TORRENCE: FROM OHIO TO CHICAGOJP: Alright Jay, when and where were you born?
JT: Um, June 17th, 1973 in Canton, Ohio
JP: Canton, Ohio? Do you consider that a fairly small town?
JT: It’s not as small as where I grew up. It's not as big a city as Akron but it’s grown quite a bit in my lifetime…it’s the home of the Football Hall of Fame.
JP: How long did you live there?
JT: I think I was there until 6th grade. Then my parents slowly moved further into the country…as we were kids. They kept moving to more remote places. Like Canton was kind of small and then it was growing and then, when I was eleven, we moved further into the country and then that’s where I went to high school and then after that, we moved even further into the country…pretty remote…in Berlin, Ohio which is more of an Amish community with mostly farms, 45 minutes from a highway so it was pretty remote there.
JP: It is very apparent when I see you with anyone from your family that there is a very tight bond. You are all very close.
JT: Yeah…I think we’re close as a family cause my father’s family…they were coal miners…my dad grew up in the coal mines of West Virginia so his parents were then immigrants and they were poor. My father’s family was the first to get out of the coal mines and so when they did that it was a pretty big shift in their poverty…my dad and his siblings were the first to get out of high school, to get high school degrees…
JP: And that was his father’s doing, your grandparents?
JT: Yeah. I still have relatives who are in those coal mining towns and they’re really trapped in poverty. So when my grandfather left with my dad and his brothers and sisters, he got a job in a factory and they specifically were trying to break the ties of whatever cycles they saw and illiteracy that they all experienced. I had a great aunt who…she basically raised my grandmother and her and her sisters cause her mom died in childbirth but my great aunt got out and got to Cleveland. And when that happened, she got her younger sister…that would be my dad’s mom…their whole family…really helped them move to Ohio. So we…financially helped them to be there. They depended on each other a lot more than I have to now. My family was really close, especially on my dad's side.
JP: All the money that was made by everybody was brought back to the home…
JT: Kind of like that…trying to get by…yeah. So moving, especially for us when we moved into the country…we didn’t know anyone and so, my brothers and sisters, we all were pretty tight. Because we were remote, we entertained ourselves.
JP: So you had most of your elementary schooling in Canton. Private or Public?
JT: Kindergarten and First Grade were in a local public school and then my parents sent us all to a private Christian school which was…it wasn’t…a fancy private school…it was in the inner city…it was really racially diverse and…they sent us there because of the Christian aspect. I was at that school from 2nd Grade to Fifth Grade. Half the people who were there were paying for the private school and the other half were there on scholarships. There were a lot of really poor inner city kids at that school…so that was an interesting experience…and then we moved back out into public school.
JP: Often I think back about my peers growing up…I dealt with a situation where I was in a middle class upbringing but then my father left and then we were instantly pushed into a lower class income bracket within middle class surroundings. But at the time I didn't understand the differences. I was just aware that my friends were given more things and eating better food, and had lunch money, but it didn’t really hit me that my economic situation was drastically different. When you were at the private christian school did you experience the differences between the kids whose parents paid and the kids on scholarship?
JT: I didn’t really notice as a kid too much. But looking back, I notice…I mean in the second grade someone told me Santa Claus didn’t exist cause they didn’t get anything for Christmas cause they were poor. Or I remember…certain students who…you know the teacher would bring them underwear or would clean their ears because they were kind of really, really poor or had really a different home-life than I had. So I remember those things but I didn’t think anything of it, I was just like “oh”. I don’t remember thinking there was any hierarchy, not that young.
JP: Were you in theater then?
JT: Well, we did pageantry things…because of Christmas. I was in the second grade and we did a Christmas pageant. I played the prophet Isaiah and I was so into it. I remember being consumed by it. I had my lines I had to memorize and that was exciting. I got to wear a burlap sack and I was really into that. I remember the whole thing leading up to it like how nervous I was the day before and how I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t a nervous that was making me not want to do it, it was making me really happy. The year after that, they did a big Christmas event. And since I was a good reader, I got to be the lead, but I read all the lines offstage and they had other kids who couldn’t read that well perform it onstage. I was reading the script and they were lip-synching my lines.
JP: Really? [I was so excited to hear this story. Jay is known for digging into his past and making wonderful commentary on why he is what he is now and why he feels the way he does. He is able to draw from experiences that seem genuine and unique.] Did you put on different voices…?
JT: I was just the voice of one character the whole time. Freddy Freckles was a toy in a toy store. But I totally got dressed up even though no one saw me. I told my mom I really needed to wear knickers and have argyle socks. I put on freckles and nobody saw me. I was, deep down, hoping someone would see me. That was fun.
JP: Did your family come to these performances?
JT: Oh yeah everybody came. Yeah, those were fun. I think my brothers and sisters were probably in it too cause when they did it, it was a whole school thing, like all the elementary school was involved. Then our church, growing up, had the same kind of pageantry for Christmas and…probably more so in my church than in school. When I was born my parents were hippies and my dad was a musician. They became part of a thing called the Jesus Movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_movement) where a lot of hippies turned to Jesus Freaks. Which was a big movement across America at the time. My paren
ts started going to this church that was made up of all of these Amish kids who were kicked out of their church and their families…when that happens…the Amish, you’re excommunicated, you’re dead basically. So there were about twenty or so twenty year olds who created a family community. Part of the reason why they were kicked out was because they wanted to play music and stuff and you can’t do that really in the Amish church. So they were all part of this Jesus Movement and my parents were really attracted to that, these young people and that community…these young Amish people who had left the Amish church. So I grew up in that kind of really tight community cause they didn’t have families. So that actually felt a lot like family…and they had a lot of interest in the arts at that church. So there was a lot of music and they were always just trying something different. They did more plays in my church than I did in certain schools I went to…and I mean they weren’t good plays.
JP: I was going to say, what type of stuff did you do…?
JT: Every Christmas there’d be some sort of kids’ play. There’s a lot of pageantry. Most of them were based on reciting scriptures, retelling stories from the Bible in either contemporary ways or just straight up, pretending like you’re in the old times…so a lot of that dressing up in bathrobes and things. So that was always a part of my life.
JP: Was your family’s history planted in Christianity prior to your parents?
JT: Catholic! [He says with his eyes widening and a big grin.]
JP: Catholic
JT: So it was a big deal when my parents changed churches. Both of my older siblings were baptized in the Catholic church and so my dad’s brothers and sisters, my cousins went to Catholic church and they went to Catholic schools and so when my parents left, it was a big deal. It was a big deal to my grandma. They eventually accepted my parent's choice but that was a big deal…and I…she only…My grandmother in West Virginia really took to the Catholic Church…something about being in that environment…she kind of grabbed on to the Catholic church for some reason. I don’t know if there was a local church, but it’s not like our Ukrainian heritage was Catholic. My great aunt who died in Cleveland…on her deathbed she told us we were Jewish…and nobody knew that! Yeah! And nobody talks about it. She was like: your great grandfather…he would have been my great grandfather, my dad’s grandfather…who we praised because he came here, to America, and I dunno there’s a lot of folklore around this guy—I never met him. But we were just taught to respect his story. Right before my great aunt Elsie dies, she goes: "The only reason your grandfather’s here is cause he killed a man AND you’re Jewish!" And then she died. That’s pretty dramatic. She was the last Kuzmunshuk, the last one with our Ukrainian name cause she never married.
JP: Now you’re able to joke and make humor about this last minute announcement of hers, but at the time did it make waves for the family?
JT: No! We were all just like “huh?” Well, my great-grandpa left cause of the Bolshevik revolution and after that, all the landowners were sent to Siberia—I went back with my dad and my older brother to Ukraine in the last few years. We were looking for our heritage. We never found anyone with the Kuzmunshuk name—a lot of them were killed—so like, he killed a man probably because, you know, lots of people were…they were killing a lot of people then. So we don’t know the exact story…it’s pretty wild. I don’t know about the Jewish thing at all. Nobody even pursued it, I don’t know. I guess it wouldn’t really be passed down if he was Jewish because I guess Jewish faith is passed through the mother but…I don’t know. Yeah, we’ve just never done anything with that.
JP: That’s interesting for her to choose that to be the last thing she ever says.
JT: And she hadn’t lost her wits…She was just willing to talk about it.
JP: Let’s go to your home-life. Your brother is also in entertainment. (Nate Torrence) I know you guys played a lot and you had a lot of skills that you actually helped each other nurture. How did that entertainment bug come to fruition in you two?
JT: We grew up a lot sitting underneath the tables in coffeehouses as my dad and my uncle would play guitar. We were always going with him when he was playing gigs and doing his music. We were always around some form of performance or expression and so…I…I think like…my older brother, it skipped him totally. He appreciates the arts mostly because of what Nate and I do. I remember as kids that’s how we would have fun. We would make up skits or short films to give as gifts. So we were writing and performing all the time.
JP: Do you remember any of your earliest skits or films that you made?
JT: Well we did a lot of that for mother’s day and father’s day – so we would recreate how my parents met or we would do “mom, this is your life” and we would act out her whole life and things that we knew of her memories. She was a roller-skater so we would choreograph a roller-skating routine. We did that a lot growing up…all the way through high school. We would sit for hours recording new messages on our answering machine that were very dramatic, they were skits in themselves.
JP: Do you have any idea where you think this performance bug originated? You sat under tables…music…
JT: Yeah, I remember these moments when my dad would perform and they would or he would be playing his music and it’d be really moving or either I would sit there and be moved or I would know that people in the room were moved. I remember being impacted. ‘I want to do that.' But most of the stuff I made with my brother was comedy – it was all just for fun.
JP: The two of you must of had a sense of performing from birth and being together magnified and nurtured the impulse.
JT: My Dad took us to see a production of Our Town. We traveled an hour to go to Akron to see Our Town performed by a touring company. I remember going to that in the third grade and being like, “wow, there’s no set. It's in the imagination” and that was the first professional production I’d ever seen and remember thinking: ‘that was cool.' When I was seven years old my mom took me to see Olivia Newton John cause I got all A’s on my report card. I could either get a parrot or I could go see Olivia Newton John…and I took a long time to think about it. But I went and saw Olivia Newton John on the Physical Tour and I remember that as a performance…
JP: That was a very lively tour in a very colorful time (the 80's) You must have been overwhelmed by energetic images. [I am not being ironic.]
JT: I drew a lot back then. I was more into the drawing thing than I was into performing. I was just creatively bent, or whatever that is in you that appreciates it and then makes you want to express yourself. Specifically with writing, especially writing about yourself, I remember being twelve and getting upset about these kids who beat me up in school, and not knowing how to express that. I would write that stuff down, so I got into writing to help you vent, recording your thoughts…that nobody else is supposed to see. I remember that distinctly.
JP: Let's talk a little about homosexuality in terms of your adolescence. Did you know early on that you were gay?
JT: I feel like I did, yeah…I remember being five and learning what the word meant. Someone said something like 'they’re gay' or 'that’s gay' and I said something like, 'well what is that?' And they said, 'oh that’s when two men love each other.' And I remember being five and being like, “oh that makes sense.” It was said in a way that was like you’re not supposed to do that but to me I remember going, 'oh that makes sense.' And when I talked about it to my family, they asked me like…I remember certain memories from way back when I was very young, I felt certain things but didn’t know how to express them. It wasn’t sexual then, but it had to do with...closeness. I wanted a really, really close friend -- who was a guy.
JP: Did you know any gay men or or women growing up?
JT: Not that I knew then. I wrote a play in Too Much Light where…I took piano lessons from a monk in the basement of a monastery and he, he uh was Brother John and I remember really liking him and he was very quiet... it was a similar thing to the closeness that I liked and I didn’t know what that was but I remember…I remember staring at his hands, how strong his hands were…it sounds kinda creepy now, but it was in an innocent way. So I remember those feelings about Brother John and I liked being with him and he was quiet and I could make mistakes on the piano or whatever. When I came out to my family later, my dad asked me if Brother John ever did anything to me. And I was like “No”…apparently when I was a kid Brother John had left the brotherhood because of his homosexuality. He was sent away because he was struggling with homosexuality. He wasn’t struggling with like pedophilia at all…totally different. But I thought my parents were asking me those things because they had confused the two…uh, but he uh… It was really wild and uh…they liked him – he was quiet and sensitive and…I remember him going away and me not having lessons anymore. I went somewhere else but I don’t ever remember why. It was kind of abrupt. Later when they told me, I was like oh, alright. They said he had similar issues that I had.
JP: I know that you didn't "come out" to your family till much later, so we will return to this topic later. For now tell me about some of your theater experience beyond the Pageants .
JT: Around the last two years of high school, we had these parents who weren’t even teachers come in and start a drama program. They hauled it over. They were writing their own scripts and then they were performing them and it became really fun. I was only in two or three productions. These two were very into it. It was someone's mom and this guy Jim... In hindsight, when you asked me if I knew any gay people, Jim was probably gay. He had a wife and a kid but he was a florist who wore a fake ponytail. He’d wear a fake ponytail to rehearsals. He did a fashion show at the country club in Canton and one year he needed dancers so he asked me to come be his dancer. And I had to wear…he, he basically took a bunch of used clothing and put splash paint all over ’em and then put us in...garbage bags over that…and then he came out wearing a phantom of the opera mask and a candelabra and a cape and then he’d rip the garbage bags off us and we’d have to vogue. So, I’m pretty sure he was gay. Cause after that I think he moved to California and I don’t know if he took his wife with him or what kind of agreement they had but if I think about like if I knew a gay person, I’d probably guess he might have been. Yeah, anyways…so, high school…you know, what else I did in high school, though…that I think made me, in a non-traditional sense, into performing is that I did gymnastics mostly in high school and that had a real sense of performance to it cause you’re alone when you compete, you’re just doing a routine that’s very performance-like.
JP: As a freshman in high school I was on the wrestling team, but I have always had mixed feeling about competitive sports. I had a friend that was on an opposing team who beat me in a match, pretty fair and square, and in the handshake when the referee announced the winner, I smiled and said, ““good match”. My coach turned hostile, because I was smiling when I had lost, smiling at someone who had beat me. The next rehearsal he made our whole team run a few extra miles.
JT: Oh no
JP: I am aware that this is an extreme attitude on my coaches part, but it was still one of those moments in my life where I recognized that I didn't have a competitive edge. I don't really have a question for you, but having been an athlete myself I experienced sports that are very intense. And I know that gymnastics was just as intense.
JT: Yeah, gymnastics are not really a team sport. I never had that aggression. It’s more like being judged. Like you're just sitting there as a spectator being torn apart for everything you do.
JP: Competition against yourself.
JT: It’s that kind of feeling yeah…all against you. I liked that cause you carry the weight. And then the scores…you don’t even know how everyone else is doing until the end. Then they tally all those things up and let you know where you landed. It wasn’t fiercely competitive…in that sense, but it was a lot of ritual, focus and discipline. I was attracted to those things. Year-round constant training, I liked that discipline.
JP: Did you live and breath gymnastic?
JT: I totally did…yeah. It was an identity thing too. Being in junior high and not fitting in, cause gymnastics wasn’t through the high school, it was through a club, so I had this other separate world that was a safe world and I excelled at it. I didn’t have to worry about doing school things cause I was just “oh I have to go do that” So it helped to answer questions for me about not fitting in all the time.
JP: Do you feel you had an inherent interest in physical based activities?
JT: Yeah, like the flipping... I was doing that stuff off the walls, as a kid, so my parents put me into it early on, around second grade, but then I started competing when I was around twelve. That was year round and a much bigger commitment.
JP: Were you thinking…Olympics?
JT: Well, Mary Lou Retton just occurred in 1984 and I think I was obsessed with wanting to compete in the Olympics cause I remember that was a big deal; her winning a gold and Bart Connors and Mitch Gaylord they were so handsome. And that was all in LA. I remember that summer I wanted to go the Olympics.
JP: Was there any deliberate steps toward the Olympics?
JT: You know, I grew, I was too tall, so it was pretty clear early on, I didn’t have the build.
JP: Were you told that outright?
JT: No, it's just you can’t advance on certain apparatus because you…you can’t build the strength of the body, you can’t change your body type. I was around fifteen or sixteen when it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to advance that far.
JP: But it still kept you interested?
JT: Totally interested in it…the sensation of flying, I totally dug that.
JP: You had a somewhat serious injury, correct?
JT: I busted both my ankles doing uh…you do a back flip into a front flip and I reached my feet out. I was higher than where I thought so my feet extended, then they met the floor. They twisted under. So after that, when I healed, I could still do it but I couldn’t keep up the amount of practicing on it. I could still do the tricks, I just couldn’t do it three times a week. I was seventeen. I was just getting out of high school.
JP: Was gymnastics going to be a component in your choices for college?
JT: I was going to go to art school. I got into Parsons in New York and I was going to go for painting and drawing. I thought a little bit about maybe doing gymnastics but that would be at somewhere like Kent State or another state school and I was really into art and wanted to go to New York. I was heading there in the summer. Right after I graduated my sister got pregnant. She was a year older than me and she was going to be a single mom. When she got pregnant it shifted things in our family. It was a big jolt to the family. We all came together. So I didn’t end up going away that summer, I stayed. I stuck around to be with my family.
JP: Making that decision to stay home, was that difficult or was it obvious what you had to do?
JT: It was obvious…cause everyone was hurting…including me. It was a really emotional time for everyone . I don’t remember struggling with the choice. I thought in my head, “oh I’ll just go do it later” --- at that time, time isn’t like, that scary. It was like, "of course I’m going to stand here by your side and make sure that you have a coach in these classes or whatever." Whatever she would need…I wanted to be around the baby.
JP: Now that you were out of high school and still at home, what did you do while not with your sister and the baby?
JT: I started classes at a branch of Kent State and drove. I commuted there for two semesters. I really got bored of school – I didn’t even want to be in school. I didn’t do very well. I was tired of classroom learning so after that second semester, I worked through the summer and then decided it didn't wan to go back to school. I went over to the Ukraine and worked in a program similar to the peace corps except it’s uh got Christian faith base to it. It’s not like proselytizing.
JP: You were just going over to help…you didn’t have a convert's agenda?
JT: Yeah, the organization did but we worked in a children’s hospital. We cleaned things. It was right when the Ukrainians claimed their independence. They were cut of from Russia. It was a bad economic time for the Ukraine. We were in charge of recreation time with these kids who were, a lot of them, dealing with Chernobyl after-affects. They had lung problems. We would just hang with these kids. I wasn’t directly involved with orphans but other teams were. They had to take care of babies that had been given up mostly because of deformities. Some people went there and their whole job was to just hold a baby for twenty minutes a day, then hold another baby for twenty minutes. They were in that early stage where they need human contact. They were really poor. It was a hard winter.
I came home and decided I wanted to go back to school. A lot of my friends stayed there and they’re there now. I thought about staying for another year. I almost did but then realized I didn't have it in me. It was an awesome experience but I was just too weak for it. I was young but I didn't know if I could endure it, the desperation was overwhelming – You’re trying to do good but you don’t even know if what you’re doing is good. I struggled with that a lot…it was exhausting.
JP: Did your time in the Ukraine tangibly affect the course your life took when you got home.
JT: I read a lot when I was there. I read books that I hadn’t ever read in high school. When I was done with the experience in the Ukraine, I had a new desire to learn. At home I did another two semesters commuting. I took a lot of theater classes. I wrote a play that year. I took script analysis and history of theater. I had a professor that was a lit teacher and I just loved her class so I started getting interested in writing and lit. The visual arts were put to the side. Somehow I thought English was either more challenging or practical for me at the time and that art was a little bit too risky of a decision to be spending all that money on…those were the things I was making up in my head.
After that year, I applied to NYU and I applied to Wheaton…really different!
JP: How did those become your two choices?
JT: Well, NYU, they had a dramatic writing program at Tisch…I’d just written this play, I was super into that and I had had a friend who went to NYU from high school so I visited him…and I, I was still just had this attraction to New York…and…and then I had this experience in Ukraine and that really attracted me to Wheaton because they had a lot of overseas programs that had to do with third world service projects…so that attracted me to Wheaton…and you could do all your theology credits in Israel
They were very different schools. I got accepted in to both. I really struggled with which one to go to. The main decision, though, was I didn’t want to go to New York cause I thought I would die there. I didn’t know any gay people, and honestly, it was right at that time when I was in junior high and AIDS was hitting. I would have nightmares that if I lived in New York I was going to die if I ever kissed a guy. I was afraid to go to New York. I was afraid of something in me…that was going to turn myself over to that and I was going to become something I didn’t know. So, Wheaton felt safer to me, I was at a place in my life where I was trying to figure this out… I was trying to figure it out my position on faith too. There’s a lot of safety in that environment because nobody’s supposed to be having sex. So it was like buying more time to figure it out. I remember thinking that my relationship to my faith... I could have experiences that might lead me to understand this better, in a way where I could fit in to the Christian culture still. I was looking for experiences and places that might change me or help me with that issue.
JP: Wheaton, in Illinois, is known to be a very overtly religious college. Does it have a denomination?
JT: Wheaton is Evangelical but they say that they're non-denominational but... You know... Billy Graham went there, and the trustees are Evangelical…so it’s very Evangelical…which is a denomination.
[Then I sidestepped with Jay for a moment with a question I couldn't hold onto without forgetting. I thought it was important.]
JP: Was Homosexuality accepted in your parents more liberal Christianity?
JT: No, that’s one subject always tabooed I think in Christian sub-cultures, especially when I was younger, maybe now it’s changing, but it’s changing very slowly. Even secular society, has a taboo toward it, especially in American culture…it’s just adapted into the Christian culture. I don’t even remember much dialogue about it other than the occasional time it would be mentioned as…as... wrong or…even inappropriately mentioned.
JPI know your family. I know your mom and dad, I know how much they love you and accept you they way you are as their son. I didn’t want to assume their attitude towards your sexual preferences.
JT: It shifted their world… If you’re never confronted with it, then you never have a, personal perspective or relationship with the issue.
JP: For instance in the movie ‘Milk’ I began to understand that he was pushing the subject of homosexuality into the public eye, telling them to wake up and realize that more than likely they work, live, and love people that are gay.
JT: Right, right…I mean nobody ever talked that badly about it cause it. That way of life was clumped in to other things that people weren’t supposed to be doing…
JP: …right…like just not having premarital sex at all…
JT: …Or aggressive things like abortion’s wrong and so’s homosexuality.
JP: So, you’re at Wheaton… [Then I brought it back to Wheaton]
JT: Yeah. It was the first time in my life where I had a professor require me to read…uh…um, an author who was, who was gay and even talking about his faith while being gay. For the conservatism of the school and the Christian sub-culture, Wheaton can be viewed as insanely liberal. When I was there it was pretty conservative, But, the faculty was open-minded and willing to challenge us. I dunno, there’s a lot of students at Wheaton who come from a similar, sheltered place. Yet the faculty, I felt, went out of their way to shake up dogmatism and make you ask, "Why do you believe this?" They were constantly exposing us to things challenging what we took for granted in our upbringings. I really liked that about the place. In ways it was all a contradiction. It was complex and I could appreciate that because I feel like I lived a contradiction being closeted ...I can’t say I like the place because they still would not let an openly gay student be there…but it was this in-between place for me. But there is a lot of political crap that goes on there… I don’t have passionate hatred toward the place…um, some of it might be deserved though if people do have that…
JP: You wrote a play about an anti-gay letter you received as an alumni from Wheaton.
JT: Yeah, ‘Jesus place your bets’.
JP: The letter asked you to help fight the battle against homosexuality. Did you feel betrayed?
JT: It was offensive.
JP: Did you feel this letter went so far as to make a statement against what you had learned from your teachers there?
JT: It was against the entire faith for me, to get a letter like that. I feel that letter was written in the spirit of securing their finance…it was either sent out to manipulate people to give to the college, like, ‘look at us, we’re taking this on, head-on, we, we need your prayers and support…and maybe your money to fight homosexuality’ even though it didn’t straight out say that, sometimes that’s implied OR if they were going to get bad press over this, it was sent out to appease anyone who may have heard about that issue and say, like, um ‘what’s going on there? I might not donate money this year.’ I was just offended. It didn’t contradict my experience there because I, I knew when I was there, that the faculty worked under their own convictions of faith, probably butting heads sometimes against the president’s vision. Faculty would often get dismissed…or not hired because they had one class that had to do with gender issues in literature’
JP: While you were at Wheaton you had come to Chicago to see Too Much Light.
JT: Wheaton students have really liked Too Much Light. It feels like church; people are standing up, being really honest. And not only that but in Too Much Light it’s obvious that the performers believe passionately about something. All those things are attractive and similar to church in some ways. At least the church I grew up in. There’s also the shock value. Too Much Light was talking about things that I never heard expressed so openly and fearlessly. It was really cool. I never met someone who was openly gay and I went to a Too Much Light show and Dave Awl and David Kodeski had a play in called ‘Introductions’ and they asked, Is there anyone here who has never met someone who is gay?" Audience members raised their hands and then Dave and David went around and shook hands with those people. I remember feeling so freakin’ empowered amazed and validated, you know, and then also, scared.
JP: Sometimes as Neo-Futurists, I feel we get so busy, we forget that an important element of the show for people is to feel validated. The Neo-Futurarium is still an important marker in this city for people to learn how to be comfortable with themselves, not just in gay and lesbian issues, but in general, being unique, or lost, or different or odd beyond our control.
JT: Yeah, yeah, totally.
JP: What happened after Wheaton?
JT: I moved to Rogers Park [Chicago] with some friends. I only lived there for about half a year and then I moved back home to Ohio.
JP: Why did you decide to move back home?
JT: I was trying to find a job. I worked for UPS – I was the driver’s assistant – I was just kind of lost, like that after school lost, don’t know what I’m going to do. I was applying to grad schools, I applied to graduate school for film…and uh… another reason I moved back home was cause my brother and I were going to start writing and performing together. (Nate Torrence) Nate had just graduated high school. Within a month of moving home we performed our first show together. So I moved home for those reasons…and I, I…I moved home to come out…to, my family. I knew I didn’t want to do that while I was away. I didn’t think that we’d be able to navigate it not in the same place. I felt our lives would grow in different directions…so I went home and, talked, about it…and then I talked to them and talked to them and talked to them and talked to them…
JP: That’s a big thing!
JT: Yeah. They were the first people I said it out loud to…and…I never like, dated anyone or never even had a friend who was…I, I just wasn’t dealing with it and that was my first step to dealing with it was talking to them about it…so that’s why. I wasn’t dealing with it in any other way, I was just suppressing it
JP: Did you come out to then soon after returning?
JT: It took me three years, and an ulcer. I got super depressed—My life, itself, finally forced me to tell them because I was going to have a breakdown or something. My younger brother got engaged and I was like, “I’m going to be alone my whole life,” I got super depressed and was not functional, I was so sad…and so it, I knew I had to talk about it or else I didn’t know what was going to happen to me…so I sat down with my parents. And after I did that, I was probably there like another like six or so months and then I auditioned for the Neos.
(SOME THINGS TO COME IN PART II: Days in TML, Living in his car, Becoming Neo Artistic Director, Off to Grad School!, and back again with Bluebeard...)
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