by Tyler Oakley
I was used to my phone’s breaking down or having minimal battery life, but for some reason, one of my models had issues with its keypad whenever I would attempt to use T9 texting. Frustrated with the mediocre quality of a mediocre phone for which I paid minimal money, I decided enough was enough. I’d confront the local, part-time employees of T-Mobile and demand answers as soon as possible—or at least whenever my mom could give me a ride to the store, since I didn’t have a car.
My mom and I pulled up to the bleak strip mall, and I stormed into T-Mobile with the fury of a crazy cat lady convinced that not only does the cat food in this can taste off, but also that the clerk in the store she bought it from had everything to do with the problem.
“Hi, my phone seems to be having some issues?”
“Can you describe the problem?”
“Well, anytime I text, it freezes and then shuts down?”
“Have you tried restarting it?”
“Obviously . . .”
This volley of questions went on back and forth until one of us caved and finally offered a declarative statement.
“Well,” he said, “the W490 model isn’t really made for texting.”
I stared at this man. In any other circumstance, I probably wouldn’t have hated him with a smoldering passion. We might have been cordial acquaintances, perhaps even friends—but this was not to be.
Fuming, I slowly asked, “Then why . . . does the phone . . . offer texting as a feature?”
“Ahhh, it’s just not recommended with this model. Honestly, we’re just a retailer, and since this model is so old that we don’t carry it anymore, I can’t really speak to its functionality.”
“Right, well, I need to be able to text to be able to do my job. . . . I need to tweet—and to tweet, I need to be able to text.” Back then, there was no Twitter app, only the option to text your tweets to the phone number 40404. Times were tough.
“Have you thought about getting a Razr?”
I winced. Oh, had that not occurred to me? Every. Single. Day? Had I not dreamed, plotted, fantasized, coveted, schemed, lost hope, found it again, and started the whole cycle anew? Thanks for asking. Yes, I’ve thought about getting a Razr. But I’m poor, and not only that, but I’ve invested in a six-pack of these W490 pieces of shit.
Maybe it was a bad day. Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe I had a time-sensitive, career-defining tweet in my head that I couldn’t text to Twitter because my phone kept freezing up. Maybe I’m just an asshole, and this day doubly so. But thanks to my better judgment, I was able to recognize that today was not the day to escalate an argument in my local T-Mobile retail store. I swiveled my glare from the T-Mobile employee toward my mom, who was standing mutely on the sidelines, eyebrows raised.
“Come on, Mom, this guy does not know what he’s talking about.”
I stomped my way back through the T-Mobile store, toward the exit, with my mom in tow a few paces behind me. Although I felt shame for throwing a tantrum in public, I was about to leave the situation, and I could soon act as if none of it had ever happened.
I reached for the door, feeling my agitation beginning to fade and my composure returning. That’s when I heard my mom’s voice behind me, mocking my behavior: “Do you have any idea who he is? My son is a YouTube celebrity, and you will be hearing about this.”
I cringed. As much as you might have just cringed reading that, I cringed a thousand times more. In that moment, I realized I was the worst of the world’s entitled brats. I’d bought the shittier version of the phone I actually wanted, and I’d received the exact product and service I’d paid for. My mom didn’t raise me to abuse strangers just because I don’t get my way. I went from feeling like an empowered hot-shit consumer advocate to a self-important schmuck in one second flat. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, I attempted to push open T-Mobile’s door and exit. It wasn’t budging. Was it locked? What the fuck? Gently, my mom demonstrated how to pull the door open, rather than pushing it.
We made our way through the parking lot in silence. When we got back into her car, she looked over at me before turning the key in the ignition. “You done throwing a fit?”
“Yeah,” I groaned.
I learned a few valuable lessons that day. First, don’t be a dick. Second, if you’re frustrated with a situation you put yourself in, stop blaming others. Finally, a good mom is supportive of you, but the best moms are supportive of your growth. Even when it doesn’t seem like they’re on your side, great mothers are on the side of your becoming a better person, and you’ll be so much better off in the long run. So pull out your flip phone and text to 40404 a quick thank-you to your mom. She has your best interests at heart, even if you are sometimes a dick.
all the world’s a stage
“All the world’s a stage.” —William Shakespeare
—Tyler Oakley, 2007
AT THE AGE OF FIVE, I HIT THE STAGE FOR THE first time. It was a kindergarten production of Teddy Bears’ Picnic, and mine was not a speaking part. I sang in the chorus, seething over the attention (and costumes!) the leads got. On the bright side, I was completely relieved that I didn’t have to memorize any lines. This theme dominated my entire dramatic career: I could never remember lines.
I was so bad at memorizing lines that nonspeaking roles became my calling. During the summer months of elementary school, I hung out at home with all of my siblings, suffering through the heat while trying to find something to do. This was during the golden era of a TV show on Nickelodeon called All That. It was basically Saturday Night Live, but made by and for kids.
My siblings and I loved All That so much that we would reenact our favorite skits and perform them for our parents. While my older brothers and sisters had no problem memorizing scripts, I was hopeless. Thankfully, from seasons one to six and again for a brief stint in season ten, one of the recurring characters on All That was a Big Ear of Corn—just a human-size vegetable prop. As I stood entirely still in a bright yellow turtleneck and green overalls, becoming the most convincing ear of corn my parents’ basement had ever seen, I beamed with pride. Obviously, my dedication to the craft was yielding dividends.
After the overwhelming success of my first stage performance in Teddy Bears’ Picnic, I decided to take a brief hiatus from professional productions. This was intended, obviously, to build suspense for an impending comeback and to give an aura of mystery to my brand. My efforts were abetted by my attending a poor school that didn’t have a fine arts program or budgets for plays or musicals. Not until fifth grade, when I went on to middle school, did my school’s budget (and the public’s insatiable need) dictate my return to the stage.
When my middle school announced that Jack and the Beanstalk would be its next production, I saw that this was my chance to play the lead. I was ten years old and had a heart brimming with big dreams. Back then, I believed that if I wanted something badly enough, it would come to be. It was basically The Secret, and no less effective (which is to say, not at all).
There’s a quote about shooting for the moon, and how even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. Whoever said that doesn’t understand the size of outer space. Nonetheless, I shot for the moon during my audition for Jack and the Beanstalk, and I did indeed land among the stars. I didn’t get the title role, but my extensive acting experience as the Big Ear of Corn had prepared me perfectly for my next role as an inanimate object: one of the forty statues in the Giant’s castle.
My performance as a statue was crucial to the success of the production. Without me, I’m not sure any of the other actors could have properly felt the tone of the show. In my gray-on-gray sweatpants and sweater, I stood absolutely still. So still that a chill spread over the audience. As a single statue among forty, I changed the acting game. They say there are no small parts, only small actors. At four feet one inch, I was both.
That year, I had a lot of far-fetched dreams that I just assumed would happen. I remember one day in particular,
I was completely positive that I was going to end the day as a millionaire. While I typically alternated between homemade cold lunches and reduced-price hot lunches, for the first time ever my parents splurged and bought me a real, authentic, brand-name Lunchables. I felt disgustingly, filthy rich.
Having never had a Lunchables before, I sat in the backseat on my way to school studying the rules and regulations of the contest on that particular box. Positive that my Lunchables contained the golden ticket, my stepdad and I agreed that upon my discovering my win, I was to inconspicuously rise from my seat at the lunch table, walk calmly to the office, cardboard box in hand, and feign sickness. Only in the privacy of my dad’s car was I to celebrate my newly won riches. I regret to inform you that I didn’t win that contest. But I did get to eat three mini-pizzas and a Capri Sun that day. Shoot for the moon, land among the stars.
After discovering the comfort of acting in sweatpants, I was bitten by the performance bug. I relocated my talents from the lost age of giant beanstalks to the 1920s, for a production called Flapper. It had a lot of rhyming of the words flapper and dapper, and even more jazz squares. Who doesn’t love a period piece? I auditioned immediately and got the role of a lifetime: Newsboy #1.
Back when I was one of forty statues, I could easily blend in and go unnoticed. As one of four newsboys, well, I can only describe it like Britney Spears did in her hit single “Circus”: all eyes on me / in the center of the ring / just like a circus.
Unfortunately, the primary reason all eyes were on me was that the roles of the newsboys were created specifically to give the crew time to change the stage sets.
My lines were interstitial to actual scenes relevant to the musical. To give historical context to the plot, I recited 1920s headlines, newspaper in hand. Stop the presses! Given that this was my first role with lines, I was petrified on opening night. I was so nervous that, as I paced backstage before the show, my mind went completely blank. In a frenzy, I scrambled to find a pen, and I scribbled each and every line onto the palms of my hands.
When the first set change came, it was my moment to shine. I exploded onto the side of the auditorium, clutching my newspaper, and a single spotlight knifed through the darkness and fixed upon me. It was all very “Seasons of Love” from Rent. Spread throughout the rest of the auditorium, I saw my fellow newsboys step into spotlights of their own. We were ready to take turns reciting our headlines, starting first, logically, with Newsboy #1.
My voice shook as I yelled out the first half of my line, an easily remembered “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” As soon as I looked down into the palm of my hand for the second half, my heart dropped. My nervous sweat had smudged my headline, and I stood there, paralyzed. I knew one of us had to say something about the stock market crashing, so I just screamed, “The stock market crashed!”
Across the auditorium, Newsboy #3’s face went pale. He looked at me, wide-eyed and mouth agape. Uh-oh. I took his line. Thankfully, Newsboy #3 was lightning on his feet, and he was able to extemporize another headline. I wonder what ever happened to Newsboy #3. Did my blunder spark his interest in improv? Maybe someday he’ll be cast on SNL, and in press releases he’ll cite my abundant palm sweat as the catalyst of his career? You’re welcome, Newsboy #3.
From this role, I learned a lesson about the importance of permanent markers, as well as to never combine a bowl haircut with a newsboy cap. I was evolving in my craft.
That year, I joined my fellow seventh graders for a weeklong trip to camp. We bundled up in snowsuits and were babysat by high schoolers who volunteered to be camp counselors. My counselor, Stephen Carrasco, was flamboyant, theatrical, and everything that I—short, pudgy, closeted seventh grader Tyler Oakley—wished I could be. He was in the Someko Singers (my school district’s AP choir, named by the reverse spelling of our hometown) and got plenty of leading roles in the musicals at the high school. Seeing him be unapologetically himself, unashamed and openly gay, all while being successful and popular, gave me hope. Maybe someday I too could tell my friends and family the truth about who I was and it would be far from the end of the world. Last I heard, he was in Kinky Boots on Broadway. Slay me.
After Flapper, my second low-budget middle-school production was Wagon Wheels West, a musical spoof of the western genre. I played Josiah Aimless, a farmer from New England, traveling across the land hoping to strike gold in California. Given that this was a much bigger role than anything I’d previously done, I decided that a named character deserved a backstory. I began to fantasize about Josiah Aimless’s complicated past. In the script, he was married with kids, but my Josiah Aimless was bi-curious for sure, and his fears included measles, snakebites, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and exhaustion, or basically any way you can die in the game The Oregon Trail.
Trying to remember the details of a bad, forgettable musical for the sake of this book is like torture. But jogging my memory by watching clips of middle-school productions of Wagon Wheels West on the Internet? Delightful.
I don’t remember much about the musical itself, but I remember like yesterday that I was in love with the guy who played the lead: Dan Byrne. He got all the solos in choir and the lead in the play, and I got nothing because my voice wasn’t done cracking and I couldn’t remember lines. Obviously, we were archrivals. He was also on the soccer team, and since we had gym class together, I was made privy to how he’d gone through puberty much sooner (and better) than I did. He eventually moved away and attended a private boarding school for high school, and years later we reunited randomly and had a heart-to-heart in the backseat of his car. We discovered that we had hated each other because secretly we were jealous of each other—me of his talents, and him of my ability to get along with the rest of the school. Unfortunately, that heart-to-heart didn’t end with a make-out sesh, which sucks.
Moving on to high school was like advancing into the big leagues. By that, I mean the Drama Club had a budget, and we could do shows that people had actually heard of. I was eager to stretch beyond being a bisexual, dysentery-fearing settler or numbered newsboy.
Okemos High School’s art wing was as far as possible from any academic classroom. Over my four years of high school, it became the perfect escape from full days of tedious academia. The greenroom was the coziest room in the whole school. There, on the worn couch in the back of the room, many drama kids had been dared into their first awkward kisses. Posters from every past production hung like pennants around the circumference of the room, reminding the upperclassmen of their glory days. I was eager to distinguish my own era by delivering one incredible portrayal after another of various inanimate objects.
I remember walking into the greenroom for my first time. I was too nervous to talk to any of the many upperclassmen, but I attempted to mingle. Mostly, I was just trying to take it all in. The upperclassmen were ducking in and out of the department’s extraordinary costume closet, emerging in wigs and corsets or sporting swords and beards. We could be whoever we wanted, both on and off the stage. Sure, we had tons of fun performing musicals and plays for audiences, but in the time spent not performing I figured out who I was. I got to wear a lot of makeup, there were plenty of sexually ambiguous guys, and we had unmonitored computers lining one of the walls. Heaven.
Throughout my years in the Okemos drama program, I began to get roles with lines that were nontrivial to the plot of the show. I was Eugene in Grease, excelling at portraying a socially awkward dweeb, mainly because I was already those things. I went back to my roots as an inanimate object in Beauty and the Beast, where I played Cogsworth, the tightly wound and persnickety clock. I was painfully in love with my candelabra counterpart, Lumiere, and would stew in fury while watching him make out backstage with Babette, the feather duster. Tyler Oakley: third-wheeling since 1989.
I was Nicolas in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, both of which I have zero recollection of now, ten years later. I was the Vizier in Arabian Nights. I got to put on a wig and a dr
ess and be as creepy as humanly possible as the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales, which was borderline typecasting.
My all-time favorite show had to be The Importance of Being Earnest. I was cast as Algernon, who was wittiness and aestheticism personified—everything I dreamed of becoming. It was the first time my two best friends (who later went on to study musical theater in college) couldn’t audition for a show. While I typically got bronze, with them out of the picture I was upgraded to gold. I fell in love with the show, probably because I had the best lines. While memorizing lines had always been impossible for me before, this time it was like learning a 1890s drag queen’s witty catchphrases, and I couldn’t get enough. I also got to wear this incredible maroon, three-piece suit that I bought at the local Goodwill for $3.99. I still have it; it’s in my parents’ garage. Maybe I’ll wear it to a book signing in your town.
Another favorite production was Into the Woods, in which I was the Narrator. Considering I had my own library nook on the side of the stage and even got to hold a book as if I were reading the story to the audience, I decided to not learn one damn line. Instead, I wrote out every single one in my narrator’s book. As was tradition on opening night of Okemos High School productions, the crew fucked with the actors by taping porn to the props. No baby doll’s face or hand mirror was safe. On this opening night, I was horrified to find that the crew had covered the lines in my book with anime tentacle porn. Luckily, my lines were still there, hidden underneath each mortifying image, but I still was thrown for a loop.
My final performance at Okemos High School was in the role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls. I sang a rousing rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” To this day, I cringe remembering it. Before opening weekend, we would always do condensed versions of the shows as previews for the entire student body, and for Guys and Dolls, the director chose the scene of my solo. Terrified that if I went all out for the school preview, I’d lose my voice before opening night, I decided to whisper-sing my high notes during the school preview. While I thought I was nailing it, apparently I just sounded like the isolated vocals of 2014 Mariah Carey attempting to sing “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” How does my drama career end? Not with a bang, but a whisper.