Money’s on the Dresser: Escorting, Porn and Promiscuity in Las Vegas (4 page)

“Really?” asked Jennifer. “That’s nothing! Here, I’m going to show you gay porn. I stole a video from this weird couple who I babysit for.” Jennifer was a seemingly well-behaved girl, and everyone’s parents loved her, but she had a naughty streak. She would shoplift, buy me alcohol and cigarettes, and make out with girls when she got drunk at parties. She was incredibly open about her sexuality, and we spent hours talking about sex and all the things she had done with guys and girls. During my freshman year, she would take me driving in her 1986 Chevette, and we would skip school and chain-smoke menthol cigarettes while singing along to Donny Osmond in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. We were badass show-choir kids. She would steal porn from that one couple, as well as raid her brother’s porn stash. I always knew she had some porn in her bedroom, but I had no idea porn with two guys even existed. She brought out a VHS tape called
Bi Bi American Style
and fast-forwarded to the scene with two guys. The video was awful, the actors were from the early eighties and not very attractive, but I didn’t care. I was watching dicks go into asses and men kissing, sucking dicks, and eating cum. I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack from watching my first guy-on-guy sex scene. From that point on I finally knew what gay sex was all about. And I was hooked.

My sexual experiences were pretty limited during high school. At fourteen, a friend of mine spent the night after a cast party for a musical we were doing. He slept on my floor, and throughout the course of the night we talked about everything. We discussed school, sex, our families, the churches we belonged to and much more. After a few hours, I got the impression he wanted me to lie next to him, so I joined him on the floor. We had been drinking, and it got flirtatious between us as the night wore on. It took me an hour of inching toward him to finally touch him. When I finally cuddled up close to him, he didn’t do anything. It took another hour for my hand to make its way down his body and touch his dick before he pushed me off. I crawled back to bed, humiliated. I thought I had hit the jackpot, potentially finding another guy who was like me, but I was wrong and felt like a complete fool. I’m not sure if he struggled with being gay or if he had wanted something more to happen, but within a few months the entire school knew what I had done and I was devastated. I went from finally feeling somewhat sexually liberated within my group of friends and accepted at school to feeling ashamed, rejected, and the butt of many jokes for the rest of my high school years. Throughout the next few years, every time anything sexual happened between a classmate and me, it would usually end up with the other guy getting freaked out and hating me. I think they would feel shame, confusion, and guilt about what we did, and they didn’t know how to process those emotions. They’d usually end up making fun of me with everyone else, turning away from me, never looking me in the eyes again. Eventually, the name-calling would start, and the guy I had experienced a few moments of intimacy with would be with everyone else whispering faggot, homo, queer, pansy, and so on. There were a few times guys would spit on me and laugh. I had no idea what to do but keep walking and act as if nothing happened. It took a long time before I was able to let myself open up to others sexually and emotionally because of this, and for years, I would expect any guy I was with to eventually turn on me.

After my sophomore year, my older friends graduated and I was left with very few friends my own age. Things got worse and worse between my classmates and me, and the teasing got me so down I would skip at least one class every other day. Again, I thought maybe the solution was to transfer schools, and I somehow managed to talk my parents into it. My family had moved and I started classes at a school down the street from my house called Balfour Collegiate. From day one at Balfour, I worked incredibly hard not to speak to anyone, say anything during class, or talk to any teachers or do anything that would put me in a spotlight, except for joining show choir... a boy’s gotta sing, right? I completely changed the way I dressed, wearing only boring, drab solid-colored clothes. Almost everything I wore was army green or denim. It didn’t really work, though, and by the time my senior year came around I was the butt of many jokes as “the gay kid”... again! I literally stayed silent in almost every class, but the kids still saw me as a target for teasing. I would go home hurt, angry, and depressed, but I would often jerk off thinking about the guys who had ridiculed me. They were always the hot jock and popular type who I hated, yet I desperately wanted to be loved and accepted by them at the same time. Talk about self loathing homosexual, right?

At Balfour, my depression worsened, and although I was fully aware of the physical changes taking place in my body, especially my increasing sex drive, the thing I wanted most was for a guy to love and be affectionate with and who would accept me. I wanted to have sex and be sexually free, but I was more interested in an emotional connection with another guy, and neither seemed to be happening. As my depression worsened, my self-hatred grew. I hated the fact that nothing seemed to be working the way I wanted, and the only way I could escape the pain was to imagine the day I would leave home, leave the small-mindedness of Regina, and run away to a place where I could be a part of a gay community, go to gay bars, and do all those “vile” things my family and church warned me about. I remember hearing sermons and reading articles in
Focus on the Family
magazine on what the gay lifestyle was really about. They painted it out to be a life of drug-induced parties, orgies, and gay pride marches in leather harnesses waving rainbow flags. I fantasized about a day when I could be a part of all the debauchery and sin they warned me about and finally fit in. And so began my seemingly never-ending countdown until the days I would leave home and start a new life—a “gay” life.

Chapter Three

From Prairie Boy to Las Vegas Show Boy

For a year after high school, I stayed in Regina to continue studying ballet at the Royal Conservatory of Music and Dance. I was focused on becoming a professional dancer and was learning ballet, modern, and jazz anywhere from four to eight hours a day and sometimes seven days a week. I earned and saved money working at a shoe store and at a children’s daycare. Eventually I began looking at ballet schools in the United States where I could study dance and begin a new life. At nineteen years old, I was accepted to a ballet school in Torrington, Connecticut, called the Nutmeg Conservatory. I continued to work hard that year to save money and refine my ballet and modern dance technique. I would usually work up to forty hours a week and study dance in the evenings and on weekends. I wasn’t completely sold on moving to Torrington, but I knew it had to be better than Regina, and I pressed forward to get the hell out of Saskatchewan.

I packed up my things in June 2000 to move to Torrington for the Nutmeg Ballet’s Summer Intensive Dance Program. Torrington was not anything like I was hoping for. I had expected to live in a place that would have the energy of a big city and maybe a little gay culture. Instead, it looked like an old factory town that had absolutely no life in it. It was dreary, buildings were falling apart, and there was absolutely no nightlife or culture. To make the best of it, I told myself at least I was only an hour or so from New York City, and that anything was better than Regina, Saskatchewan.

That summer, things at the Nutmeg Conservatory didn’t quite work out as planned. One of the male teachers thought my talents would be better suited to dancing in the corps de ballet, similar to a chorus position in a musical, and he recommended I work with a professional ballet company in Oklahoma City. At the end of the summer, I packed up again, this time for Oklahoma City, another shitty city, but less shitty than Torrington, so I didn’t care. I was excited to be out on my own, away from the gloomy cold weather of the Saskatchewan prairies.

I ended up spending two years in Oklahoma City dancing for a small company called Ballet Oklahoma, which had about fifteen dancers. I spent a lot of time on my own, falling in and out of depression due to loneliness and boredom. Most of the other dancers in the company were older than I was, and it was difficult making a connection with anyone. I hoped my first year away from home would be similar to the college experience of parties, dating people my own age, drunken hook-ups, and debauchery, but it wasn’t. It was a quiet life of dancing five days a week and nothing too exciting on the weekends. I didn’t own a car that first year in Oklahoma City, leaving me to depend on my roommate, Tori, and the few friends I made in the company for rides. Tori was a nice Connecticut girl I had met at the Nutmeg Conservatory. She and I started at Ballet Oklahoma at the same time and decided to live together in a two-bedroom apartment on Meridian Avenue in Oklahoma City.

As far as dating and sex, my first year in Oklahoma was unspectacular. I dated a few guys and spent a lot of time online chatting on websites like gay.com or in the chat rooms on AOL and Yahoo, which were very popular at the time. That is what gay men were doing in 2000 and 2001. I was only nineteen, and couldn’t get into the bars, so I’d go in chat rooms, meet guys there, talk on the phone, and meet up in person if we were interested in each other. I dated a few guys, but nothing too serious or memorable. Now not only was I bored and lonely, but incredibly sexually frustrated and horny.

After my first contract with the ballet company expired in the summer of 2001, I got a job dancing at a theater called Discoveryland USA to perform in the musicals
Oklahoma
and
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, since the theater was located nearby in a small town called Sand Springs. Soon after that, I met a guy named Mason and started dating him.

Mason was struggling with alcohol and drug addictions, so I resisted dating him initially. Eventually I gave in because the sex was too good and what else was I supposed to do? I was living in Tulsa, doing a musical in the middle of nowhere. He drove me crazy from the moment we started hanging out. Although I had never met an alcoholic or drug user, it was clear there was something wrong with this kid. He would constantly get excessively drunk or go on crystal meth binges and not sleep for days, so we had an emotional turbulent relationship from the beginning.

Despite our rocky relationship, Mason and I spent the summer drinking Natural Ice beer and Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum and smoking a lot of weed. We were both underage so we had to sneak into gay bars. It was a fun time, but there was nothing substantial in the relationship. We were both young, Mason was dealing with his demons, and I was searching for someone to take care of me and of course have sex with on a regular basis. These issues, along with codependency, was not helpful for either one of us. At the end of the summer, I went back to dance in Oklahoma City, and Mason’s parents shipped him off to rehab in Texas.

I went back to Ballet Oklahoma in the fall to continue dancing. But my time in the company came to an abrupt end the following spring when I was let go from the company. I was asked to leave because the director sensed I did not want to be there, and he was right. My heart just wasn’t in it. I was miserable in Oklahoma City, still dealing with my sexuality and becoming a gay man. The other dancers were nice, but instead of feeling a part of the company, I felt completely alone. I was a twenty-year-old boy ready to explode out of the closet, but I had no idea how to do it. I still wasn’t even sure if being gay was acceptable and would continuously deal with the guilt and shame that had been eating away at me for so many years.

Nine months before I was let go from Ballet Oklahoma, the world watched as planes flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, I—along with the rest of the world—was confused and unsure what to make of it. The terrorist attacks caused a lot of stress and more depression and grief in me, and I didn’t know how to make sense of it all. I was in desperate need of comfort and human consolation. I had not made peace with my homosexuality, so I turned to the only other thing I knew, which was the Christianity I grew up with. After much research and prayer, I ran into the arms of an ex-gay ministry called First Stone Ministries in Oklahoma City. It “helped” people overcome same sex desires as well as other “sexual dysfunctions.”

I attended weekly counseling sessions and group meetings at First Stone Ministries—a well-known ex-gay organization—similar to the international ex gay ministry Exodus International. Along with private and group counseling sessions, we were encouraged to attend group outings where we “affirmed ourselves as men.” We would do things like fish; have barbecues, play softball, and participate in Bible studies, praise and worship services, and prayer circles. We would affirm each other as men and pray to God to remove our same-sex desires and heal our sexual deviancies as we desperately tried to reconcile our broken emotional and sexual pasts.

Some of the men in the groups struggled with other sexual dysfunctions that were not just limited to homosexuality. These men dealt with issues such as childhood sexual abuse, rape, pornography addictions. Some were child molesters, and one guy had had sex with animals on his farm growing up in Oklahoma. Some were just plain old sex addicts and chronic masturbators—the tamest of the bunch—and we all hung out together, praying to God to take away the gay, bisexuality, porn-addiction, or animal-fucking urges. We were told to steer clear of masturbation, of gay men and women, and of anything from our past that would remind us of the life we were trying to leave. We were pressured to purge our homes of any books, music, movies, magazines, and pictures that had homosexual content or reminded us of the sinful life we were fighting to leave behind. I wanted to do what I thought God wanted me to do, so I jumped in fully and became an active member. I threw away countless CDs, books, movies, pictures, and any clothes that might have been perceived as gay.

We were also instructed to “pray about” and discard any items in our home that reminded us of our past homosexual lifestyle. These could be anything: a bedspread, a decorative pillow you bought with an ex-partner, pictures of you and gay friends, gifts from gay friends, etc. After numerous cleansings of my apartment, I had barely anything left, but I guess it was what God wanted, so I felt pressured to listen and obey.