The hotel was on Sunset Boulevard. I planned to stay for six days to see friends I’d missed dearly during the height of the pandemic. Every hello and goodbye hit in a new way now. I’d flown in from New York City, having moved three years ago from LA, where I’d been for the previous ten years. I lived various places, Hancock Park, Beachwood Canyon, Studio City, and lastly in Nichols Canyon, not far from where I was staying. West Hollywood is known as an LGBTQ+ area of Los Angeles. Rows of queer bars run along Santa Monica Boulevard, mostly catering to cis white gay men. Rainbows line the streets.
I wrote all morning. Madisyn joined me at the table at nine thirty, her sweatpants and vintage T-shirt made me hard, I have a thing for sweatpants. We both sat and did work. We spent time together well. There was a natural flow, lucid, not forced, and fine with silence.
We wrote then fucked then ate then napped and then I left the hotel for the first time at around four to go to Pink Dot, a convenience store directly across the street on Sunset. Known for its colorful pink and light blue exterior, and the vintage blue VW Bug with pink dots and a propeller hat parked out front.
While walking the short distance from the hotel exit to the southeast corner of Sunset and La Cienega, I passed a tall man who I briefly caught eyes with. He carried a slushy in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. As I neared the corner, the light red, cars hurtling down Sunset, he turned and started to move toward me.
“Don’t look at me, you fucking faggot! Faggot!” He screamed this at me, over and over. Every faggot getting louder. No one near us on the sidewalk.
He was about three feet away, standing over me. I froze. There was no room for me to tell him I was, in fact, not looking at him. He just kept yelling. I worried that if I turned to run it could trigger a reaction, and the same if I said something. So I just stood solid, looking forward, doing my best to seem unaffected. And in the moment I was, because I was in shock. This seemed to work, he started to walk east a bit. I took out my phone and called Madisyn. Better not to text, you can keep your head up if you’re on the phone. Shaken, I explained and asked if she could come over to Pink Dot. The call triggered him. As the light finally changed and I stepped off the curb, he turned back around.
“Don’t you fucking talk about me, faggot. I know you’re talking about me. I’m going to beat you up, fag!”
He charged toward me from behind, yelling at me, Madisyn hearing all this through the phone.
“I’m going to fucking gay bash you, faggot.”
He started coming faster. This time I ran, trying to reach Pink Dot before he reached me. That jolt of panic, a flashback to being with Justin on the hill or when another man in West Hollywood, years before, screamed, “I’m going to beat you into the ground, you ugly fucking dyke. I’ll kill you before the police get here.” My friend Angela and I sped away in her car. Or when I ran from a group of teenage girls who surrounded me at eighteen. “It isn’t Halloween. Why are you dressed up as a lesbian?” one of them asked as they approached, threatening me. Or when Paula and I dodged a friend of a friend who came at us around a bonfire, wasted and enraged by our snuggling. “You don’t have to shove it in our faces!” he barked. Others had to intervene, fighting him off until he stumbled away.
“This is why I need a gun!” the man yelled right behind me as I frantically swung open the door to Pink Dot.
“Please help! This guy is screaming at me, calling me a faggot and saying he is going to bash me.” The words flew out of my mouth. As I swung my head over my shoulder and back.
I was out of breath, my voice trembled, but I tried to suppress it. The man stood right outside the entrance. Two people were working behind the desk. One of them jetted toward the door, yelling at the man to get away, locking it as the pursuer lingered, but then walked off. The woman at the counter asked if I needed water, she encouraged me to breathe.
“We don’t put up with that here,” she said. “Are you okay? You sure I can’t get you anything?”
I said I was fine but thanked them, taking her advice to breathe, to calm my nerves.
I have learned to compartmentalize these moments for the most part. Shut down. Shrug my shoulders. Let it run off my back like the beer I had thrown on me while walking down Queen West in Toronto less than six months before while filming the third season of The Umbrella Academy. Another queer-friendly neighborhood. My friend Genesis and I passed a man who proceeded to turn around and throw his beer at the backs of our heads.
“Faggots! Faggots!” he said as he walked away. The s slithered, ssss, like poison down the throat. That time, I pivoted, a reflex, boiling rage from all the times I hadn’t turned around.
“Did you just call me a fucking faggot? Fuck you!” I yelled, repeatedly, as a few people standing on the sidewalk watched. Genesis pleaded for me to calm down. He walked off.
I think about that moment a lot—the anger that man felt entitled to display and my response to it. In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.
I forgot I had hung up on Madisyn when I frantically swung open the door to Pink Dot. I could see her on the other side of the street, already on the way over. The man was nowhere in sight, so I expressed my gratitude for the help and walked to the sidewalk to meet her, my neck twisting from side to side. I made sure to keep looking as we walked the short distance back to the hotel room.
She put her arm around me as I recounted what had happened, the touch different from before.
10
THAT LITTLE INDIE
I didn’t get my first tattoo until I was thirty, but the meaning stretched back to one of my earlier experiences as an actor. The tattoo reads C KEENS, and it’s located on my upper right arm, just below the shoulder. C KEENS is my nickname for one of my dearest friends, Catherine Keener. I met her during a pivotal time, post–Hard Candy, pre-Juno, I was busy but not very known. Groundless in Los Angeles, sprawled and unfamiliar. I was researching for my next role, up all night digesting the horrors, hoping my acting partner and I would get along, that we would trust each other. I was finding it hard to separate myself from my roles, and this role was particularly distressing.
My initial meeting with Catherine was at her home in Santa Monica, just a few minutes’ walk from the beach. At nineteen, I had just signed on to star in An American Crime with her. Tommy O’Haver, the writer and director, picked me up from a hotel in Hollywood on Highland Boulevard. We drove the forty minutes west to her home so Catherine and I could spend time there together. Talk the film, the characters, but mostly connect with each other. These weren’t easy roles.
The house was an old dark-brown Craftsman. It had an unusually large backyard, the kind you do not expect in Santa Monica. A small tree house, a swing dangling below. Tall hedges stretched above the surrounding fence. It felt like its own little world.
The fact that I had been cast opposite such an icon was utterly surreal for me. I’d be making a film with one of my favorite actors of all time. Stepping through her back gate, I was unbearably shy. I barely spoke.
I had attempted to look cool. Vintage T, black jacket, torn-up Converse. She walked toward us with a giant smile and that familiar voice. Wearing ripped jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, she oozed warmth and sincerity. She was direct, with characteristic sensual swagger.
We climbed over her deck balcony and continued our way up to the roof. Our sense of humor aligned, and her unmistakable laugh came pouring out. Staring out toward the Pacific, we spoke of what was ahead. No condescension, that dismissive cadence slung at you when you’re young. Instead an unspoken ease. I’d never met anyone like her before.
I went from shy to present. I could already feel her care, her desire to protect, but with zero preciousness. We became pals quickly, but our closeness could only do so much to mitigate the effect filming had on my nineteen-year-old self.
An American Crime was based on a true story about a sixteen-year-old girl, Sylvia Likens, who in 1965 suffered the most amount of abuse on a single victim in Indiana state history. The film is brutal, but it holds back, the real story was even worse. I had been cast as Sylvia.
Sylvia’s parents were carnival workers, and when they traveled, they left two of their daughters with Gertrude Baniszewski. Keener played Gertrude, a single mother of seven, struggling with poverty, barely earning a living by doing laundry for her Indianapolis neighbors. Gertrude almost never ate, her face gaunt, angular, and sharp, a body as thin as a rake. She self-medicated with downers, swigs from tiny bottles, mood swings fluctuated from one extreme to the other. Sylvia’s parents leave Sylvia and their younger daughter, Jennie, with Gertrude and her swaths of kids for twenty dollars a week.
When the first of the money is late, Gertrude takes it out on Sylvia and Jennie. Leading them down to the basement, she demands they bend over and aggressively flogs them. The abuse escalates, Gertrude encouraging her children to join in as well. In one of the most horrifying scenes to film, Gertrude forces Sylvia to stick a Coke bottle up her vagina in front of the other children.