Breaking the Surface (38 page)

Playing Darius turned out to be even more therapeutic for me than I thought it would be, in part because Darius’s life is in so many ways close to my own. I remember talking with a reporter who asked me if I could relate to the character I was playing. I said, “Yeah, right, a chorus boy with an eighth-grade education.” I was sidestepping, because we do have a lot in common. He may have been a chorus boy with an eighth-grade education, but he was gay, he had AIDS, and he was facing the end of his life.

For me, playing Darius was like a dry run of what I thought my life might be like down the line. I got the chance to wear an ACT UP button onstage, and I died every night of the disease that will probably kill me. I got to be publicly gay without being self-conscious. Darius was totally out and proud, not at all afraid of being himself. I got to experience what that was like as Darius, in preparation for doing those things as Greg. That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with acting in the first place. You can be anyone you want and do anything you want.

I came to envy Darius as if he were a real person or a friend of mine. I admired his zest for life, which was something I was still struggling with. I know that no one is up all the time, but Darius did a good job of enjoying life and conveying that joy to those around him. All of his down moments were offstage, which was exactly when I had to be up. Offstage I had to put on a happy face for the other cast members, because I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on in my head. I had to “play” Greg the character, who is a lot happier than Greg the real person. At the time, I was lucky if I could just stay afloat and not get overwhelmed by my emotions.

In some ways, I can’t quite believe that I put myself in the position of playing a role in a show that was dealing with what I was living with every day. Twice during the time I was in
Jeffrey,
I had to get infusions to keep my fungal infection under control. One time I did it in Florida, and the next time in California. I couldn’t say anything to anyone about what I was going through. Sometimes I wanted to scream.

One of the great benefits of doing
Jeffrey
was the opportunity to work with a group of gay men who were comfortable with their sexuality and felt good about themselves. The men in
Jeffrey
became my role models. They didn’t have advisers telling them what to say or what not to say. They just lived life on their own terms, which impressed me.

With the cast, I never made any secret of the fact I was gay. I didn’t formally come out and say I was gay, but when we talked, I didn’t hide the truth about my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel I could be open about my HIV status. The cast was wonderfully supportive of me, onstage and off, but I wanted to be treated like any other actor, which was already difficult given what I’d done as an Olympic athlete. If they knew my status, I think it would have been even more difficult for them to treat me like everyone else. Also, I wasn’t ready to go public about being HIV-positive, so I was still being very careful about whom I told. That part was frustrating. My whole life I couldn’t fit in, because I was stupid, because I had dark skin, because I was adopted, because I was gay, and now because I was HIV-positive—even though I was in the midst of a group of proud, openly gay men in a play about AIDS.

Hiding my HIV status forced me to keep my distance from everybody in the cast. Pretending that everything was okay was very exhausting, so a lot of the time, rather than hang out with the rest of the cast in the green room, I stayed in my dressing room under the stage, which I shared with one other actor. The excuse I used was that I wanted to smoke, and the only place where I could smoke was in my dressing room. Sometimes, especially on the weekends, when we had matinees, the cast went out for dinner between performances. I usually made up some excuse and went off by myself, afraid that if I spent time with them, they’d see through my facade.

When it came to the press, there was never any question about what I would and would not talk about. I’d already taken a huge step just by being in
Jeffrey
and playing a gay character who had AIDS. Talking to the press about being gay was a whole other level of being public about my sexual orientation that I wasn’t ready for. Talking about my HIV status was absolutely out of the question.

You would think that at this stage of my life, playing a gay character in a show about gay dating, I could handle talking publicly about being gay. But I couldn’t. I told myself that it was simply nobody’s business, that my personal life was my personal life. The truth is, I was still terrified that if people knew I was gay that they’d think badly of me. On top of that, after so many years of being in the closet, I’d gotten used to it. I really didn’t know how to live any other way. From spending time with the actors in
Jeffrey,
I could see there was another way to live, but I’d had a very isolated life, and it was still all new to me.

There were a few occasions while I was in New York for
Jeffrey
when I found myself stunned by how casually people talked about and dealt with homosexuality. The first time, I was at dinner with a former diving teammate and his mother and sister. They came to see me in
Jeffrey,
and we went out after the show. At some point in the conversation, I asked my friend what he was up to, and I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but he said something about his lover. Then he caught himself and said ex-lover. I was startled. I looked at his mom and I looked at him, and I felt like saying, “Should we really be discussing this in front of your mother?” But his mother looked just fine, so apparently his family knew.

I was kind of embarrassed. For one thing, even though I had assumed my friend was gay from when we trained together, it wasn’t something we’d ever talked about. Also, I wasn’t accustomed to talking that way in front of anyone’s mother. I was so uncomfortable with the whole subject that I never used the word
lover
in front of my mom. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have talked about with people I didn’t know very well, and he and I didn’t know each other that well. But his mother seemed perfectly comfortable, and before we said good night, she told me to give her a call anytime I needed a good home-cooked meal. I thought it was incredible how they all treated being gay as the most normal thing in the world. It was a revelation to me.

The second time that happened, I was at lunch with another friend and his mother. He and I had talked about being gay, but I’d never met his mother before. My friend had to make a phone call and left me alone with his mom for a few minutes. She asked me about my dogs. I told her a little about them, and then she asked who was taking care of them. I told her that I had a friend taking care of the dogs, and she said, “Oh, is that your lover?” I almost fell off my chair. My friend had told me that his mother was very comfortable with gay people, but I wasn’t used to hearing that kind of question from someone’s mother. When I got over the shock, I said yes, that the man taking care of my dogs was my lover. Then she wanted to know how long we’d been together. This was going to take some getting used to.

It turned out that the reporters also took some getting used to, because they weren’t at all shy asking me about my personal life. When I first started out in diving, I would hedge when reporters asked about girlfriends, and I’d say that I was too busy or too shy, or I’d just let them think what they liked. Over time, as reporters realized I was gay and discovered that I never answered personal questions, they generally stopped asking. In a way, they protected me by not stating the obvious, like the fact that Tom was not only my manager but my lover, too. I was grateful to the press for protecting me during those years when I wasn’t yet ready to talk about it.

But a lot had changed in recent years, and even sportswriters were no longer reluctant to ask pointed questions about homosexuality or to write about it. And, after all, I
was
playing a gay character in a play about gay men, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that the subject of my sexuality came up a lot.

Robert Lipsyte, of the
New York Times,
was one of the most persistent of all the reporters. I was delighted when Robert told me he liked the show, especially when he explained that he had come to see it knowing that he’d only write about it if he liked my performance. So he didn’t tell me in advance that he would be there. After the show, he came backstage, and the first thing he said was, “Darius, you were fabulous,” which was a line from the show. Then he told me that he thought I was terrific and that in many ways I
was
Darius. He didn’t realize how close to the truth he was. Right after that, he asked me, “So does this mean you’re out?” After a long pause, I asked, “Out?” I’ll let Robert describe what follows. He wrote:

   He became, briefly, zoned, as if he were on the edge of the diving board, gathering himself for that leap into space. “Didn’t we have this discussion before?”

   “Five years ago in a Sizzler restaurant outside LA,” I said. “You said then that your sexuality was a totally private matter.”

   “I still sort of feel the same,” he said, stretching out the sentence, inflecting words, as if it were the three seconds from board to water. There was no suggestion that the topic was taboo or even discomforting; in fact, he seemed to enjoy confronting it, playing with it, as I took notes for the next twenty-five minutes.

   “It’s different now. I asked the question then because there were so many rumors, and I didn’t include the answer in my report because it ultimately had nothing to do with the story of you preparing for Seoul.

   “But now,” I gestured at the empty stage, “you are in a gay role, in a gay play. It’s so New York, the way you seem to be saying ‘Drop dead’ to anyone who ever called you a name.” Louganis laughed and squirmed and nodded.

The article went on for quite a bit after that, but I never acknowledged being gay. I feel a little silly now, but I wasn’t yet ready to cross that line.

Plenty of other sports reporters and people from the diving world came to see me in
Jeffrey
. I didn’t anticipate any of the sports people coming around and supporting my efforts. I didn’t make any attempt to let them know what I was doing.
Jeffrey
is a very gay play, and I didn’t think that the two worlds would mix.

Whatever my feelings, they came, including the administrator of U.S. Diving and a woman from U.S. Diving whom I’d worked with. After the show, they wanted to talk to me about the play. I thought they would just say hello and go, but they wanted to talk about Darius, the rest of the cast, and the message of the play.

My mother came to New York to see the show on a Saturday, and she saw both the 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. performances. I told my mom that she didn’t need to see both shows, but she wanted to. She said that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy it the first time through because the only thing she would see was me.

At seven o’clock, we generally had rather reserved audiences. When the show was over that night, I told my mom it was a good thing she was staying for the ten o’clock show, that it would be a better house. She said, “No, they wanted to hear every word you said, that’s the reason they were quiet.”

When I asked her what she thought of the play she said, “The only criticism I have is that you aren’t onstage enough.” That’s Mom. She sat through the ten o’clock show, and we had a pretty raucous crowd. They enjoyed the show and they were very vocal about it, laughing in all the right places.

After the show, I introduced my mom to the cast, and they loved her. They couldn’t believe she had sat through two shows in a row. Then I told them that she’d been to another Off Broadway show for a matinee earlier in the day. They were dumbfounded, because it’s so exhausting sitting through that many shows. Later, several of the cast members came up to me and said, “We know why you’re so nice. You’d have to be, with a mother who’s so supportive and nonjudgmental.”

The months I was in
Jeffrey
flew by. Before I knew it, I was waiting to go onstage for my final performance, which proved to be extremely difficult and emotional for me. Saying good-bye is never easy, but it’s grown increasingly difficult, because I don’t know what the future will bring. That last performance was also difficult because the sense of isolation I felt was so intense. I couldn’t share with anyone what I was feeling and experiencing, because I couldn’t tell anyone the whole story. Some of the other cast members noticed I was melancholy, and I imagine they figured it was just because I was leaving.

What also made me sad was knowing I was unlikely to get another chance to play a role that was meaningful. All of the acting I had done up to that point was relatively meaningless.
Jeffrey
was that rare opportunity for an actor to do important work, to deliver a message, to say something noteworthy.

In some ways, playing Darius was more satisfying than winning a gold medal at the Olympics, because it was so much more challenging than diving. With
Jeffrey,
I had to convey emotions and thoughts through spoken and unspoken language—which was never easy for me. I had to engage the audience in a much more direct way than I did when I was diving.