Barry
“Teddy, I think I’m dying.”
I am sitting on the end of a weight bench at the gym, talking to Teddy on the phone. The gym overlooks the Palm Springs Airport.
Let’s just say I’ve helped a lot of men empty their pockets before they ever reach TSA.
The airport is spread out before me. As I work out, I can see the planes coming and going, a never-ending stream of visitors
from across the world arriving in and exiting from our winter oasis.
I think of the guy I was with last night . . . Levi? Liam? Lonnie?
I know it had an L in it.
“But you can still work out even on your deathbed?” Teddy asks.
“I have to work out,” I say. “I have Nostalgia Con tonight at the convention center. That ’80s convention, remember? My agent’s
assistant says it could big for me. I need to look good for producers and pictures.”
“You still have an agent?” Teddy sounds surprised.
“Oh, my head. I’m dying, Teddy. Help me.”
I hear Teddy sigh over the phone.
“What are your symptoms, Barry?” he asks. “Besides bad eye work that will always make you look perpetually surprised.”
“I have a horrible headache. When I blink, I see spots. I think it’s a brain tumor.”
“Were you on WebMD again?” he asks. “Everything ends with a brain tumor. Even a splinter.”
I don’t answer.
“I take that as a yes,” Teddy continues. “Sweetheart, you have a migraine because you’re hungover. You see spots because you’re
dehydrated. I mean, I have a hangover just hearing that dreadful music at the gym and those loud planes taking off, and I
only had two Rose Kennedys. If you’re really worried about your health, I’d do a spot check down south. Logan did not look
like he was a poster child for abstinence.”
Logan! That was it!
“He was nice.”
“He was a senior in college, and he stole twenty dollars from my wallet.”
“That was me. I needed a venti Starbucks and oatmeal before I worked out. I’ll pay you back, I promise. I plan to sell a million
headshots tonight.”
He doesn’t say anything, but his exasperated sigh speaks volumes: Yeah, sure, you’ll pay me back. With what? The three dollars in residuals from your last commercial for no-rinse bathing wipes?
I know how you make money: The down-low straight college boys toss you some cash to keep them happy and to keep your mouth
shut. The money pipeline may have shut down from the Hollywood types you used to blackmail since everyone is gay now, but
nothing has changed for men in the closet.
“My big break is coming soon,” I continue. “I promise.”
“Your big break is going to be a shoulder considering those weights you sling around at your age,” Teddy says.
“Can I work in?”
I look up. A man as beautifully dark and chiseled as the Chocolate Mountains outside the windows is staring at me.
“Speaking of dumbbells,” Teddy says, overhearing.
“I have to go.”
“Barry . . . don’t! Have some dignity for once in your life!”
I hang up on him.
“I’m Cole.”
Cole is holding an eighty-pound dumbbell in each hand.
“Barry,” I say, lowering my voice. I stand. “Have a seat, brah.”
“Spot me?”
I move behind the bench as he lies down on his back.
This man is perfect.
He lifts the set of dumbbells into the air. I count.
“Just one more rep,” I say. “C’mon! You got it!”
The strain turns Cole’s muscled arms jiggly, as if they’re made of Jell-O, but he releases a grunt that would stop a charging
elephant in its tracks and finishes his set strong.
“Nice work, man,” I say.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
Anyone over thirty today is a daddy.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m mixing in legs today,” Cole says.
“Your legs don’t look like they need any work,” I remark.
“More my ass,” he says, giving it a slap. “It always needs work.”
My headache begins to fade.
“Back in a sec.”
I watch him walk away. I catch my reflection in the wall of mirrors.
I do not look my age, but no one’s mistaking me for thirty either.
Fifties? Perhaps.
In a dimly lit room, I can hear Teddy add. After cataract surgery. And three martinis.
I look over at Cole doing squats.
What does he see? I wonder. A father figure fantasy? A meal ticket?
I look at myself again.
What do I see? My lost youth? Another momentary distraction?
Shall I be honest, or continue to write a screenplay and present it as a documentary?
My life as a gay man runs parallel to my life as an actor: It is constant, relentless rejection based on appearance.
I wrap this rejection in a false belief that the next man—or gig—will complete me.
I lost the Golden Girls gig at the same time I lost my first real boyfriend, Kyle Moses. We were both actors, of course. I worked at the Sherman
Oaks Galleria at night, and Kyle delivered Domino’s so we could keep our days free to audition. We met as extras on Dynasty. Joan Collins could sniff out a gay man more quickly than cubic zirconium, and she introduced me to Kyle at Craft Services.
I felt like Cupid shot an arrow through my heart that day. I fell head over heels. We were like lesbians and moved in together
after three months of dating.
Kyle was from the Ozarks, a sweet boy with an all-American face, dimples you could plant tomato seeds in and a voice that
sounded like a creek of running molasses. I had what casting directors called “gay face.” In my youth, my appearance was fragile,
pretty almost, and that alone was certain death in Hollywood in the 1980s. Couple it with a voice that sounded distinctly
unmanly, and roles for me were, back then, as rare as an out actor. I have worked to change my face and voice over the years.
Kyle and I auditioned for everything. We would work for free. We just wanted to build our credentials.
We were contestants on The Price Is Right and Let’s Make a Deal, played corpses on Hill Street Blues (we held hands between takes underneath our shrouds) and servers at The Regal Beagle on Three’s Company.
And then Kyle and I both booked auditions to play Coco, neither of us believing we had a shot in the world at securing the role with such established actresses.
When I got the call from my agent that I’d won the part, I ran out to buy a bottle of champagne I couldn’t afford.
When Kyle came home and I told him the news, he threw the bottle of champagne at me from across the room, and our world—quite literally—exploded.
Kyle blamed me for the breakup. He said I was selfish for taking a role I didn’t deserve. When I left to start filming, Kyle
accused me of abandoning him.
“You will regret this, you piece of shit!” he yelled. “I hate you! And so will the world! I hope you fail!”
I did.
And when I was cut from the show, I believed I deserved that, too.
Barry Goggins, I told myself, was not a nice guy. I hurt men. So why not just make being a villain my starring role for life?
Just a few months later, I was out of work, and Kyle was starring in the hit movie Billy the Hillbilly about a country boy who avenges his family’s death. It spawned five sequels and made Kyle famous and richer than God.
I ended up on the cutting room floor, in life and love.
And so I slinked to the desert.
But that unquenchable desire to be wanted is never sated. It only grows stronger the older you get and the less time you have.
You want to leave a mark before it’s too late.
Sex and fame are drugs, and I can never get enough.
I even tried SCA for a while. Sexual Compulsives Anonymous is a twelve-step recovery program, like AA, for sexual addiction
and romantic obsession, inclusive of all sexual orientations.
The few times I went to meetings, I thought, No wonder these guys are here. They’re butt-ugly. They couldn’t get laid by a carpet installer.
Hollywood isn’t original. How many Batman reboots and teen romances can you make?
Some might say the same thing about me: trying to make a living off of a show no one even remembers I got cut out of and then performing it in drag for old queens who want to relive the past. How original.
But we were among the first. Long before RuPaul and Drag Race, The Golden Gays were bringing humor and heart back to people who desperately needed to be reminded that they were loved
and accepted, and that—despite the world telling them that we weren’t equal, didn’t deserve to have equal rights, couldn’t
marry, weren’t accepted by God—we still had more in common than what separated us.
That’s the show I wanted to bring to life.
I wanted to heal souls.
But somewhere along the way, that message got lost.
“Spot me again, Daddy?”
Cole is back, this time with hundred-pound dumbbells.
Gay men have turned themselves into walking stereotypes. I have done nothing to dispel those myths. I’ve turned myself into
the exact opposite of what Hollywood hated when I began acting.
As Cole lifts, I suddenly see this same gym as it was in the 1980s, a time when we did not stare at our phones, when we had
to look someone in the eye. There was an art to cruising: a look, a smile, a head nod.
We did not immediately ask—or dismiss—someone by asking if they were a bear or otter, twink or top, side, vers, pansexual,
asexual, bisexual, androsexual.
We once built a tight community here, inclusive for all, but over time we have turned that into a gay Hunger Games, in which we hunt one another and tear each other apart.
Our community belittles and ridicules—Too fat!
Too fem! Too poor! Too old! Not A-list!—quickly depositing one another into categorical silos in order to make ourselves feel more worthy.
But this only isolates us. We no longer meet those who are different from us, those who have battled similar wars.
Now we view each other’s differences not as a single stripe on a flag that makes us whole but as a scarlet letter.
As Cole does chest presses, he releases an ear-shattering grunt that sounds like an elephant.
I shake my head. There are even more categories for gay men who work out.
Grunting Gays—like me and Cole—are weightlifters and body builders; Cardio Queens monopolize the treadmills, elliptical machines,