Free Born to Be Brad by Brad Goreski Page A

Leo. School was something I wanted. And I learned a valuable lesson that year: You can’t let someone take your dream away from you. My teachers rejected me, but they couldn’t deny my success in a play called Dancock’s Dance by Guy Vanderhaeghe. I portrayed a schizophrenic man-child in an asylum, a kid who believes he is the king of Germany and is sexually abused by the other patients, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the theater.

    As a theater student at George Brown College in Toronto, I dressed as Marlene Dietrich for a cabaret show, singing “Mean to Me” live. My teachers believed this undercut my talent and that I’d embarrassed myself.
    Sometimes it was all too much. One afternoon early in the third year of drama school, I stood outside one of our classrooms, crying hysterically into my hands, collapsing onto Trish’s shoulder. She was my touchstone. But as much as I tried to hide my drug use from her, she knew it was more than recreational.
    “I need help,” I said. “I need help. I can’t do this anymore.”
    Trish was holding me. She was the nonjudgmental voice of reason. “Whatever you need,” she said. “Do you want to leave? Do you need to go home?”
    I went to exactly one Cocaine Anonymous meeting, but it didn’t take. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t yet see that everything was connected. I hadn’t hit rock bottom. I still had a roof over my head. I was still holding down a job. I was still functioning. A few weeks later Trish asked me about the meeting, but I dismissed her, telling her I felt nothing. And when she tried to ask me again a few weeks later, I blew her off. I turned a deaf ear to the voice of reason.
    The only voice I heard now belonged to a man. A gorgeous man named Nick.
    G raduation was approaching, and I was out one night with a drag queen named Tiger Lily, a Pocahontas look-alike with curly black hair (her own). We were way up above the dance floor looking down at a sea of shirtless men. And there was Nick, dressed in jeans and nothing else, his eyes closed, moving to the music.
    “If I could date anyone in Toronto,” I told Tiger Lily, “it would be him.”
    A few months later, in March of 1999, she and I were at the Snowflake Ball—or some other party where cardboard snowflakes hang from the ceiling—and there was Nick again. Except this time he was walking directly toward me. I was twenty-one years old. He was forty-three and told me he had two children. It wasn’t the kind of news one expects to hear at a club where grown men are sucking on Ring Pops and wearing angel wings. But there we were.
    It felt like a scene out of a movie. I was this skinny kid with a bad Caesar haircut and semi-bad clothes, hanging out with low-rent drag queens and people who weren’t all that cool. I was always on the outside looking in. I still felt like that kid on Electric Circus, the one who was asked to dance in the window hidden behind a sheet. And then Nick showed up. And he was so handsome—like a cross between George Clooney and the guy from General Hospital, the one who plays Sonny. And he was talking to me! And I could feel so many pairs of eyes on me, wondering who I was, wondering why this man who everyone wanted was suddenly interested in me. I felt like an ugly duckling finally becoming a swan. I felt a sense of self-worth for the first time. And that night, we closed the place down.
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    “It felt like a scene out of a movie.”
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    Four months later I moved into Nick’s house, not quite in the suburbs, but not quite in the city either. I was domestic. And I was trying to be clean. While it sounds like a bad made-for-Logo movie, I have to say, the relationship started out well enough. Actually, it was kind of like that movie Stepmom, right down to the scene where Nick’s daughter and I danced in her room doing her hair. I gave her style tips, too. I took her out to lunch.
    And ours was this thrilling Gay-December relationship. He was the first man to take me on a