by Dave Holmes
Having just come out publicly, I got a few auditions to play the gay best friend in romantic comedies and Lifetime original series. I got many, many opportunities to call the lead character “girlfriend” and tell her to do herself. These characters spoke entirely in catch phrases and had no emotional life of their own. They were to the aughts what the token black character was to the ’80s and ’90s. Once in particular, I went in for a sassy best friend role in an independent movie. My audition monologue was a speech the gay guy delivered to the main character about embracing her inner diva and getting fierce. The scene was to take place in the women’s bathroom of a restaurant, just after the lead character saw the boy she liked having dinner with her rival. In the middle of this sassy tirade, another woman walked into her gender-appropriate bathroom—to use it, like a human being might—and my character said to this woman: “Excuse me, girlfriend, but we’re on official business here,” and then shooed her out. Like: The ladies’ room is for troubled women and their neutered friends only; deal with your natural bodily functions somewhere else. Hateful.
I showed up to this audition, and it was a sea of skinny guys in vests and bow ties. It was a crowd I could not out-queen. I would have to change up my approach. I went in, I told the camera who I was and what role I’d be reading for, and when it came time in the script for the hapless woman to make the error of using the bathroom to void her bladder, I said “EXCUSE ME GIRLFRIEND, WE’RE ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS HERE!” in a blind rage. A deafening, terrifying, Vincent D’Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket conniption. Listen, you have to make choices as an actor. I didn’t get a callback on that one, but I still think a sassy gay friend who goes into rage blackouts when women want to use their own bathroom for its intended purpose is a character in search of a movie.
Eventually I got a semi-regular gig playing a gay stereotype on Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, and just before cameras rolled on my first day of shooting, Thomas Lennon—in mustache and tiny khaki shorts—assuaged my fear about playing such a character: “Just remember, Dave, we are all playing terrible, terrible people.” It is the most freeing thing I have ever heard on a set, bar none.
The audition process for Reno 911! was, without a doubt, the most fun you could have in an audition, which I understand is not saying much. I begged my manager to get me in the room, and he did, and I prepared a character and a situation, as the casting director told me to do. When I arrived, the person at the desk asked me only one question: “Did you call the police, or did the police call you?” Are you a perp or a victim? was all they needed to know. I told her—victim—and she told them. And then I went into the room, in character, and the entire cast was there, in character, and we improvised a half-hour-long scene. It was a dream.
When they’d bring my character back for an episode, they would messenger me a script the day before the shoot. It’s a union rule: these things need to go out the day before so that everyone knows what to do. Down the left-hand side of the page were the technical specs: what kinds of lights they’d need and how many of what kind of cameras. And then down the right, the dialogue, which in the case of Reno 911! would be, in full: “They have dinner,” or “They talk.” And that’s it. And then I’d show up on camera, and before we’d shoot they’d ask me to try not to laugh, but if I had to, to try to hold it for one second so that the editor could piece a scene together. And I would mostly fail and so would everybody else, because these were the funniest people on the planet, working their hardest, together.
It doesn’t always go like that.
A couple years later, I got another one of those calls from my manager: The daytime department from [major network] wants to see you. Go! I knew going in was that it was a pilot for a daily talk show with “a name” and a cohost role that had not yet been filled. Great. I like to talk. Bring it on.
A young woman from the development department met me in reception and took me down to a conference room where I’d be meeting with her and her boss. On the way down the endless hallway, she—let’s call her Madison—asked what I knew about the project. I said I knew pretty much nothing. She said: “Oh! Well, it’s a daily, Regis & Kelly kind of a talk show, except it’ll be Tori Spelling and a gay guy.”
Pardon me?
“Tori loves her gays. Do you know her?”
I do not know Tori, and Tori does not know me, but I am gay, therefore Tori loves me. And in order to replicate the success of Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa’s time-tested chemistry, the network was going to pair Tori Spelling with Some Gay Guy. Oh, brother. I felt my pulse quickening. This was not going to go well.
Because here’s what I hear when someone says they love their gays: I hear that they love the animated gay stylists they see on TV. I hear that they love someone who is ready with a quip and a snap and a Hey, girlfriend, why are you crying and eating Wheat Thins? I hear they love a mascot in a vest and a bow tie who can put them in a daring updo and then go away quietly. I hear I love my eunuchs. I hate it.
So I met Madison’s boss—whom we will call McKenzie—and we sat down and made chitchat for a moment. I knew instantly I was not going to get this job because they had really tucked themselves in for a bottomless pitcher of pizzazz, and I was absolutely not the man to serve it to them. They looked down at their clipboard of fun party questions:
“What do you and your girlfriends like to talk about?” Oh, boy.
“Um, I guess…when I am talking to my female friends…we talk about…what we are doing at the time?” No sale.
“What’s, like, a dream weekend with your girlfriends?” Christ Almighty.
“I don’t know. New Orleans Jazzfest?” Their eyes glazed over.
Finally McKenzie, desperate for any glimmer of glitter, said, “Let’s talk relationships. My gays”—again with my gays—“give me the best relationship advice. What kind of relationship advice do you give your girlfriends?”
And I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I said: “Do any of your gays tell you that you should spend more time among heterosexual men?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, do they tell you to hang out with men who can love you back? Because if they don’t, they are not giving you good advice. They might be giving you funny advice, or advice that rhymes, but they are not giving you good advice.”
McKenzie nodded, looked back at her clipboard, and said, “Ouch.” No fucking kidding ouch.
Madison stepped up: “Like, do you do any GAY things?”
I said, “Yeah, I do the two or three important ones,” and they both sat up and asked what those were, and I chose not to explain the joke.
The worst part was looking at them and knowing they were kind people who were trying their best.
And listen: In my life, I have been told that as a gay man I am a threat to the American family. I have been told that to accept me as an equal is an insult to God. I have been told that I am no better than a pedophile. I have been told that I cannot serve in the military because my presence will undermine unit cohesion. I have had bottles thrown at me when I gathered with others to protest for marriage equality. I have been told that I am sick, that I am damaged, and that I am damage and sickness incarnate.
Let the record show that what finally made me snap is the suggestion that I was supposed to have chemistry with Tori Spelling.
It didn’t stop there. In the post–The View glut of panel shows, I went in for chemistry test after chemistry test. I would always almost book the job, and then at the last minute not book the job, and it was always because—this is a thing I have been told more than once to my face—“For the gay guy slot, we need a really gay guy.” Which it was explained to me—and honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve had someone explain how people like you are supposed to behave—meant: quips and zingers, a lot of fashion talk, constant sexual innuendo. Where a few years before, anti-gay propaganda would have led to my losing a job, I was suddenly losing jobs for not behaving enough like anti-gay propaganda.
And
I was starting to fall out of love with television.
If it is uncomfortable being a fat guy in a gay bar, it is straight-up agony being overweight in Los Angeles. You are surrounded on all sides by healthy, glowing individuals with jobs they don’t really need to go to every day, and every day is cloudless and 72 degrees, inviting them out of their homes to run, hike, bike, or otherwise show their bodies off.
Previously, I had been a fairly active person. I went to the gym. I rollerbladed. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, which generally meant about a mile and a quarter. And then I drank fifteen draft beers out of filthy taps, ate pizza at three in the morning, soaked up my hangovers with Sausage McGriddles, and had the nerve to wonder why I was fat and tired.
But in Los Angeles, I adopted healthy habits one at a time. I bought a bike and I started waking up an hour earlier in the morning to ride it. I started going to bed at grown-up times, which is easy because the bars close at 2:00 a.m. and are filled with people who moved to town to be on Big Brother. I started feeling stronger, more energetic.
Except each morning I woke up feeling like a medium-sized human being was sitting on my chest, and it took me longer than I’m comfortable admitting to connect it to the fact that I still smoked. So I quit, by which I mean that I told everyone I didn’t smoke anymore but barely altered my habits one bit. On a visit west, my old roommate Lee asked: “If you don’t smoke anymore, why is it that you still smoke?” I said: “Oh, it’s hard. Maybe I’ll get hypnotized or do Chantix or something.” “Oh,” he said, “I have an idea for you.” And then he leaned in close and looked me right in the eye. “Have you tried being a man?”
I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette, and I have not had one since. As Catholic priests, nuns, and educators have known for centuries, shame is a powerful deterrent.
If you drop a habit, you want to pick one up. What I decided to do was train for a triathlon. Southern California has the benefit of year-round warmth and sunshine, so there is always a race to train for. I chose Wildflower, up in San Luis Obispo, because it has the reputation of being the hardest in the country, and I am an idiot. I bought myself a wetsuit, joined a training team to raise money for cancer, and started bragging about it immediately.
The first training swim was in a high school pool out in the Valley, and we were directed to show up with a swim cap and a pair of goggles, neither of which I brought. My coach said, “No goggles?” I said, “Yeah, no, sorry, forgot.” He said, “Chlorine, though.” I said, “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” I’d been in pools; I knew chlorine.
I did not know chlorine. What I knew was my parents’ pool, which contained a moderate amount of chlorine. I had not experienced a high school pool, whose chlorine levels had to combat teenage acne, athlete’s foot, staph infections, and whatever venereal diseases kids are passing around these days. This pool was all chlorine, and my eyes were completely unprotected.
I didn’t notice how badly I’d injured myself until after it was over. In the showers, my eyes began to sting, and then to burn, and then to sting and burn so intensely that I began looking for an emergency eyewash station, which I couldn’t find because I wasn’t in an industrial chemistry lab, and also I couldn’t see. And then the tears came, in furious rivers, doing their healing work. Soon, the pain subsided. And then ten minutes later, when I was in my car heading out of the place, it started again. I pulled over and cried medicinal tears into an old T-shirt out of my gym bag. It passed again. And then it kept coming again, and again, in waves that increased in intensity, every ten minutes or so. Pain, tears, relief.
My improv team King Ten had a show that night, and I had about an hour to eat dinner before I had to be at the theater. So I found myself a Rockin’ Sushi place on Ventura, where I could sit at the bar and have a protein-rich meal in at least partial darkness. I took a seat, ordered a few pieces, and then the process started again. Stinging eye heat, and then a soothing deluge of tears.
What I’m saying is that I was sitting by myself at a popular sushi bar, crying.
Do you remember when I told you that I will be recognized only at times when I am not at my best? Sitting at a sushi bar, in the middle of their dinner rush, alone, sobbing uncontrollably, was one of those times. In between tear waves, I heard someone at a nearby table say, “Hey, isn’t that that guy from MTV up at the bar?” And their friend said, “Yeah. Don’t say anything, though. I think he’s having a rough night.” And then I cried even harder.
My strategy at any sushi bar is to begin and end with toro. It’s the star of the show, fish-wise, so it’s good to kick off a meal with it, and then to let it be your grand finale. As the sushi chef handed over my last piece of toro, I couldn’t pull the plate away, because he was holding on to it. He was trying to get my attention, and this was the only way he knew how. We were both holding on to that final plate, and I looked up at him and his gaze met my tear-stained eyes. He looked at me with real, honest compassion, and said to me: “Me, too, sometimes.”
I wept the real way when I crossed the finish line of the triathlon. I did three more that year, and made them a permanent part of my life. I started doing the Malibu Celebrity Triathlon every year, because their definition of “celebrity” was broad, and the year Jennifer Lopez did it, we finished the swim at around the same time. If you got US Weekly the next week, you saw a picture of her in the celebrity transition area, changing flawlessly from her swimwear to her bike gear, and you also saw me just behind her, grimacing and pink, struggling out of my wetsuit.
So then I entered the lottery for the New York City Marathon, and unfortunately I got into the New York City Marathon. I lost whole weekends of my life doing eighteen-mile training runs. I lost toenails. But I did not lose weight; my race pictures show me in a skin-tight running shirt that hugs my massive belly. Even the ultimate endurance event—the race whose first participant finished it and then died—couldn’t move the needle.
I was a fat endurance athlete. I still ate like an unsupervised teenager through this whole time in my life and failed to see the connection.
At around this time in California, I started to notice friends of mine getting involved in a thing called Crossfit. It seemed to follow the same pattern. One by one they would:
• get into it,
• start looking terrific,
• begin to talk to one another about it,
• never stop talking to one another about it,
• never stop talking to me about it, and then
• injure a knee or a shoulder and have to stop.
I thought: If it causes actual physical harm and turns its users into willing zombies, it must be great. This might be for me. It’s a mind-set similar to what draws less-cautious people to heroin.
So I went. A Crossfit gym—they are called “boxes” officially, but continuing to call them “gyms” is how I convince myself that I am in but not of this world—opened up near me, and I figured that a new place would have a higher concentration of beginners—and perhaps a lower percentage of loud people with perfect bodies—so I joined.
I hated it from the moment I walked in the door, and I’ve been back five times a week ever since.
Here’s the deal: Crossfit is full of peacocky guys whose shirts come off the second the workout begins, to the point where you think: If this is how you’re going to be, why wear a shirt at all, anywhere? It is full of personal-trainer-looking women who will critique your push-up form, even if they’re not your actual personal trainer. You will work out to the point of intense and violent vomit, and you will come very close to getting in your car and going home. You will learn a thing called a “burpee,” which requires you to flop onto the ground, peel yourself back up onto your heels, jump up in the air and clap, and then do that a bunch of times in a row. You will be surrounded by people who talk about Crossfit and nothing else, who tell Crossfit jokes and wear Crossfit shirts that say things like “Buck Furpees.” You will do all this while you listen to Rage Against The Machine. It is
deeply unpleasant.
It also works. If you’re diligent, after a few weeks of burpees and Olympic weightlifting moves, and the meat-intensive Paleo diet, you will notice a change in your body. You will see muscles you have never seen. (And also you will feel them, and they will feel sore.) You will have to buy new, smaller pants. People will ask you what you’ve been doing, and then you will watch the regret wash over their faces when you talk about Crossfit for an hour. You may injure yourself severely or have a meat-induced heart attack before you’re fifty, but you will have had abs for a moment before you go, and it will have been worth it.
I was pulling it together physically, but my mind was still a mess. I was still drinking like a college kid, still throwing myself at the wrong guys, still generally behaving like the scrub TLC wanted none of.
Right around the time I started Crossfit, I did a shoot at a house on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. A lot of people who have houses right there on the beach rent them out as filming locations, because how else are you going to make a mortgage payment like that? This place was a smallish shack in a little private surfing cove—a place where Big Kahuna would live in one of those Frankie and Annette movies. Along one wall there were acoustic guitars. Along another: surfboards. And along a third: psychology textbooks. I was intrigued, doubly so when I met the owner of the house, who was among the most attractive men I’d ever seen in person. So I had to ask, because I was fascinated and also because I wanted more reasons to stand near him: “What’s the deal with all the psychology books?” He said, “I just got my degree and my license to work as a clinical psychologist, and I’m going to run my practice out of my home. Instead of sitting in an office talking for an hour, we’ll grab surfboards and paddle out past the breakers to where it’s nice and still, and we’ll do our sessions out there in the ocean.”
I said, “Do you take Blue Cross?” He did not. I made an appointment anyway and have gone every other week since. And every other week, after I have finished a session talking about my feelings with my hot therapist in the Pacific Ocean, I think: “This is so absurdly Southern California that every single person I grew up with would never stop laughing if they knew about it.”