Paul Festa

The atmosphere at the War Memorial Opera House was charged at Saturday night’s premiere, with a few dozen sign-waving death penalty opponents outside and a star-studded audience inside. Luminaries on hand for the show included Sister Helen Prejean (pronounced “pray-zhawn”), on whose memoir the opera is supposedly based, and Tim Robbins, on whose movie the opera is actually based. Also in attendance were actress Susan Sarandon, who portrayed Prejean in the movie; singing nun emeritus Julie Andrews, whose presence might have given lead mezzo-soprano Susan Graham an extra dose of the jitters; and Robin Williams, who, if he has not yet appeared on the screen in a nun’s habit, is bound to do so sooner or later.

“Dead Man Walking’s” journey into operatic no man’s land is made all the more audacious by the fact that none of the principal creators had prior experience in the art. Thirty-nine-year-old composer Jake Heggie is known, by the few who know him, for his songs. Librettist Terence McNally earns his living on Broadway writing plays and musicals. And director Joe Mantello has acted in and directed plays and movies. With the unorthodox “Dead Man Walking,” the trio made their operatic debuts. For the audience, this was akin to boarding an airplane piloted by three novices who decided, for their maiden voyage, to fly the plane backward and upside-down.

The once-removed source of this unlikely opera is Prejean’s account of her work as spiritual advisor to two convicted murderers awaiting their executions in Louisiana’s electric chair in the mid-1980s. In an adroit blend of memoir and advocacy, Prejean’s book recounts her attempts to understand and humanize these men, her uphill battle to get them to accept responsibility for their crimes and achieve some kind of personal redemption, her part in the futile legal maneuverings to get their death sentences overturned, her witness of their executions and her wrenching encounters with the parents of both the victims and the condemned. Sprinkled throughout are legal, moral and biblical arguments against capital punishment that, together with her personal testimony, make the book a devastating indictment of the practice and of a society that permits it.

The book, movie and opera all make concerted efforts to convey the heinousness of the convicts’ crimes. In perhaps its boldest dramatic innovation, the curtain rises on the crime scene, a midnight forest where two teenage lovers lie naked together after swimming in a nearby lake. They are set upon by the fictionalized Joseph de Rocher (baritone John Packard) and an accomplice. De Rocher rapes the girl, then stabs her to death to silence her screams. The accomplice shoots the teenage boy execution style in the back of the head.

From this opening scene of carnage, which caused audience members near me to gasp, we are transported to a sun-washed scene portraying Sister Helen at work, merrily singing to her young black students in the New Orleans inner city, and then to a lengthy but minimally rendered scene in which Sister Helen drives her car to the prison and expostulates on her situation. Leaving aside the advisability of adorning the stage of an opera house for 20 minutes with a steering wheel and two bucket seats, this is the first scene of several over the next three hours that illustrate a recurrent, possibly inherent problem in staging this story: There’s an awful lot of talking in “Dead Man Walking.”

The problem of dramatizing a story so bound up with argument and ideas also vexed the movie, which tried to smuggle into dialogue bits and pieces of Prejean’s compelling case against capital punishment. What didn’t quite work on screen really doesn’t work in the opera house. Hands firmly gripping the wheel, Sister Helen slogs through miles of inner turmoil over ministering to a murderer, delivering her thoughts in quasi-recitative passages that repeatedly inspire that immortal question, “Are we there yet?” Once McNally gets Sister Helen interacting with the other characters — particularly the aggrieved parents of the convict’s victims — things start to pick up.

The music affords us a smoother ride. Heggie’s musical language is, like that of most of his young contemporaries, eclectic and familiar; you could say that he occupies the cutting edge of conventionality. But while the various influences of Copland, Bernstein, Berg and other predecessors are clear, the music is good enough to weather accusations of being derivative. With deft orchestrations, he builds tension and delivers climaxes without overreaching. His ensemble writing is superb, particularly when it involves the distraught quartet of victims’ parents. The music associated with the crime is particularly evocative: a meandering, ascending chromatic figure that infuses the scene with the same retrospective, haunted grief that characterizes the best of Prejean’s own writing.

There are wonderful things about McNally’s libretto, though many of them, particularly the comedic scene in which Sister Helen is pulled over for speeding, are the inventions of Robbins’ movie. On the whole, however, McNally’s admiration for the movie seems to have led him astray in the opera house. In Prejean’s book, the condemned is sentenced to die by electric chair. In the movie, as well as in the opera, he faces lethal injection. The prospect of electrocuting a baritone onstage may have been more than McNally and his co-creators could stomach, but it was the horrific fate of death by electric chair — a device that can take more 15 minutes to finish its work, setting the condemned’s head on fire and exploding his or her eyeballs — that inspired much of the terror and pity of Prejean’s narrative.

“Dead Man Walking” premiered with a first-rate cast. The whole group, but Susan Graham in the role of Sister Helen especially, sang with such purity of voice and clarity of diction that the inexact supertitles flashing above the stage seemed superfluous, if not insulting to the singers. Packard conveyed a convincing sense of de Rocher’s arrogance and petulance, and can hardly be blamed for failing to bring off the character’s rushed redemption. Frederica von Stade, a San Francisco Opera fixture, expertly filled out one of the opera’s most successful characterizations as de Rocher’s mother, whose breakdowns are that much more effective for her attempts to put on a brave face in front of her condemned son. Theresa Hamm-Smith, in the supporting role of Sister Rose, engaged in conduct unbecoming a nun by stealing each one of her scenes.

The opera ends with Sister Helen’s a capella rendition of a spiritual, “He Will Gather Us Around.” Introduced with her entrance and heard in bits and pieces throughout the opera, it is the only tune likely to make it home with audience members. The oft-repeated theme is meant to be the opera’s emotional lynchpin, charged with summoning all the work’s pathos and kindling a redemptive spirit at its otherwise dismal conclusion. But for those of us to whom spirituals sound bloodless and antiseptic when sung in operatic voice, “He Will Gather Us Around” will be the opera’s musical undoing. Even if you like to hear Kathleen Battle sing spirituals, even if “Porgy and Bess” is your favorite work in the repertory, the repetitions of this cloying tune act like clusters of redwood trees, sucking up sunlight and starving everything below. Barely one of Heggie’s other musical creations can survive next to this melody. It is all-consuming, and if it makes half the impression on you as it did on me, the rest of the opera’s fine music can hardly be remembered, much less redeemed.

Musical misfires can do only so much to distract us from the tale of a man facing death, his conscience and a determined nun. But McNally unnecessarily guts the complex question of the convict’s guilt, stripping it of vital ambiguities. In foreclosing the possibility that the convict is being executed for a crime in which he took part but was not the principal actor, as Prejean’s first convict maintained until his death, McNally robs Prejean’s story of one of its principal tensions. We wind up with a clean confession achieved too easily, with the Christian homily that “the truth will set you free” as our consolation prize. Certainly this type of neat, dramatically slack finale is as familiar to the opera house as it is to McNally’s Broadway audiences. But in an opera that so gleefully sets aside tradition, that so readily embraces bleak realism over operatic glitz, this adherence to formula feels like a betrayal. For this we endured fluorescent lighting?

“How’d your date go?” a friend asked me when it was over.

“He talked about himself for 40 minutes,” I reported.

“Hot!” said the friend. It was now about 11 o’clock and the narrow bar had filled up with Sex Film candidates and other loose characters. Auditions continued Sunday but these were in essence closing ceremonies, the last official Sex Film activity for this group. For that reason, and because a number of us had seen the sun rise in unfamiliar neighborhoods that morning, the mood was several shades darker than it had been the night before; in addition to being hung over, we were starting to get paranoid. We were making calculations, weighing rumors, sizing up the competition, wondering darkly about that guy who used to be on “Third Rock From the Sun,” counting up the number of auditions and dates we were called for, trying to divine our respective futures from everything John said and the way he said it and how it compared with what he had said to the others.

My friends among the candidates were confident of their failure. Keith hadn’t been asked to audition again and was sure he’d been eliminated. Jarrad had another audition scheduled but no date. I, by contrast, felt pretty good about being two and two for dates and auditions — Susan Shopmaker had called to invite me to appear again at noon the next day. Then, at the Wonder Bar, a guy told me he’d been called to audition all three days, had had two dates, and had been interviewed in private by HBO. Into this schedule I read my doom.

All night, hope and other illusions withered. No longer were we all one big happy family working in concert toward some bold and noble goal of artistic and sexual liberty. Now we were one big unhappy family, 34 dirty-minded siblings competing for the attention and love of a single parent who was endlessly affectionate but neglectful by virtue of his miraculous potency, charisma and consequent popularity. The dinner hour was upon us, and the competition for four or five servings of John’s stew of art, achievement and notoriety was now too acute to ignore.

I’d underestimated the seriousness of this whole venture until now. I had fallen for John’s ruse, had let him lull me into thinking this was sex therapy improv camp instead of an audition that would determine the course of the rest of my career and the rest of my life. He lulled us, sitting in that theater at the archives, into thinking that we were embarking on this daring adventure together, when of course most of us will be left behind. Now the drug of his presence and charisma was starting to wear off and the reality of the audition, of the rejection and disappointment that are inevitably in store for most of us, was starting to hurt. All I could remember from the week as I sidled through the crowded bar were the idiotic things I had said, the moment when his e-mail silence began, the sentences in this diary I now cringe to think that he read. The cycle is familiar because it is so much like love, or the realm of it in which we contemplate the possibility that we are no longer loved in return. We did not come to New York to date each other; we came to New York to date John. Now we wait by the phone. If we fell in love with him, the worse for us — or the much, much better.

Having been shaken off by my date, I milled around making conversation with the other candidates. The flow of available small talk quickly grew infinitesimal before running completely dry. The awkwardness was keenest with the other gay guys, the most direct competition and, I increasingly thought, the most vulnerable. Throughout the week the project had produced a kind of gay superiority complex, in which we fags were chummy with John and with each other and enjoyed, if not flaunted, our majority status and our instinctual, gay-given comfort with the whole idea of fucking strangers on the one hand and fucking on film on the other.

The illusion that majority status benefited us was one of Saturday night’s first casualties. In my conversation with John at his apartment, he had mentioned female ejaculation at least twice and said how he was becoming more and more interested in having the movie explore female sexuality. How many women, and straight men to fuck them, did the candidate pool offer for John to choose from? At best a handful. Now, at the Wonder Bar’s closing ceremonies, I started envying heterosexual odds. Transgendered odds wouldn’t be bad either. If the cast list didn’t include the blond young hooker whose mid-video sex switch had mind-fucked even this gender-jaded group, I’d eat my chromosomes.

Milling around the Wonder Bar, all my gay male comrades could talk about was casting anxiety. I had a fairly long talk with “Plato,” a guy I’d met one night about a year ago in the company of several other skinny white 20-something chem-friendly photographers, circus performers, hookers and drug dealers at the Los Angeles mansion of an art- and artist-collecting corporate lawyer. I’d been instantly attracted to Plato, not least because in addition to having those smoldering rent-boy good looks, he was a writer. At the Wonder Bar we commiserated for a while about the psychic brutalities of writing, and then about the building anxiety of the week’s audition process.

Plato’s anxiety, it turned out, was more severe than my own. One of the other candidates was his boyfriend, which offered two distinctly horrifying scenarios in which one would be cast and not the other. And then there was Plato’s long-standing friendship with John, which already had had to weather the director’s decision, after Plato had given what all agreed was the best audition in his life, to cast someone a little younger as Tommy Gnosis in the “Hedwig” movie. How would the friendship weather another disappointment at John’s hands? How did that factor affect the rest of our chances? What must John be going through with his newly acquired status as star-maker, weighing friendships with people he’d disappointed before, matching sexual orientations and chemistries between close friends on the one hand and people he’d never met on the other, between people who live in this atmosphere and others like me who were giddy with the novelty of it?

I was preparing to leave the Wonder Bar when Jarrad arrived, resplendent in such magnificent Suppositori Spelling drag that no one recognized him. His powder-blue knee-high fuck-me pumps added at least six inches to his height, and the makeup and colorless Wonder Woman armored top and bikini underpants with no tuck completed the metamorphosis. I was relieved to see him, then dismayed as it became apparent that the bond we’d formed at Albert’s bar the night before had succumbed to the oddsmaking calculation and anxiety that had poisoned the rest of the candidate pool. Why hadn’t John assigned him a date? Jarrad fretted. I shrugged my shoulders. Our subsequent small talk could have fit comfortably into a dime bag.

At a loss for words, I looked around and saw the back of a head of spiky brown and white-pepper hair on a petite frame: John. I resolved to avoid him — any interaction with the director in this crushing atmosphere could only result in misbehavior, feet-in-mouth and regret. A minute later the crowd had shifted so that he was right in front of me, the nape of his pale neck exposed and winking at me in the obscurity of the bar like a spinning aluminum lure in a murky pond. That skin seemed so naked, so inviting, so vulnerable, that my resolution to avoid John transformed into a considerably more powerful desire to kiss him, and before I could think through my actions, my lips were feeling the warmth of his neck and my tongue tasting the salt of his skin as I sucked lightly, came up for air, then kissed the spot once more.

John turned around, inquisitive but not necessarily surprised, then smiled broadly as he recognized me. He backed into me and drew my arm forward around him so that we were spooning standing up, then ground his bottom into my groin in time to the music, all the while maintaining his conversation with a woman I did not recognize. He bummed a puff of her cigarette and I squeezed him for a puff of my own. He didn’t get it at first, then I said into his ear, Hook me up. Was that pushy? He held the cigarette to my mouth and I drew in smoke, exhaled and released him.

After parting with the blond, John turned to Jarrad and me. He admired Miss Spelling’s outfit; we told him about our date at Albert’s bar. Then the evening’s signature conversational paralysis set in and the three of us stood there with absolutely nothing to say to one another.

“Well, I’m going to go circulate and talk to some of the others,” John said. He left. Jarrad and I looked around anxiously. I reviewed what I’d said to John and found it insipid and self-aggrandizing. Then I dealt myself a few mental punches about kissing his neck. Why had I done it? I had no self-control, no cool. I’d swooped down on him like a bulimic before a buffet with a missing sneeze-guard. Whatever chance I’d had with this movie I’d just blown.

It was time to go. But as I was leaving the bar I once again got caught up in a conversation, this time with an uptown guy who cheered me up momentarily by saying he thought I had a really good shot at a lead. Why was that? I asked.

“Well you’re probably the best-looking guy here,” he said. “And your video was really great.”

I didn’t buy it about the looks, as much as I would have liked to — there were hotter guys and besides that it seemed obvious that John hadn’t summoned us all here for a more than usually sexually fraught beauty contest. And the movie? By Saturday night those videos seemed like they’d been made and screened three or four Miss America scandals ago. It no longer seemed to matter that my movie had been good, because the things that were good about it no longer seemed to matter. The movie had timing, music, humor, perversity of story, and of course the richness of the archive I had to play with (my mother bouncing her doll down the wide avenues of East Flatbush, the ruby spot of blood pooling on my newly shaved head). But those were not the qualities that John was looking for in his actors, not anymore. What mattered was acting, presence, charisma, and so far what had I offered him in my auditions? Cheap laughs.

I walked home in a dark mood and did my best to cultivate it. I had to start priming myself for an emotional performance the next day. The world was providing me with an abundance of material, starting with the blood bath our country was preparing to run in Iraq, stretching back to the bloodbath I had witnessed on Sept. 11 2001, the ruins of which lay three blocks from my current residence in TriBeCa and extending out into the infinitely bloody landscape of post-Oppenheimer anxiety.

The previous night I had dreamed that I was looking out on New York from my 28th-floor Juilliard dorm room in Lincoln Center, and a great seismic wave was rolling through the island toward us, pulverizing into fine radioactive dust block after block of glassy skyscrapers and stone apartment buildings bordering Central Park.

Walking home from the Wonder Bar I heard something rustling in a garbage can, freshly lined with a blue plastic bag. I stood before it a while, contemplating the hours of hunger and thirst it would take for that bag to become still. Then I did something I can only confess now that I am 3,000 miles from New York and New Yorkers, which is that I removed the liner and liberated a small rat, who went off into the dark recesses of the West Village to scavenge and breed.

Sunday I woke up with a new mantra: I am sad. I had recited it on my way home and as I lay sleepless in my bed, then as I woke the next morning an hour earlier than necessary, as I moped around the apartment and meditated on the image of people in business suits falling 80 stories in humiliating daylight. I felt vile about using those deaths as material; I used them some more. I listened eight or nine times to Olivier Messiaen’s “Le Banquet Celeste,” an organ work that straddles the gap between major and minor to wrenching emotional effect. I left the apartment with a churning emptiness in my gut and a noticeable tremor in my hands.

When I arrived at the casting office, I withdrew into a corner by staring into my laptop, tapping at it occasionally, and otherwise hiding within massive, DJ headphones. I wasn’t trying to be subtle about the fact that I was writing about this whole process, and in the shaky state of sleep- and food-deprived, Messiaen-inspired, virtually ecstatic gloom, I for once was able to suppress my natural compulsion to simultaneously entertain and take care of everyone around me.

John called me in to audition with Plato. That was good news — I wanted to go dark, and Plato was so dark he was practically opaque. John held me in the hallway while he sent Plato to the love seat.

“OK, the deal is that you’re calling a sex line –” Fuck me. “And what you want this guy to do is reenact an ideal sexual scenario you always have in your mind, a sexual touchstone for you. And the scenario could be real or imagined.”

Before he’d finished saying this into my ear I had my image. It was of the hermaphrodite in Fellini’s “Satyricon,” and I saw this beautiful young person (not, perhaps, as illegally young as Fellini portrayed him) lying naked, exposing his pale breasts and body and micropenis, hair transformed into a white froth in the refulgent summer sun on a wide slab of granite in the Yuba River where it flows through the Sierra foothills and where I spent three days one summer without leaving. I barely moved from that rock in those three days, and that’s how I envisioned the scenario with the hermaphrodite, willfully stranded on this exalted aerie, 30 feet above a diving pool in the river, and canopied by an overhang that could also be described as a medium-size cave. Only a glimpse of this image came to me in that moment, accompanied by the beats of Messiaen’s dissonances shimmering in the air like heat rising from the rock, but it told me down to the last detail everything I had to say and do for the next 20 minutes.

Oh, it started off veering toward farce just like the others — I repeatedly had to ask Plato to make his deep voice higher, and I wound up talking dirty to him about his “little clit of a dick.” This made the director laugh out loud, as Plato is famed across nine time zones for being distinctly not little, to the degree that the fact has even odds of becoming the subject of an Entertainment Weekly or maybe even Teen People headline were Plato to be cast. But from hormone and dick jokes Plato’s gravity pulled me back down and at that lower altitude I was able to say a number of very involved things about the way loving him had made me feel whole because his manifest conflict between sexes reflected the kinds of less visible conflicts I have within my own identity, between ways of being, self-presentation, even my passionate (not necessarily sexual) orientations. We shared the experience of feeling “neither here nor there.” I barely remember a line of the dialogue now, only this resonant memory of what it was like to feel that the words coming out of my mouth to describe my longing for this person who once loved me were having a palpable effect on the temperature and atmospheric pressure of the room.

Plato was right there with me, and I with him, me feigning this heartbreak and Plato pretending to be the sex worker pretending to be a hermaphrodite. (I don’t, strictly speaking, know how much of a stretch that was for Plato.) The dialogue went on a long time. At Plato’s perfectly timed cue it got dirty. Then it became sad and I began to suspect, without saying anything about it, that the reason I missed the hermaphrodite was that the hermaphrodite was dead. Plato said something to buck me up and I smiled painfully through the welling of tears in my eyes. When it was over there were a good 15 seconds of silence before John spoke in a husky voice, blinking back tears of his own. “That’s what this movie has to be about,” he said. “Because that person could be anybody.”

I looked at John, as did Plato, and I didn’t blink or change the haunted expression on my face. He said a few more things about the audition, ordered an improv hug between me and Plato, and then dismissed the two of us for the day.

Doubt hit me the moment I walked out of the room. Had it been good? Or merely melodramatic? Did that hand to the face come off as a hackneyed gesture or an organic expression of grief and exhaustion? Were John’s tears an organic expression or an elaborately prepared consolation prize for a disappointment he already knew was in store for me? Had the dismissal from the day, and from the auditions for that matter, expressed, “I don’t need to see any more of you because I have witnessed the orgasmic manifestation of God in your work,” or something more along the lines of not needing to see any more of me, period?

I turned to Plato. We embraced for a long time. “That was really great,” Plato said, beaming through his darkness. I felt a door open between him and me that had never been ajar in any of our limited encounters on either coast. And on a more selfish level, I felt hope.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Monday, the day I left, it became clear not whether we were going to war (that had been transparent for some time) but when, and it was very soon. I had done this same flight on Sept. 15, 2001, and watched Port Authority and New York State police remove the two Arab passport-holding young men seated on either side of me, before they ransacked the interior of the airplane in search of box cutters and explosives. I had flown then so I could fly now, in part because there is no struggle with fear that a few dozen milligrams of a good Valium derivative can’t take the edge off. (I didn’t have the benefit of a prescription on that September 2001 flight.) The plane took off and landed in the usual way.

I was not home two days before I ran into a friend — a documentary filmmaker and friend of John’s for many years — who welcomed me back and asked cheerfully how the audition went. Oh, and had I heard? The movie was cast. There were only four leads. One of them was Jarrad and the other was that guy from “Third Rock From the Sun.” But the information was fifth-hand, he added, so I should take it with a grain of salt.

I wasn’t sure how to take a hind kick to the gut by a wild stallion with a grain of salt, and I felt like nothing less was being asked of me. But if there’s one thing three years at the Juilliard School train you to do, it is to smile and continue a conversation amicably after having had the wind knocked out of you by disappointment, and this is what I did with the documentary filmmaker. That night I lay in bed with a different kind of sleeplessness than what I’d experienced in New York. This agitated wakefulness exhausted not only me but my boyfriend, who had given me an ecstatic welcome home and now lay beside me awake as I tossed and turned. I found myself in the difficult position of begging solace from someone who not only was immensely relieved by the news that had hurt me, but whom I had spent that matchless week in New York hurting.

Still, I confided in him and he listened and did his best to comfort me. Some of his responses stung, though, as he held up a mirror before my feelings of rejection and envy. I confessed to him that as much as I wanted to be happy for Jarrad, all I could think was how difficult it would be to hear him talk about the monthlong improv workshop, about John this and John that, about the shooting schedule, the parties, the premiere.

“That’s exactly how I would have felt if you’d been cast,” my boyfriend said matter-of-factly.

Near dawn, I got out of bed and brought my computer to the hallway, where I e-mailed John. If my sources had it right, I wrote, I wouldn’t be coming back east for the workshop, and so I wanted to thank him for inviting me to one of the strangest and most wonderful challenges — certainly among those filed under “audition” — of my life.

Then I slept. When I woke up a few hours later there was a reply in my in box: “Paul, I don’t know who your sources are but I AM leaning towards different people right now — partly because they are in relationships already (those things are a big deal as I discovered and you know). But absolutely nothing is for sure right now. I’m truly right in the middle of it all. Which is not to take away from how wonderful you were. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock almost killed me it was so beautiful. Thank you so much and we’ll talk. Love, JCM.”

First I felt that kick in the gut again — of course I was hoping he would refute the rumor entirely. Then I naturally enough took the intended solace in his praise, which on second glance brought me a new rush of pride. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock. The director hadn’t merely found it beautiful, he had bought it. With some stolen help from Fellini, from the transgendered blond Sex Film candidate, from Messiaen, even from John Updike (whose hooker in “Rabbit, Run” had a “brass froth” of pubic hair), with Plato’s openness and spontaneity and immediacy, I had spontaneously written and performed a fiction and passed it off as memory. If only for a 20-minute audition, I’d surpassed my most grandiose fantasies about this venture. I did not leave New York a celebrity, pseudo or otherwise; I didn’t even leave with a part. But for those minutes of sex and pathos on that battered love seat next to Plato, I was an actor.

As the days went by and the sting of rejection dulled, as the final cast list came out (with Plato and his boyfriend, with the transgendered hooker and the boy who fucked his bleeding girlfriend, with the guy who had three audition calls, two dates, and a private interview with HBO, with the Chinese woman who had played Korean in the “Hedwig” movie, with the guy who sent in an audition tape because he was “a complete whore,” with a few more for good measure, but without Jarrad and without that guy from “Third Rock From the Sun”), I couldn’t help thinking about another homosexual ingénue from the provinces who came to New York hoping to rise to stardom on the stage with the help of her 40-year-old idol.

Wasn’t I a slightly less evil and less sick 21st century version of Eve Harrington? I’ll grant that the antiheroine of “All about Eve” plotted her course with malice and subterfuge, and that she, unlike me, successfully completed it. But both of us had sat on couches located about 20 blocks from each other on Broadway and told our idol a startlingly sad story of love lost, had made that idol cry and made that idol believe our lies.

And though Eve fed off souls greater than her own for the sake of her career and artistry, while I merely held out my hand in earnestness and hope for that nourishment, both of us shared a dangerous instability. Both of us were searching for an identity we could not manifest on our own, but had to be conferred: by our respective mentors, by the stage, by fame. Both of us were or felt like frauds, and found that we were skilled in imitation because we were personal palimpsests onto which any character or effect could be easily overlaid.

In the second entry of this diary I wondered whether this audition would expose me, whether they would see my fraudulence, my incapacity to act truly under the imaginary circumstances of the play or in the reality of my own life. Or would they discover me, see me for who I really was and make me a star?

“Honey, there’s a step in between, which is ‘I accept myself as a real person,’” Albert replied. I did and do on some level. But there is something in me, the part of me hung up on celebrity and John’s praise, the part of me crushed by his rejection, that does not accept the reality of who I am.

The theatrical fable of Eve’s encounter with the great Margo Channing is told as a lesbian vampire story, the younger actress sucking the creative and erotic life out of her mentor. The passionate feelings I felt for John were real — but they were also inextricable from the work he did and the gifts he could have chosen to bestow on me. As a lifelong collector of mentors, of substitute parents whether movie directors or Baroque music pedagogues or swinging bisexual couples, all of whom I feel compelled to write about in public and in intimate detail, I both hate this conflict of motive and passion and accept it as the inevitable consequence of being called. As for the pleasures and hazards of being chosen — those are once more deferred.

For two hours between 10 and midnight, Barbara coached four of us, all nonactors, on the basics of improvisation. The first rule was no blocking. Accept whatever ideas or premises your partner suggests; practice saying yes. Keep the mind clear of plans and preconceptions. Free yourself to a constant acceptance of the present moment and a mindful retention of the recent past. Endow your partner and your setting with physical attributes. Don’t try to be funny or clever. Don’t be afraid of silence; once a character has been defined, his or her silence has great emotional depth.

Most of the session was review for me, but Barbara offered one or two tidbits I didn’t remember from class. One that would have a substantial impact on my auditions was the mantra, a method of conjuring a mood or affect by silently repeating a simple phrase. Barbara introduced this during a scenario that had stalled badly. “OK, you’re not having enough fun,” Barbara interrupted. “When this happens, use this mantra: ‘This is fun! This is fun! This is fun!’ Sometimes I will be onstage screaming this inside my head. It will always turn the scene around.”

To demonstrate the power of mantras, Barbara did an experiment. First she sent me out of the room and had me come back in as though I were entering an audition. Then she asked me a rapid-fire series of questions in a hostile monotone: “What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you like about it?”

I was able to answer the first two coherently, then stumbled through the third. Without critiquing my performance, Barbara sent me out of the room again, now assigning me to spend some time repeating a mantra before I returned: They like me, they like me, they like me, they like me…

“What’s your name?” Barbara barked when I came back.

“Paul Festa,” I answered, smiling.

“Where are you from?” she snarled.

“I’m a California boy,” I replied easily. “I was born and raised in San Francisco.”

“Oh, really, how nice. Mariah Carey as the next Bond girl. Why?”

“Well, who else is going to fuck her?”

The class cheered.

Friday morning I woke up two hours before my first audition and immediately reached for my mantras. Shaving in the shower, wolfing down two overcooked pork chops for breakfast, riding the 2 Express from Chambers to 14th Street, hiking across town and up to the casting office on Madison Square Park, I practiced them in combination: They like me, this is fun, this is fun, they like me, this is fun, this is fun, this is fun…

When I arrived, three or four guys were loafing in the waiting room. We made small talk; in the lulls I silently practiced my mantras. Then John Cameron Mitchell walked in.

“OK, let’s have you –” He pointed to “Keith,” a burly, conventionally handsome L.A. guy who in his video had sat naked in front of a huge American flag and narrated a kidnapping fantasy come true. “And you.” He pointed at me.

Keith and I followed the director down the hall and into a small room where Rob and his assistant on HBO’s documentary in development had their cameras trained on a somewhat battered gray love seat.

Keith and I sat down and John gave us our first scenario. “You’re in the waiting room out there,” he said, “and you’ve just watched the audition videos. And you know that once you’re called into the room, you’re going to have to kiss.”

The conversation started off woodenly as we compared notes on the videos and gave each other our vital stats. “How old are you?” he asked. “Thirty-two,” I answered. “What about you?” “Oh, I’m 36,” he said. “I’m really old.”

“Well at least you’re not as old as John,” I said. “I think he’s, like, 39.”

My left ear curled listening for a laugh from the director and encountered silence.

My second audition was with the only other San Franciscan candidate, a mixed-race boy in his mid-twenties named Jarrad whom I’ve kissed at a few parties and clubs back home. Jarrad, whose alter ego Suppositori Spelling is the reigning Miss Trannyshack (new wave drag’s highest honor west of the Hudson and north of Sunset Boulevard) has no recollection of those encounters, but acknowledging some alcohol-induced memory loss, does not categorically deny they took place.

After Jarrad and I had performed the same initial exercise, discussing the tapes and our upcoming audition, John pulled me out into the hallway to give me my instructions for the next scene. The premise was that I was calling up a phone sex line in order to enact a rape fantasy, that is, that I wanted to be raped. Jarrad, playing the phone sex operator, was given his own instructions out of my earshot.

I started off trying to take this one seriously. I adopted all the poses of what Barbara referred to as low status — eyes downcast, toes pointed inward, brow furrowed — and with great pathos tried to convey the message, without spelling it out, that I wanted the phone sex operator also known as Suppositori Spelling to take me against my will.

As if that weren’t a steep enough challenge, Jarrad blocked me at every turn. Every offer I made, he dismissed; the best I could get from him was indifference. He was only following directions, it turned out — his assignment was to be a phone sex operator at the end of a long day, who’s bored with his job in general and anxious to finish up with this call in particular.

“You’re trying to humiliate me, aren’t you?” I asked after Jarrad roughly blocked me for the fifth time in a minute.

“Yeah, whatever,” he replied.

“It’s OK — I deserve to be humiliated.” Then I let my eyes go out of focus into the distance and declared solemnly: “I have low self-esteem.”

The director howled with laughter.

My third and final audition of the day was with a handsome 6-foot, 5-inch black Chicagoan. In the warm-up exercise, chatting in the imaginary waiting room with the knowledge we would have to kiss, I made a move on him. He froze. Then he tried to explain: It wasn’t that he found me unattractive, but that even though we were supposed to pretend there weren’t other people in the room, he knew there were other people — one of them with a camera. That made him uncomfortable. This was the most unusual argument I’d yet heard for being cast in the Sex Film Project, and with it the audition quickly came to an end.

Before leaving the office, I was assigned my first date — with Jarrad. I suggested that the two of us meet for drinks at Albert Fuller’s place at 7:30. A few hours later, waiting at Albert’s bar for Jarred to show up, I found myself struggling to justify some of the Action Week activities, particularly the hazily defined liaison Jarrad and I had been assigned.

“Why would somebody, as a director, want his stars to fuck with one another before he cast them?” Albert asked as he rolled us a cigarette.

“Well, he’s trying to make a sexually explicit movie, and he wants the plots and themes and characters to come out of our own improvisations,” I explained. “And he feels that the best way to get the right chemistry on the screen is if there’s the right chemistry in person. There are definitely some people who are professional actors, but most of us, I think, are not, and we’re not trained to fake it. We’re not trained to pretend we’re hot for somebody.”

“Well, honey, when you’re not, you’re not.”

“But if Hepburn wasn’t, she would learn. She would fake it, because she’s an actress,” I said. Albert and I had watched a Katharine Hepburn bio on TV a few nights before.

“There are some porno stars who can get it up for anything,” Albert observed, handing me the lit cigarette. “And there are some who can’t. And I’ve looked at a lot of them.”

“I think John wouldn’t want the film to be two actors who weren’t hot for each other faking it really well,” I said. “That’s not what he wants — he wants something a little bit more vérité, something a little bit more real, where you sometimes have to ask yourself, is this real? Or is this fiction?”

Jarrad was now 20 minutes late. I told Albert about the Salon serial and read him a passage that concluded with my realization that I was camped out this week in a pseudo-celebrity’s waiting room.

Albert put down his gin glass and gave me an almost affronted look.

“Pseudo! Honey, drop the ‘pseudo’! This shit is real.”

Maybe it is — and maybe that’s what’s keeping me up nights. This week in New York I am sleepless with excitement. Staring at the guest-bedroom ceiling of my borrowed TriBeCa duplex at 5 in the morning I am happy! But I am also afraid. Before the Thursday screening, John tried to get us to distinguish between our fear of the known and fear of the unknown, and to understand and perhaps even embrace the fact that so much of what we all were doing with this project ended with a big question mark. So what am I really afraid of? In America, you can become dangerously famous for much less than starring in John Cameron Mitchell’s sexually explicit new movie. Am I afraid that these steps to Parnassus could actually be leading me to a point where notoriety grows beyond my control, beyond pseudo, beyond being fun, to the absurd realm of stalkers and public harassment, of obnoxious fans stopping one in public to have their left breast signed, of a chronic, insufferable invasion of privacy? (Whether my career as a confessional writer over the past few years has left me any privacy to be invaded is a separate question.)

I have low self-esteem. Perhaps the issue, the reason for “pseudo” and the other halfhearted self-deprecations that pockmark this diary, is that I do not feel allowed, as a writer, to enjoy the week, to relish the experience of having been called, or the fantastic (if complicated) outcomes that success could yield, because I think the reader will prefer to see me stretched on a rack of angst and self-doubt. I certainly have generous, genuine doses of both those emotions in their highest grades and concentrations, but I remain unsure how much of it at this point in my life I manufacture for the sake of softening the edges of my literary persona. Perhaps we could observe a moment of central transparency on my part to name and nominate for oblivion this tendency or tic of mine, learned equally from W.C. Fields, Woody Allen and Macbeth, which is forever capitalizing on the idea that for a schlimazel onstage, nothing succeeds like complete failure. We love those characters, or we love watching them implode, because they are foiled at every turn, because none of their good deeds goes unpunished, because no blessing fails to bring them a wealth of misery.

But it occurred to me as Albert told me to “drop the pseudo” that whatever mask of haplessness and self-defeat I wear in this diary, I had better enjoy this part of the experience, this airborne moment, no matter how brief, tentative, or morally vexed, because if I can’t go from an office job in February to having John Cameron Mitchell declare my “incredibly promising” career in filmmaking in March and take pleasure in that, I will never enjoy anything in my entire career even if they give me enough golden statuettes to plug every butt double in Hollywood.

The boyfriend didn’t like the second episode of this diary, particularly the satirical curl to my description of his struggle with the project. “Why don’t you try being serious for a change?” he demanded. It’s a good question. I’m 32 years old — isn’t it time I started taking my responsibilities and my day job and the sensitivities of my friends and family and boyfriend, and my prose and my career and my whole life more seriously? I reflect on the matchless quality of this week in New York, this sensation of having flung myself in a lucid dream from a great height, and I am now in that moment of freefall in which I am not sure yet whether I will be able to fly or whether the sensation of lucidity was a fatal illusion. In freefall, I feel happy, afraid, awakened, alive. What I don’t know is this: Was I brought here by my lack of seriousness? Or my overabundance of it?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Jarrad arrived about 40 minutes late, flustered, and took a seat next to me at Albert’s bar. I poured him a glass of champagne and sat back to watch how Miss Trannyshack 2002 and Albert Fuller would get along. Introducing them had seemed like a risky proposition from the beginning, and as I watched them conversationally circle each other I had to ask myself why I’d set this up. The short answer was that I knew no more fun or stimulating place in New York than Albert’s bar. But then, as I monitored their responses to each other, I realized that I was taking this date far more seriously than I’d thought — I had taken Jarrad home to meet the family.

After a few awkward minutes, Albert and Jarrad had a radically transformative effect on each other. As Albert talked, I watched Jarrad become uncharacteristically still and quiet. At certain points I had to laugh and grab his thigh, because his mouth was literally hanging open as Albert’s discourse careened from the formal to the filthy to the sublime. Albert in turn had transformed from his normally gregarious self into a man onstage in front of an extremely desirable audience. His story of how he and the apartment wound up in Ned Rorem’s diaries — normally a three-minute anecdote — expanded to a 15-minute deadpan comedy routine that had Jarrad and me clutching each other with laughter.

Shortly before Albert threw us out at around 10 p.m., my phone started vibrating in my pants pocket. John Cameron Mitchell, read the LCD. I had left him a message earlier, when Jarrad first showed up, to ask him exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing on this date. “Oh, it’s no big deal. Just get to know one another, see what the chemistry is like,” he said when I posed the question. I had brought the phone upstairs to Albert’s private quarters, because in the studio we were blasting Albert’s recording of Bach’s Italian Concerto so loud it could be heard down the street at the Café des Artistes. I told John I thought the date with Jarrad was going well and asked him how his day had been.

“Exhausting,” he said. “But good. People were coming up with really deep, personal material in the auditions today. It was kind of overwhelming.”

Deep, personal material? Overwhelmingly exhausting deep personal material? I scanned quickly over my auditions: A flat joke about John’s age. A rape fantasy with an uninterested rapist. A Sex Film aspirant who was camera shy. Meanwhile the others sat on that dingy love seat unpacking their souls and overwhelming him with pathos. This is fun, this is fun, this is fun, I had insisted all morning and into the afternoon. Perhaps I should have had a little less fun.

Shaken, I returned to the bar, where Jarrad was talking at length for the first time, describing to Albert the Tori Amos video in which she sings while playing harpsichord with one hand and piano with the other.

“Far out, honey,” Albert said.

Finally Albert sent us on our way, out into the cold where Jarred clutched my arm and gushed about how wonderful Albert was, how amazing the studio, how great it was to spend time with someone that age (76) who was that hip. “I have a total phobia about old people,” Jarred told me. “I’m normally terrified of them, and of getting old.”

I was still preoccupied with what John had said about the afternoon’s auditions and quickly set about dulling that anxiety at the open bar of a club in the East Village where a number of Sex Film Project dates were ending up. In addition to our colleagues, several of New York’s most illustrious cross-dressers were there. After an hour or so I found myself crowded into a photo booth with a few others, including the legendary Justin Bond — a great performer and a genuine pseudo-celebrity — as a little dime bag of cocaine made its way around. I was busy passing the bag when I felt my black cotton pants being yanked down and saw Justin Bond, seated on the photo booth stool, closing in on the kill.

I quickly fell to a squatting position, putting my genitals out of reach and bringing me face-to-knees with the legendary performer.

“Justin, I swear to God, there’s no way I would ever turn down a blow job from you except for the fact that I’m dating this guy –”

“I was just blotting my lipstick!” Justin interrupted me with nasal indignation. With that, she gathered her skirts with great dignity and sailed out of the photo booth.

I suppose I was asking for it, wearing those summery cotton pants with no underwear. A wide range of other hands, most of them attached to Sex Film Project candidates, had found their way underneath them already that night, including those of the burly, handsome Keith, whom I spent some time kissing next to the photo booth, and Jarrad, and two or three or four guys who were hanging around Jarrad. After two or three hours, the combination of the loose pants and loose guys playing with them resulted in the worst case of blue balls I’ve ever had in my life.

At around 3 in the morning, I limped in acute pain back to the East Village apartment of a new friend of Jarrad’s, someone so well connected he was going to be in the Sex Film without even having to audition. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough not to feel guilty about heading back to an East Village apartment with a Sex Film cast member and candidate, but in a number of conversations with the boyfriend that day I had come to what I thought was a practical compromise to govern my sexual behavior for the week. I had explained to Jarrad just as we left Albert Fuller’s that I was in a relationship with a really amazing guy at home, and that while he was tolerating this week and this date, I would have to rein it in on our date tonight: kissing and jerking off were my limits.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Jarred whispered to me as we entered his new friend’s tiny fourth-floor walkup. I appreciated the sentiment, but it was entirely academic, because all I was capable of doing for the first 20 minutes while Jarrad and his friend went at it on the bed next to me was to hold a refrigerated bottle of Rolling Rock to my aching testicles, which were swollen to the size of Meyer lemons. Once the swelling went down and the beer was at room temperature I jerked off, coming on Jarrad, his new friend and his new friend’s ceiling. Then I gathered my things, kissed my date goodbye, and walked through the crisp spring dawn back to TriBeCa.

Next: Hangover, hermaphrodites and the breeders

“When porn actually was good was when they had multiple cameras,” the director was saying as I walked in. “Because they were like, ‘They’re having sex, and we don’t have much money — let’s have three cameras, one of them slo-mo.’ That’s why you see stuff from the ’70s that actually seems real, and emotional, and you think, Wow, these guys are actually having a relationship.”

How much of a limb were we walking out on with this project? He went on:

“I was talking to Gus van Sant. He wants to make a film with real sex. There’s been a number of French films lately with a lot of real sex, actually none of which I really like. But there’s a new wave happening here now, and this is going to be one of the first, which is kind of exciting. So it would be nice to raise the bar for making it one of the best that might explore these types of things.”

And what was wrong with the sex movies already on the market?

“A problem with a lot of these films is that people are always equating sex with death. Sex with depression, sex with anomie, sex with trouble. And sure, they can be connected, but sex is connected with every part of your life, or could be. And I think all these films that are pretending to be so groundbreaking in France — it just shows how fucking scared they are of sex. French people say they invented love, but they are so scared of it.

“I think an American film about love with sex is definitely necessary. ‘Y Tu Mama También’ had that kind of comedy and fun, but imagine if you actually saw the hard-ons when they’re on the diving board, or imagine if you saw the sex fully instead of hiding it in the normal way. You really could have been … sucked up into that film even more. They could have taken it to the next level. And that’s where people have stopped from going there fully, with trust, with love.”

Next, the director told us the movie would be unrated rather than X-rated, and that independent houses in college towns and major cities would show it. The rest of the distribution would be through festivals and mail order. No, he didn’t think Blockbuster would carry it.

After JCM answered a few more questions, the producer started handing out three-page questionnaires that listed the 34 cast candidates along with four ratings: NEVER, POSSIBLY, I THINK SO, DEFINITELY. With each video we were to rate the candidate based on his or her sexual attractiveness. Under each rating was room for written comments.

I understood why the filmmakers had us do this, and in fact it inspired less dread than the free-form cruising of the night before and the “dates” for which we were keeping our Friday through Sunday nights free. But as the videos started playing and people began scribbling on their ratings sheets, I began to feel almost as if I’d been duped. I’d made my 10-minute audition video with the instructions to tell a true story about a sexual experience I’d had, with the obvious purpose of interesting the filmmakers in me as an actor, as a storyteller, and as a sexual person. But now my peers were about to watch what I’d done and rate me based on something related but entirely more specific, which boiled down to that quintessential Internet-time courting query that my generation and adjacent ones will go to our erotic graves asking: “Hot or not?”

This was not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, supposedly voting on my artistic vision and technical prowess, it was three dozen peers contemplating whether they wanted my penis and other appendages penetrating their various orifices while John Cameron Mitchell’s crew immortalized the images for an international audience. Without knowing it, I had made and submitted a video personals ad. Had I known it, would I have devoted said video to the affair I’d had with a married couple who resembled my parents?

The videos rolled. Since “Festa” came after three B’s, two C’s and a D, I had some time to get nervous. Between videos I looked up at the other candidates and busied myself with some demographic guesstimates: Mostly male — a handful of women, one of them transgendered. Mostly white — a couple of black guys, one Chinese-American woman, one black woman, one Hawaiian man, a lone Latino (Ramon was out on tour with his dance company). There were about eight or ten guys I thought were hot, and about an equal number I thought were not, and the rest were in between. But the vast majority, including all the women and the tranny, I would “definitely” have sex with if John Cameron Mitchell asked me to. In fact I was hard pressed to think of things I wouldn’t do under that particular circumstance, short of joining al-Qaida or the Israeli ultra-Orthodox, as my sister did a few years ago at the invitation of the charismatic mentors she found in the midst of her own late early-30s pre-midlife crisis. (My sister’s conversion gave me some cover at home. “At least it’s not Chabad,” I was able to console my mother about the Sex Film Project.)

The videos were a mixed bag. Most were low tech, the Handycam bouncing around freely in dimly lit poster-adorned bedrooms. Most showed some sex, though hardcore scenes were the exception. Most were funny (“My friends suggested I try out for the movie because I’m a complete whore”) and some were unbearably sad. Among the candidates was a 20-year-old hooker who’d been on the job for seven years, and a 30-ish transvestite singer who’d survived a wide range of drug habits and abusive relationships after being molested as a boy. One woman talked about how she felt she had raped a male partner; one guy described fucking his girlfriend while she bled from her face (this drew an isolated hiss from the audience).

One by one the videos played; candidates scribbled down their ratings. Every so often I glanced up at the crowd, brought back from absorption in their stories to a fresh realization of where we were and what we were doing. Who it would be? I wondered. Who would be called out of the waiting room, who would John Cameron Mitchell turn into a star?

By the time they inserted my video into the massive TV set, I had become wildly nervous. I had shot the movie, my first, in a couple of weeks, though I’d been working on the story in book form for more than two years. The video version had met with mixed reviews back home. I’d shown it to a group of guy friends — three gay and one straight — and listened in mounting horror as the laugh lines passed in complete silence. When it was through, I got up and turned off the VCR, saying I thought maybe we shouldn’t watch the clips reel that followed. The straight friend was already walking out of the room at that point. “Yeah, I’ve had enough,” he said on his way out.

When you are working with material such as mine, you quickly become accustomed to rejection. “The story of a man who has sex with his parents [sic] is just too kooky for me,” said one literary agent last summer after my prior agent delisted me. “It’s not something I can really buy — or sell.” My hopes were raised when one agent’s assistant called it “immensely readable,” but were dashed when her boss disagreed. Then a friend of mine at home broke the tie, calling it “unreadable.” After a second friend gave up reading at about Page 80, complaining that the work (a comedy) had plunged her into a crippling depression, I decided I would not be a writer anymore — not, at least, for a little while.

Then came the Sex Film Project audition call, and I’d held out some hope that what evidently hadn’t quite worked on the page would miraculously mutate into screen magic. I liked the movie, even if my friends didn’t — I thought it was funny. The images and the characters were vivid. The juxtaposition of archival video, interview excerpts, photos and music was smart and clean, and the whole thing was bookended with MTV-style photo montages, including a hardcore porn shoot starring Boyle and Goyle, the blow-up dolls who played the couple in various scenes in the movie. It seemed to have all the right ingredients for JCM’s project: laughs, hardcore sex, significant underlying themes, two guys and a girl.

Now the movie was playing before its biggest audience yet — the 34 cast candidates (minus Ramon and one or two others), the filmmakers, and HBO. My heart pounded. I grew terribly and suddenly cold. The laughs came in the right spots, but they weren’t exactly guffaws. Then the video settled down and became serious, and I watched myself explain even from the time she was a little girl, my mother always knew she would be a mother, that it was part of her identity as a woman. And as the eerie, tentative music began to play, the video cut to grainy, slow-motion footage of her as a young girl in Brooklyn, rocking her doll on a porch swing in time to the downtempo techno I’d overlaid, then walking the doll down some wide East Flatbush boulevard, again in time to the music, her eyes wide and affectless as the doll’s. As the scene unfolded, my shivering became more and more violent until I began to cry.

Having made this movie, having made the rocking of the doll synch up with the beat of that goddamn techno, which in turn had to be lowered so it didn’t overwhelm the voice-over when it entered, I’d estimate conservatively that I’ve watched the scene about 3 or 4 trillion times. But not once before that day at the Archives did I react to it so strongly. Maybe this was part of that therapy John had described in our talk the other night, that “safe place,” that “church,” that “sacred space” of the theater. “You just do it there and then it can integrate into your life,” he’d said.

Perhaps only now, watching this movie with an audience of virtual strangers, could that space come into being, could I assimilate the alien, indigestible information fed to us every day of our adult lives by our therapists and our pop-psych paperbacks and our daytime television talk shows: that our parents were children once, that everything they gave us and everything they withheld was in some way determined by what happened when they were. Perhaps only in the weird womb of that theater, even as I could feel the others judging, cruising, rating, rejecting me, could I accept the reality of that little girl’s existence and feel compassion for her.

Or maybe I was finally cracking under the strain of my Sex Film Project regimen, which involved sleeping at most four hours per night and eating half portions of randomly timed meals once or twice a day. This is not my normal response to stress. Even preparing for Juilliard juries, during which the notoriously sadistic violin faculty spot-checked us for 15 minutes to upwards of three hours of repertory, I ate and shat copiously and slept nine solid hours. But since leaving JCM’s apartment on Tuesday night I had found myself lying awake for hours before falling asleep, and I went through my days without any semblance of a normal appetite. Even pot, which usually makes me ravenous, had the effect of seizing up my insides into a taut ball; chewing became onerous. And so, sitting there on the floor of the theater, my underslept and underfed body became a flaccid, jittery conduit for emotion, and I wept.

By the time we’d watched excepts from all the tapes, I was exhausted. How had they screened 400 of these? When it was over, the group had undergone a palpable change; we now knew one another. We knew who the hookers were, the sluts, the creative masturbators, the Left Coast hippies, the fallen Hassidics, the Freudian basket cases. We knew whose lover was in jail; we knew who ate his own cum. We knew who looked like a girl but knew he was a boy. We knew who had been raped as children. Some videos were better than others (few were as technically souped-up as mine), but each one revealed some charisma, some presence, some poignancy. “I learned from every one of these,” John said when the screening was through. “That’s why you’re here.”

When our Thursday afternoon screening at the Archives came to an end, we were under the powerful illusion that we were family, that we would all be working together on a vital mission, and that each of us had something to offer it. For the moment the crass and consequential aspect of rating one another’s sex appeal fell to the background, as did the fact that we were not collaborating with but competing against one another, not just for a role but for John’s approval, not just for John’s approval but for John’s love, not just for John’s love, but each other’s. As the reality of the competition fell away, less base emotions than lust and greed rose to take their place. For five hours sheltered in the Archives from a cold, rainy late spring afternoon, we had watched each other and ourselves bare our bodies and souls. I, for one, felt love in that theater.

Next: The tranny who insisted she was just going to blot her lipstick on it.

Never teach your mother how to Google.

My next line of defense, after vagueness, was hagiography. Listen, Mom, I said, John Cameron Mitchell is an extremely accomplished and brilliant actor. He was totally amazing in “The Destiny of Me” and “Six Degrees of Separation” (a stretch on my part, as I never saw either play). Had she seen “Hedwig”? My straight roommate, a grown man in his middle-late 30s, blasts the soundtrack in his room until even I can barely stand to hear any more of it. And then there was that girl at Tower who, when I rented the “Hedwig” DVD, volunteered the story of seeing the director having drinks on the balcony of a Market Street bar, and hollering up to him at the top of her lungs, “Hey, John Cameron Mitchell — YOU ROCK!” Look, Mom, I said reasonably, this isn’t some sleaze-bag pornographer. He’s the voice of a generation. OK, so it’s a sleazy generation. But in addition to all his professional qualifications, he is a mensch.

How I knew this about JCM at that point I’m not entirely sure. I suppose hearing him interviewed on the radio and also thinking that his commentary on the “Hedwig” DVD revealed his lucidity, the benign self-possession hidden under Hedwig’s lacerating tranny wit. But I also knew it a decade ago, just from that cover photo of “The Destiny of Me,” because an expression of such generosity of spirit couldn’t be summoned by even the greatest actor if he didn’t possess it himself.

Even if my mother bought my pitch that JCM was a saint among sinners, however, I had the additional problem that the first episode would spell out for her exactly what it is that I’ve been writing about these past two years. This seemed like the kind of bomb one had to drop personally.

“It’s a book sort of based on — well, pretty exactly based on an affair I had with this couple who resembled you and Dad.” I swallowed hard. “It’s this whole sort of self-parodying, Freudian excavation thing. Kind of.”

“Oedipus Schmedipus,” she replied. “A boy should love his mother.”

Having survived that confession, I turned to the last one on my list — the married couple. They were even less nonplussed than my mother. “Cool,” said the husband. “When do you find out if you get the part?”

I don’t actually know the answer to that question. The process of casting and making this movie is shrouded in some mystery, not least because, as the filmmakers are quick to acknowledge, they’re pretty much making it up as they go along. The rough idea was to submit the casting call via the Web site, audition New Yorkers first, and then mix them up with us out-of-towners, cull a handful of actors from that group to participate in a monthlong workshop in the spring, and send the director away to write a script based on the material derived from the workshop. Filming is scheduled for the fall.

That broad outline left plenty of ambiguity. The filmmakers have scheduled six days of social and professional events this week, but which is which? Take the first official event in what they are somewhat lewdly calling Action Week (I had to ask whether this was some theatrical term of art, which it isn’t) — JCM’s Wednesday night club in the West Village called Shortbus, “a sweaty teenage dance party for the socially challenged.” We were asked to show up at 9 p.m., an hour before the general public was admitted, for an hour of Sex Project-only drinking. Then “the largest game of spin the bottle you’ve ever played” was scheduled for midnight. Manning the DJ booth afterward would be JCM as his alter ego, DJ Dear Tick (“You’re gonna have to burn me out!”).

I walked down West Eighth Street past expensive shoe stores and discounted expensive shoe stores trying not to think too hard about what might be expected of us, or about how those expectations might conflict with those that go with my supposedly monogamous relationship. Were we supposed to get laid? Would the filmmakers be monitoring chemistry between potential castmates as the evening went on, and would they spot-check us in the morning, to see who was waking up alone?

After our chaste interview the previous night, I knew I was at no risk of waking up the next morning with the director. This was no reason not to flirt with him, though, so I decided to greet him at the party by reenacting a scene from one of the movies he’d assigned us to watch, “Stardust Memories,” in which a young female fan approaches the legendary director played by Woody Allen.

“Would you sign my left breast?” I asked him airily, holding out a Rub-a-Dub laundry marking pen and pulling up my shirt.

He laughed. “No, wait — do you really want –”

I cut off the question with a step toward him. He smiled. He took the pen. Then I felt the cold ink circling my left nipple in an outward spiral, followed by the slow-motion flourish of his signature above it. “Love from JCM,” read my breast.

The event turned out to be less a sweaty teenage dance party for the socially challenged than an overheated reunion of tricks and ex-lovers for the chastity impaired. I can’t quite bring myself to count them, but the Shortbus succession of Ghosts of Liaisons Past stretched to the late 1980s and spanned, as Sade so mystically put it, coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago. These were happy reunions, for the most part, with the crushing exception of seeing “Ramon.”

Ramon and I met about 13 years ago, when we were both 20 and he was enrolled in a summer academy for gay activists organized by AIDS Quilt founder Cleve Jones. The academy brought together queer collegiate firebrands from all over the country to learn basic organization, media manipulation, protest and civil disobedience skills, with the perhaps not unforeseeable result that the camp devolved into a queer activist version of “The Lord of the Flies,” or what the mutual friend of Ramon and me described as her “summer pogrom.” While the queer Savonarolas ate one another alive under Jones’ feckless supervision, the skinny, bottle-blond, coal-eyed Ramon and I had a lot of sex, an activity we resumed once or twice when we were both in New York a few years later. Since then my only contact with him has been to read about his modern dance career in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section.

When I heard that he was auditioning for the Sex Film Project, I began entertaining elaborate fantasies about our appearing in it together. We had known each other practically as kids; we had history. But more than that, we had art in common, and so in my fantasy Ramon, the acclaimed dancer, and Paul, the injured and obscure but nonetheless brilliant violinist, would be portrayed negotiating their careers as collaborating downtown artists whose already charged sexual relationship would take on the added electricity of their performances onstage. It would be the perfect narrative reflection of JCM’s larger mission, the marriage of sex and art.

“Honey, listen,” Albert Fuller said when I related my casting fantasy. “When people get together and play good chamber music, it’s like watching people fucking onstage.” Albert paused and swirled his glass of Boodles and ice with his pinkie. Then he added: “Certain other things may apply.”

Albert’s simile of onstage fucking had long appealed to me; it perfectly explained the paradoxical eroticism conjured so often by wizened old men in sweat-soaked tuxedoes. It especially appealed to me in this context: Why shouldn’t John Cameron Mitchell put full frontal artistry in his movie? Not John Garfield’s expressionless head grafted onto Isaac Stern’s fat fingers in “Humoresque,” or Leslie Howard bow-syncing to a record of Jascha Heifetz in “Intermezzo,” but the real thing. Why not portray Ramon dancing down Albert’s staircase (giving said staircase a silver-screen comeback after a 24-year hiatus) while I play the violin below him in the flickering obscurity of the studio, and Albert ambles in silhouette before the brightly lit 20-frame map of Paris that takes up a two-story wall of the duplex?

Maybe Ramon felt the weight and turgidity of my motives; perhaps he resented me for describing our oldest mutual acquaintance, who is no longer a friend of mine, as the “evil and horrible ‘Jane Jarman.’” Whatever the reason, Ramon didn’t seem interested in collaborating with me on even a cocktail, much less a shared lead in a movie, and ended the evening with a breezy “I hope I see you again sometime.”

With the Ramon fantasy lying before me in shards, I recognized that it was also my defense against the party, against the producer’s ominous e-mail asking us to keep our evenings free for undefined tête-à-têtes with potential castmates, against the whole creepy agenda of Action Week, which seemed to back up my boyfriend’s original suspicions about the Sex Film Project’s quasi-professional relationship-building requirements. With Ramon, in other words, I could have bypassed the guilt-inducing cruising and dating, and along with them the lurch back into that miasmic realm of single gay urban life from which I had been quite happy to escape into my relationship with the monogamy-minded 25-year-old philosophy Ph.D. candidate.

Oh, the party was fun — my face ached by midnight from smiling and laughing, and JCM had signed my breast and later kissed my nipple in front of the cameras (manned by Oscar-hoarding documentary filmmaker Rob Epstein, shooting a “making of” special in development for HBO). There was the goofy spectacle of the director emceeing the massive game of spin the bottle, and the heady moment when he told a friend of mine that I had an “incredibly promising” career ahead of me as a filmmaker.

There was so much to be happy about, and yet as Ramon made his frigid farewell, I fell into a depleted gloom amid the hordes of marauding homosexual men looking to get laid with the weird ulterior motive that it might help them get cast, all sharing the knowledge that two or three or four of us were destined to proceed in tandem, naked, fucking and sucking one another out of pseudo-celebrity’s waiting room and into a peculiar beam of limelight, pretending to be in love, transformed by the experience.

All I could think at the launch of this thrilling, sex-soaked, weeklong gamble was the unhappiness I had found assembling this collection of tricks and lovers in the first place. Now, with a boyfriend back home in San Francisco, it seemed depressingly forced and unsavory to be augmenting or recycling that collection for allegedly professional purposes — even in the service of John Cameron Mitchell’s new movie. So I left, and went to bed alone, and woke up that way.

Next: The audition tapes

Another habitué of this circle was an extant pop diva, excruciatingly famous in the 1970s, whom Fenton remembered as “that fat hairy cow screaming while she shoved a cucumber up her twat.” Fenton — who in his prior location in Times Square would periodically take 20-minute breaks to entertain the out-of-towners, swishing down the block sporting dark sunglasses, a smoking jacket and a feather boa — also lustily described the spectacle, witnessed the previous week, of Nicole Kidman carrying her own boxes as she moved into the apartment above the salon. I left my haircut a few hundred dollars poorer but with the sensation of having soaked for three hours in well-aged filth and glamour — more than my money’s worth — and that with the sounds of 30-year-old starfucking tales reverberating in the room and beating against the impalpable tremors of the new upstairs neighbor unpacking boxes full of marked-up scripts and little golden statuettes, and the simple fact that I was getting the first tax-deductible haircut of my life, I had entered a special psychic and circumstantial realm: pseudo-celebrity’s waiting room.

This room is a very strange place — exciting, scary as hell, possibly related to hell, as limbo is — right next to it. It’s awfully warm in here, though not altogether unpleasant — the excitement is radiant like a photograph by David LaChapelle, who knows the light and color of pseudo-celebrity’s waiting room (the nameless naked model bathed in a golden haze of opium smoke), knows the hues and tones that evoke ineffable bliss, that both blind and elevate those of us crowding the room, sick with hope that we will be chosen.

“Many are called and few are chosen, said the rabbi from Nazareth,” Albert Fuller has reminded me so regularly over the past 10 years. As a performing artist and Juilliard teacher for 40 years, he knows what hes talking about. As someone forced from the stage, from music, I unfortunately also know what he’s talking about. The homily haunts me; I live in exile from New York, from relevance to the art pulse that animates this city. John Cameron Mitchell has called me here. Will he choose me to stay, or will I fly west a week from now, unchosen one more time? Which is scarier?

Ten minutes past midnight I arrived at the director’s second-floor walk-up in the West Village. All the strategic and moral calculations inspired by his invitation were briskly erased as the director extended his hand, gave me a businesslike handshake, and after showing me into the cluttered living room of his one-bedroom apartment, offered me an array of nonalcoholic beverages. I opted for water in a coffee mug, which I managed to spill on the carpet and couch only three times in the next 90 minutes.

Seated beside John Cameron Mitchell on his sofa I had some of the typical responses to meeting a screen actor for the first time — that is, in addition to repeatedly flinging tap water all over his apartment. He’s shorter than I would have imagined. How strange, I thought, that he doesn’t walk around his apartment in a blood-stained fur coat and feathered blond wig, making lewd wisecracks and periodically breaking into heavily German-accented heavy metal. But there was also the thrill of recognition, that this was the same voice, the same eyes and sensual lips, the same prominent, virtually equilateral nose. Once or twice Hedwig peered out at me, and winked.

We talked about my fears , particularly the one about the boyfriend and his sudden metamorphosis from audition video assistant director No. 3 to victim of somatic jealousy symptoms. The boyfriend was under the impression, I explained to the director, that as part of the filmmaking process cast members were supposed to become involved with each other, in an extra-professional capacity, to establish a sexual and romantic relationship with them from which to build the movie.

The director gave me a look indicating that was crazy talk and offered to call the boyfriend and assuage his fears. I dialed the boyfriend’s number and handed my cellphone to the director, who spent the next several minutes talking casually about the project, saying nice things about the audition video and the boyfriend’s cameo, and inviting the boyfriend to call him anytime if he had any concerns.

When he hung up the phone, I realized I loved the director even more than if he’d thrown my legs up in the air and fucked me the minute I walked in the door.

Once everyone’s fears were assuaged, I asked if I might ask JCM some questions on the record. The first thing I wanted to know was why he wasn’t planning to act in the new movie.

“I hated directing myself.” He paused and grinned, as if to say that was all there was to it. “It wasn’t fun. I couldn’t concentrate on one job or the other. The only fun I had was actually directing other people, and then I loved it. I’m burned out on acting — I don’t want to act for a while.” He paused, then added: “I might put a cameo penis shot in there …”

I wanted to know what had surprised him most in the audition videos people had submitted.

“The most common things we would hear in our audition tapes were, if they were gay guys, ‘You know, I’d feel comfortable exploring sex with a woman for the first time in this safe environment,’ or a woman saying ‘I’d explore having something I haven’t had in this environment.’ Like it’s a sex therapy camp. And I think people who are most attracted to this have some issue with sex that they want to work out — oddly in this public way — whether repression or abuse or just sharing the joy of sex.”

And what about doing it in public made it therapeutic?

“Well, I certainly have worked out a lot of things through public — through ‘Hedwig,’” he replied. “Acting saved me from a slightly unexamined life; theater and being gay saved me from oblivion, or being a dangerous shut-in or something, you know, or a tenured academic — I don’t know what’s worse.

“You work out things onstage. It’s a safe place. It’s like a church, a sacred space. You just do it there and then it can integrate into your life. So doing ‘Hedwig,’ for example, made me more comfortable about my feminine side, which was a huge thing, because it was a very natural part of me that was crushed by my Catholic military upbringing. Sex is multifarious, it has so many connections, like nerve endings, and that makes a lot more things you can work out in such a place. And since the plot will actually come from a workshop of things that interest them — I want to encourage them to come up with story ideas from what are their imperatives, you know, so it’s going to be very natural.”

Suddenly I felt new fears surfacing in the place of those he’d just put to rest. First there was his jarring use of the third-person pronoun in discussing the workshop participants — fair enough, since I’m only here on a callback audition — but inevitably it brought me back to the point with which I started this diary. I am not an actor! Biting my nails bloody in pseudo-celebrity’s waiting room, I mull two contradictory thoughts. One says that this audition will expose me, that they will realize that the videotape consisted of a chain of well-edited lies and lip-synching, that I am a fraud, a phony, someone incapable of “acting truly under the imaginary circumstances of the play” (as I was instructed at my evening division acting classes), because I am incapable of acting truly under the real circumstances of my own life. And the other voice is too high on Zoloft to even acknowledge this scold; it says, it sings: I have been discovered. They will see me for who I really am, and they will make me a star.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this second voice does not express the purest of artistic motives. It’s a pleasant distraction, though, from that fear of fraudulence, because really, what is more terrifying about auditioning for John Cameron Mitchell’s Sex Film Project? Exposing my genitals? Or exposing myself? They prefer people with acting experience but don’t require it because — how did they put it? — they want the story to come largely from our own improvisations, from “people who feel comfortable playing a version of themselves onstage.” How can I act in any style, much less this one, without what Virginia Woolf called, in spelling out to Vita what her writing lacked, that “central transparency” that breathes life into the work of a true artist? After a million words I’m still struggling to achieve even a moment of that clarity as a writer. Will I be able to summon it for John Cameron Mitchell’s camera in one audition? For 90 minutes on film?

Episode 3: Chamber music: Like onstage fucking?