). I recognized the military drills and mandatory early-morning masses for what they were: an all-out assault to discipline the “different” out of me and make me (gasp!) normal. I was conscripted into a system that demanded conformity: heads buzzed, shoes shined, belt buckles and buttons gleaming, and beds made with sheets so taut you could bounce a quarter off them.
I despised every part of it.
Until that fateful night.
We weren’t told what we were about to watch that autumn evening, but I knew it had to be something big.
The nuns marched us single-file in our pajamas down to the library and sat us on the floor in front of the console Zenith TV to watch a special Friday night broadcast of “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on NBC. Exactly what my spirit yearned for in the bleakness of that grayscale gulag: something unashamedly “In Living Color” (cue the peacock, flute, and harp).
I watched, intrigued, as Glen “Rhinestone Cowboy” Campbell hiked through unidentifiable scrubland, strumming his guitar and singing. I scanned anxiously for clues to his location, impatient for the “special” part to be revealed, when suddenly he stopped and looked up as a monorail passed overhead and the announcer trumpeted “The Grand Opening of Walt Disney World.”
Disney World? There was something beyond Disneyland?? How could I not have heard of this entirely new magical destination? I was so transfixed, I don’t think I even hazarded a breath. Mind. Blown.
Sad fact: growing up in the Midwest, only really rich kids got to visit far-off, magical Disneyland. I was from Muncie, Indiana, pathetically the most average town in America. Our family took sensible, educational vacations. Indian Mounds. Old Forts. Caverns. The Liberty Bell was almost too extravagant for us.
I don’t know what it was about that night: the Dickensian boarding school, knowing my father’s idea of a perfect family life didn’t include an unindoctrinated me, or realizing that I didn’t fit in anywhere (and probably never would)–-but right there and then, I decided–-no, I knew: I was going to Walt Disney World someday, no matter what it took.
And I was going to go there by myself.
Maybe it was divine inspiration. Maybe some queer angel looked down and knew this lonely, misunderstood gay boy needed a magical life-preserver to cling to during the oncoming storms of adolescence, bullying, and conversion therapy. All I know is I started acting like it was the most natural thing in the world for an 11-year-old boy to go around telling everyone he could about his upcoming solo trip to Disney World, reality be damned.
I started planning. And saving. And budgeting. Paper routes, odd jobs, and washing dishes in the school cafeteria so I could pocket my lunch money. Family friends gave me leftover Walt Disney World ticket books with the A-, B-, C- and D-tickets intact—I only had to buy my E-tickets (90 cents each). Park admission each day was—I’m not kidding—only $5.25.
Saving to stay in pricey Disney hotels would’ve delayed my trip by years, so I found the closest off-property hotel with transportation to the park, The Ramada Inn Maingate. The internet didn’t exist even in Tomorrowland, so I made my reservations by landline and paid by mail with traveler’s checks (remember those?).
I also researched everything to do with Disney World. I won’t say for certain, but if you check the main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library for magazine articles on Disney World published between 1965-1974 and can’t find any, I might know who still has them in storage in his four “My Disney World” scrapbooks.
I knew more about Disney than most of its employees.
Did you know that when Disney World opened, it boasted the ninth-largest navy in the world? I knew. That the Magic Kingdom is actually built on the second floor, with a basement full of cafeterias, costumes and characters underneath (“Utilidors”)? I could draw you a map. That water bridge they built to carry boats above cars driving below? The first of its kind in the world.
You get the picture.
It was almost 3 years (34 months and 4 days, to be exact) between that TV special and the magic carpet Eastern Airlines flight from Indianapolis to Orlando that carried me away on Monday, Sept. 2, 1974.
Five entire days at Walt Disney World, all by myself. At 14.
I’ve told this story hundreds of times, and this is where incredulity always kicks in and I hear, “Your parents let you DO that?!”
I never asked them.
They were both in the throes of their alcoholism. Home life was chaotic on the best of days. No one was clearly in charge. I’d made my plans perfectly clear for almost 3 years and worked like crazy to make them happen, and they never said I couldn’t go. As far as I was concerned, they couldn’t suddenly play their Parental Authority Cards. I certainly wasn’t going to invite them along. They would’ve been the ultimate buzzkill at T.M.M.P.O.E. (The Most Magical Place on Earth).
Nothing was going to ruin my dream. Not even school–I missed the first four days of ninth grade. I figured if I was smart enough to make this trip happen, I was smart enough to catch up on whatever I missed.
My parents drove me to the airport. I don’t know whether he did it out of support or in resignation, but my Dad surprised me as I got out of the car when he pressed a hundred dollars into my palm, gruffly telling me to be careful.
My nose was glued to the window the entire flight, hoping I could glimpse Cinderella’s Castle from the air before we landed (you can’t). The then-terminal was little more than a brick shed with oversized garage doors on one side (now it’s just used for international baggage).
I’d pre-booked Mears car service to the hotel. The front desk clerk who checked me in didn’t bat an eye–I had pre-paid, I was tall for my age, and very self-assured. I dumped my luggage and raced to catch the next complimentary van to the park. We bypassed the iconic parking lot toll booths, approached the Transportation and Ticket Center, and I got out.
After 1,039 days of planning, hoping and dreaming, I had arrived.
I recall every single moment like it was yesterday.
The monorails. The feeling of walking through the gates and realizing I was really there. Seeing Cinderella’s Castle for the first time. Walking–no, skipping–no, prancing down Main Street, U.S.A. I didn’t care who was watching or what they thought of me–this 14-year-old positively joyous chubby gay boy, finally living out his ultimate Disney fantasy. I felt like I’d just tried on the glass slipper, and it fit perfectly. I was the happiest boy on earth, in T.M.M.P.O.E.
It was heaven. I arrived every morning before opening and stayed til after closing. I rode the rides and the monorails again and again. Visited each of the hotels. Rented a little speedboat and explored the lakes. Pretended to be a guest so I could swim in the pool at the Polynesian (you could hear the music underwater!). Filled an empty suntan bottle with water from the Seven Seas lagoon, and a used Disney soft drink cup with sand from the beach to take back to Indiana (I still have both). I went wherever I wanted to go and did whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it. I was free.
I wanted to stay forever.
And before I forget: Fairy Godmothers are real. My first day there, waiting in line for The Haunted Mansion, I met Jean, an 18-year-old off-duty ticket seller searching for her boyfriend Dave, who worked inside. We struck up a conversation and she ended up riding with me. We eventually found Dave and they took me down into the Utilidors (OMG!), under their wings, and home for dinner. I saw them every day. Not only have they been two of my closest friends ever since, each of their children (and grandchildren) knows by heart the story of “Mr. Bill” and how he ran away to Disney World and became part of their family.
They say all dreams come to an end.
They lie.
I’ve visited Disney World more times than I can count (Disneyland, too). I snuck into the Disney Studios in the ’80s, had lunch in the commissary, toured the archives, and might even have snagged myself an employee nametag. I finagled (ok, appropriated) press credentials to both the grand re-opening of Disneyland’s new Tomorrowland in 1998 and the Grand Opening of the Disney/MGM Studios in 1989 (I even appear briefly in their grand opening tv special on the Disney Channel–talk about full-circle). I’ve sung in two Disney films, Pocahontas and Mulan, and in an EPCOT attraction as a singing faucet (it was embarrassingly bad). Marvin Hamlisch granted me permission to be the first artist to record his and Howard Ashman’s “Disneyland”, for my first CD–they could’ve written it about me. So many Disney stories.
I celebrate that little boy’s grit and determination–so daring and unstoppable–and sometimes I also mourn the childhood he was so desperate to escape, and the parents who were so absent (or understanding?) that they let him go.
And.
Without that suffering, I might never have longed deeply enough to summon that “spark,” take on that dream, and risk the journey that brought me the happy ending that saved my life.
I never realized that in doing so, I’d become the hero of my own Disney movie.
Some people deride impossibly happy endings with a dismissive, “That’s so Disney,” but not me. Not only do I believe in impossibly happy endings, I will proudly tell you that mine was perfectly Disney.