Shazbot, I Should be Timothy Hutton by Now!

It’s true; I graduated from high school in 1981 at the age of seventeen assuming that I would transfer seamlessly from my senior drama class right into Hollywood super-stardom. After all, Mork and Mindy was on my thirteen-channel, 32’’ television set, and Ordinary People was at the multiplex – it seemed like a no-brainer. Hey – I was a young, decent looking, feather-haired, guy next-door type. I had a stack of black and white, commercial composites stuffed inside my brand new, leatherette portfolio. Not to mention I’d had my crooked teeth fixed to near Pepsodent perfection – not cosmetically of course, because braces would have only slowed my meteoric rise to fame. No, rather I took the cheaper more expedient route of having my flawed grill artfully airbrushed on my 8 x 10 glossies.

So, with all of these things going for me I thought surely – in the broad spectrum of entertainment from boob tube sitcoms to big screen dramas – there was undoubtedly a key light out there somewhere with my name on it just waiting to find me.

All I needed was a break.

Of course I also thought it couldn’t possibly hurt to have a fallback plan, so just in case my star didn’t rise quite as swiftly as expected I also applied to my local university – as a theatre major. I know, as fallback plans go a degree in theatre arts might not seem like a sensible choice, but it bears repeating – I was seventeen.

So for the next few years I floundered – in college, in my relationships, and in the business.

In school, I dated a boy, and then a girl, and then a boy again. I skipped classes, refused to crack my textbooks, and subsequently found myself cycling on and off of academic probation. I even made an attempt to transfer to San Francisco State University for a semester. The relocation was really to be close to a guy that I’d met while on a short vacation there. In nine short months, however, I had withdrawn from class, the guy had moved on, and I headed south again to LA. Back in Tinseltown I took some commercial workshops, did some equity waiver theatre, and relentlessly pursued some kind of professional representation. In retrospect, I was like a very ineffectual eighties version of James Franco. I was attempting all things – a social life, a college education, and a career – and succeeding at none of them. I was James Flunko. In parachute pants and a racer-back tank no less.

I can sum up this early period of my acting career in three short anecdotes that clearly exemplify how I perceived Hollywood, and how Hollywood’s perception of me began to impact my self-image.

Anecdote One: Party Favors

In the aftermath of a play that I was in, I received a phone call from a manager. He had seen my performance, and he wanted to set up a meeting to talk with me about the possibility of representation. I was thrilled. Finally someone had recognized my potential.

This was it; the break that I’d been waiting for!

Cut to the chase: before I knew what was up, I found myself sitting on the edge of a bed having a meeting with a man wearing a frayed, terrycloth bathrobe. As we sat there atop his chenille duvet – I still fully clothed for the record – he proceeded to explain to me the gist of his managerial services. It went something like this; he would offer me entree to select, high profile parties where I would be introduced to a corral of important men who had the ability to supply me with various acting opportunities. In return for the professional kindnesses shown to me by these strangers, I was expected to willingly supply them with certain favors. Uh-huh.

I didn’t know exactly how to respond in the moment. Still very young and quasi-Catholic, I had no queer sass or business savvy. Frayed Bathrobe suggested that I simply consider his proposition before saying yes or no, and I made a quick exit. Although I had managed to keep my knickers resolutely on, they were in a morally offended and highly disillusioned twist.

Anecdote Two: Actor Light

Sometime later – after securing a manager who didn’t take meetings while reclining commando in his night clothes – I was sent on an audition for one of the major network soaps.

This was it; the break that I’d been waiting for!

Following my audition, I called my manager – per his instructions – to see if he had gotten any feedback on my reading. My manager hemmed and hawed a bit before finally telling me that the casting director had told him that I was a little “light.”

Still hopelessly green, I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Light..?

I had to press my very kind manager a bit further, but eventually he told me that “light” really meant gay.

Gay. The meaning of that was very clear. It meant that I wasn’t getting cast, and I carried that feedback – like a stiffening suit of heavy armor – with me from then on; trying to control and assess the damaging effects of my “lightness” after every audition.

Anecdote Three: Have You Ever Seen a Grown Man Naked?

Eventually I managed to get cast in something. The audition must have fallen on an unusually “heavy” day for me. It was an episode of Starman, a short-lived TV series starring Robert Hayes that was based on the 1984 movie of the same name.

This was it; the break that I’d been waiting for!

It was a very pivotal role. I played a “student” standing in the corridor of a high school. My character gets approached by an FBI agent who asks, “Where is the principal’s office?”

And then I – as student – was to reply, “Down the hall on the left.”

Yes, that was it. Just the one line, but remember, “There are no small parts…”

This particular episode was being directed by Robert Hayes himself, so when it came time to rehearse my career igniting scene, Mr. Hayes pointed out my mark on the floor in front of the long bank of lockers at the school where we were shooting and said, “Action.”

The actor playing the FBI agent approached me from behind, tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned to face him he said, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?”

I froze. Petrified. Then the laughter started; first Mr. Hayes, then the FBI agent, and finally the entire cast and crew. They had recognized me – my lightness, I thought. And there I stood, with the entire company laughing at me. This was supposed to be my big break, but instead it seemed that I was just the butt of some cruel joke. Eventually the laughter subsided and we managed to shoot the scene as written before I was released from the set.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the joke had nothing to do with me. Rather it was merely a well-timed, innocent, and very funny reference for Robert Hayes to an iconic line delivered by Peter Graves as Captain Oveur in the movie Airplane from 1980, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Unfortunately, I was just a young, closeted actor in the right place at the right time with the wrong inferiority complex.

So this was me in the heart of the New Wave, Brat Pack, Just Say No decade. I was a young man in my late teens to early twenties trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted, where I was headed, and how to get there. Not necessarily a unique or impossibly arduous journey of self-discovery. As an awkwardly maturing, artistically bent, and budding homosexual, the path I was on had been trod by many before me. And along the way there had been pit stops and safe havens established for boys like me – theatre companies, acting classes, gay bars, festivals, and parades – especially in a city as diverse and sprawling as Los Angeles.

None of these sanctuaries, however, had in place adequate fortification to offer any of us sufficient refuge from an impending, explosive pandemic. With growing frequency my surroundings would begin to morph; college classes into hospital rooms, rehearsal halls into hospices, and nightclubs and pride parades became memorials and candlelight vigils. And soon I would find myself still struggling to come of age in the unforgiving era of AIDS.