Shortly thereafter Doogie ends, and you don’t land another guest spot for a few years, and not another very special guest spot until 2000. That’s when you appear on Will and Grace as the leader of an ex-gay conversion therapy group whom Sean Hayes tries to out. Your public sexual status at the time is closeted-but-suspicious, so it makes for an interesting week. You love the cast and admire how well they work together, but given where you are in your personal life you’re a little freaked out to be playing a character like that on what’s widely seen as the gay-friendliest program on TV. It seems like a big bold move, but when it comes out no one bats an eye. You are happy to maintain your low eye-batting average.
Then you do a very special episode of the Howard Stern–produced Son of the Beach. Here’s how special: the episode is called “Queefer Madness.” You kid you not. You play a member of David Arquette’s biker gang. You get to make out with the super-hot-but-very-cool Jaime Bergman. You are confused why you’re offered a role like that. It turns out that the part was written for your once good friend Stephen Dorff expressly because he wanted to make out with Jaime Bergman. Then at the last minute for some reason he couldn’t do it, so he suggested you. And that’s how you get to suck face with David Boreanaz’s future wife.
The next year you shoot a very special episode of Touched by an Angel in Salt Lake City. You have a sweet, wholesome part in a sweet, wholesome show. That night you receive an “in-room massage” from an anonymous gentleman you meet on AOL. Ah, the irony.
You do a very special episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. You play a guy who captures a woman and then bores a hole in her brain with a drill bit. It’s one of the first times in your life you get to do that.
Two years later you appear on a very special episode of Big Brother, which is particularly gratifying for you because you’re obsessed with that show. You love the whole idea of filling a house with strangers and cameras, of people knowing they’re being filmed all the time and yet inevitably losing sight of that along the way amid all the playing around and hooking up and voting off. One night you’re at home when a friend calls and says, “Did you see what just happened? Go on Big Brother, watch the live feed!” One of the greatest players of all time, Will Kirby, a/k/a Dr. Will, who is awesome and hot and sort of a villain, is bored and talking to one of the outside cameras and saying that his favorite actor in the world is Neil Patrick Harris. Which is so meta, because your favorite show is Big Brother, and your favorite player is Dr. Will. It’s one of the coolest moments of your life up to that point. And then next week the producers call asking if you want to be on it. Well, duh. You do a Secret-Santa-in-July thing, sneaking into the house in the middle of the game, waking people up and giving them presents. When you sneak into Dr. Will’s room and rouse him he admits, upon questioning, to having morning wood. Man, is it fun to see your Big Brother man-crush’s little brother full-throttle.
And finally you do a very, very, very special episode of Sesame Street in 2008. Seriously, this is very special—the bucket-list check-off of all bucket-list check-offs. Your life partner (you’ll meet him later) is friendly with an amazing actress named Kerry Butler, whose husband is one of the executive producers of Sesame Street, Joey Mazzarino. You all become friends, and one day you get a call: “Hey, would you ever want to be on Sesame Street?” Well, doy! They say, “We want you to be a character called the Shoe Fairy, who grants wishes in shoes. Abby Cadabby and Sully would sing, and you would appear and sing a song called ‘Shoes!’ ” You say, “I’m in, but may I make one suggestion? Can we change the name Shoe Fairy, so it doesn’t emphasize the ‘fairy’ so much? Because it’s me, I wouldn’t want any confusion or distraction about the gay association with the word ‘fairy.’ ” So they turn the noun into an adjective and you become the Fairy Shoeperson, and record this great song and wear a crazy costume made of shoelaces all down the front and part your hair in the middle and speak with a borscht belt accent for no good reason. Acting with puppets is the best. It’s another type of magic show. As you perform you peer down and see the puppeteers smooshed below at odd angles, wearing headbands with microphones, staring at little tiny monitors with scripts taped to them. As always, you love being made privy to the secret machinery behind the process. And as (almost) always, you love seeing how absolutely flawless and magical it winds up looking on TV.
It’s one of the best days of your life. The kids you will soon have will enjoy watching the tape of that.
* * *
To work with Sesame Street again, go HERE.
If you are really enjoying making short appearances on a variety of different TV shows, go HERE.
If you yearn for the legitimacy of stage work, or are just jonesin’ for some hot manlove, go HERE.
* * *
1Granted, several times you get to third base, but that’s because you’re assisting in a birth.
2Murder, not writing.
Despite your love for the stage you are far too busy rescuing patients from a variety of camera-ready ailments to appear on it. But when Doc Howser hangs up his stethoscope you are eager to once again tread the boards, for the first time since high school. In rapid succession you star in James Lapine’s Luck, Pluck and Virtue at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and Jon Robin Baitz’s The End of the Day in Los Angeles.
They’re both great roles, but they prove mere preludes to the first great event of your stage career, and one of the most pivotal events of your life. In 1997, while shooting a movie in Boston, you attend the opening night of the first national tour of Rent. As is your wont, you seek out and befriend members of the cast. They are every bit as diverse and bohemian as the characters they play. They are black and white and brown and skinny and fat and butch and gothy and gay and supergay and wonderful and creative and welcoming and you love them, and you love the world they inhabit, and dammit, you want in.
So a few months later, when the producers announce the formation of a second national tour, you audition for it. No halfhearted, half-assed audition here—you go full heart and total ass. Your audition song is Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” ’cuz it’s edgy and mentions “junkies and closet queens.” And you get the role of the narrator, Mark Cohen. Overjoyed, you go down to La Jolla and begin an unforgettable, life-changing experience.
There’s a reason actors who’ve done Rent speak of it in such personal, reverent tones. When you act in Rent you have to own its ideals: no day but today; forget regret or life is yours to miss; there’s only us, there’s only this. You instantly embrace the beautiful worldview of the show, a view only deepened by the poignancy of the tragic death of its author, Jonathan Larson. Your director, Michael Greif, has been with the show since its inception. He understands it better than anyone, and with a few exceptions the people he has cast are not just amazing actors but amazing souls. No one judges; no one condemns; no one feels hampered by other people’s notions of what you’re supposed to be. And of course it’s very free sexually. You’re very flirty with lots of people who are very flirty with you. You make out with one of the understudies; you have an affair with the girl playing one of the leads. And both on- and offstage, there’s lots of representations of gay: proud gay, happy gay, defiant gay.
So you hook up with a dude.
* * *
If you want to hook up with a dude, go HERE.
If you want to rock out onstage even harder and more transgressively, go HERE.
If you’re not ready for that yet, but are still interested in pursuing a life in theater and/or learning titillating gossip about Kelsey Grammer, go HERE.
If this whole thing is getting too gay for you, snort a line of coke off a stripper’s ass HERE.
Here’s a peculiar and rather disappointing fact about you: you’re not much good at remembering the intimate details of your sexual history. To be honest, you’re not much good at remembering the broad generalities either. You are not by nature a hedonist, sensualist, or Casanova, and so when one day you look back on your lif
e you will find you don’t have particularly vivid memories of where you’ve stuck your stuff. And you will realize that part of the reason for that quasi-amnesia—perhaps most of it—is that you spent much of your life trying to engage in entirely the wrong type of stuff-sticking.
But your first gay hookup, that you will remember vividly. His name is Andy, he’s in Rent with you, and from the moment you see him you kinda sorta know it might go that way. One night during previews he lures you back to his place with the “I’ll happily give you a back massage if you want one” line. (Even then you knew that was a line.) In fairness, you do really need a massage because you do feel genuinely, physically beat the eff up from the kind of hard dancing you have to do in Rent—the kind with lots of explosive movements and writhing gestures and … well, you can see how the show can’t help but get you feeling sexperimental.
So you go to his place, and he starts rubbing you, and whoops, his hand wanders, and whoops, your hips rotate, and hey, look what the two of you find yourselves doing just because it happened to happen this way, and you have your fun, and you’re lying there post-boytally, and in the wake of your “bisexual” breakthrough at the Landmark Forum a year earlier you know you’re supposed to be thinking Of course, now it all makes sense! Finally, this feels so right! But that’s not what you’re actually feeling. It’s less an escape from self than a brutal collision with it. The excitement and anxiety of what’s happening drives you into an even more analytic, introspective, meta-angsty place than usual. Any chance of surrendering to and thus enjoying the moment is cut off by the constant internal monologue now set to hyperdrive: No one can know, you can’t tell anyone, this can’t happen again but what if it does …
On the plus side, you did have an orgasm, which, like Andy himself, is nice to come by.
Andy accompanies you on several more tentative dips into the Great Sea of Gay. When Rent is over you stay with him in New York on your frequent trips to see Broadway shows. He continues to offer you “massages,” and you continue to allow him to give them, and sometimes it doesn’t lead to something else, but sometimes it does. It’s like a friends-with-benefits situation, with the benefits somewhat limited. The two of you walk around the West Village like bros and then at night sometimes you cuddle up. It’s hardly a relationship, but it’s a necessary tentative first step toward a new life, and it’s great to be doing it in New York. The physical reality of a new and vibrant city makes it feel like a safer place to engage in authentic self-exploration, and not just sexual either. Are you closeted? Maybe. A better word would be “un-self-actualized.”1
You soon find the sporadic hookups with Andy aren’t enough. You want more. Fortunately for you, it’s the late nineties, the golden age of AOL, and soon the shrill screeches of dial-up internet become your Pavlovian cue to start feeling horny. You enter a chat room, say “M4MShermanOaks5,” with a bunch of other gloriously unknown people, type “Hey, everyone!” and then wait to get an IM. When you have a private conversation the other person usually requests a picture, and you send him an image of either someone else or a body part, and by “body part” you seldom mean “pancreas.” And a few times you actually go and hook up with someone in full clandestine mode, spending the whole time with a baseball cap low over your head, wondering if you’re going to be exposed, if it’s all a big setup, if there are hidden cameras in corners. The whole covert-ops-ness vibe is nerve-racking and heart-pounding and, both despite and because of this, intensely hot.
But random hookups on the down-low are not your thing. You’ve sown a few wild gay oats in the shadows, but now you’re ready to spread some in the sunlight. Which is why on some subconscious level you jump at the chance to visit your old friend Ed Alonzo, who is performing his magic show in Berlin. It’s a perfect opportunity. Ed, who is straight, happily married, and the father of a little girl, is a familiar and comforting presence. But if you go visit him in Germany you will be among people who don’t even speak English, much less Doogish. You will be alone. You will be unknown. And you will be ready.
On your second day in Deutschland you decide to wander. You walk outside Ed’s theater and, in an astonishing Zufall, discover a massive procession going on. It’s the annual Love Parade, a glorious Teutonic rainbow freak show with lots of barely clad dancers shimmying down the street on supergay floats. Everybody’s smiling and having fun, and, having nothing better to do, you follow it.
For the first time in over a decade, you feel truly anonymous in public. It’s gleefully liberating to be wandering among the throngs without having to disguise yourself. You feel empowered to walk tall—not just physically, but emotionally. Because you’ve been in the public eye since puberty, you have never felt free to privately experiment with your identity, to say “I’m going to be goth for a month,” or “I’m going to try wearing glasses and be a scholar and talk about Kierkegaard.” Or “Today, I’m going to be actively bi-curious,” to be more … germane.2
But here are teeming throngs of ordinary people who are happy, authentically celebrating who they are, giving not the slightest fraction of a shit about your history. It’s a similar vibe to Rent, but that was just a show, and even in that context the characters were countercultural outcasts. These are regular, everyday people just marching around having a blast.
The next night you’re psychologically ready to go out and cut loose, but you’re still a little hesitant. You chat online with Andy, your friend-with-benefits. And he says, “Why don’t you just go out?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Well …”
“Do it, no one knows you there, just go out.”
And so you go out, and God bless Andy.
You go by yourself to a loud punk-industrial gay dance club, mostly empty. You sit in the corner, nervous, beer in hand, passively waiting for adventure. A good-looking guy from Austin sits next to you and recognizes you. Oh no, you think, this was a bad idea. But then Ed’s friend Ully, whom you’ve arranged to meet, shows up with his friends, the Europeanly named Christophe and Rodrigue. They’re variety performers. They do a single trapeze act where they flip and catch each other. They are young. They are ripped. They are hot. This is good. This is very good.
And now, blissfully, your self-monitoring switch turns itself off, and you’re actually dancing in a gay bar with two superhot circus performers. It’s incredible. Before this you have never danced for purposes of seduction, ever. Sure, you’ve danced at weddings and proms and such, but never as a means of flirting. So to find yourself doing it for the first time, and being okay at it, and enjoying it, is almost otherworldly. And a few beers later, amid the cacophony of earth-shattering techno, you lean over and start making out with Christophe. In the club. Big step. So, so great.
They invite you back to their place. Your internal alarms go off and you think, Oh jeez, now it’s getting XXX-rated. But it’s not that way at all. Rodrigue goes to his room to practice circus acts. (Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that’s a euphemism for sex, but in this case that’s literally what he was doing.) You and Christophe end up in his bedroom, in his bed, and you spend the night, and it’s fantastic. He barely speaks English and you speak no German, so you smoke cigarettes laced with hashish, have very rudimentary, comical conversations interspersed with very nonrudimentary, noncomical sex, and it goes on all night, and you don’t want it to end.
You spend the next day together. Randomly, you visit the very first Bodies Exhibit—the one where they have actual skinless cadavers posed like they’re having a knife fight or riding a horse. (Romantic, right?) That night you go out again. This time you bring Ed with you, which is another big step: here’s this guy I’m fooling around with, is that okay, Ed? Answer: of course it’s okay, Neil, calm down. And you all go out and dance and have a blast.
Then it’s time to go back to the States. Saying good-bye to Christophe is hard. Never before have you been intimate with a guy and not woken up the next day in quasi-denial mod
e, saying, “Hey, bud! Good to see you, bro!” You’ve had a little fling, and it is sweet to give a hug and know that you probably won’t see each other again. Sweet and sad. It’s the first time you feel that kind of waving-good-bye-on-the-bus-home-from-summer-camp sadness, but even that, in its melancholy way, has its charms.
It is, in every sense, a seminal week.3 All the things you’ve done—walk next to gay people in a parade, dance with other men in a club, make out in public—had only last week seemed so taboo in your mind, unachievable, horrifying, potentially life-destroying. And yet when you do them, they are fun, and—get this—not that big a deal. In hindsight, the fears you’ve faced are revealed as eminently overcomeable. There’s a parallel with magic. The secrets seem so awesome and huge, but once you know them you see they’re manageable and very much of this universe, and you’re left with the pure joy of an authentic experience.
You’re not much for life lessons, but you will happily quote the brilliant Dan Savage: “It gets better.”
Better, and easier.
* * *
If you’re ready for it to be better, go HERE.
If you’re ready for it to be easier, go HERE.
If you’re ready for neither and this whole thing is giving you gay anxiety, go HERE.
* * *
1Better but much more pretentious.
2See what you did there?
3You know you saw what you did there.
Dr. Horrible is one of the greatest and most satisfying experiences of your professional life. So when Joss Whedon calls you out of the blue to say he wants to discuss another possible project for you, you jump at the chance.
Neil Patrick Harris Page 7