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[0:00] Bobby Steggert: I'm Bobby Steggert, and this is The Quiet Part Out Loud.

[0:15] Bobby Steggert: Shame is about two things. Fear and control. When we shame others, we're afraid of some difference and we try to control them with the threat of rejection. And when we shame ourselves, we internalize these messages, becoming afraid of our own difference, and then we attempt to control ourselves through the continued internal threat of isolation. Now I bring up evolutionary psychology a lot, and it's because it often points to who we are fundamentally, far beneath all the complexities. And we're a species that requires closeness to our caretakers for much longer than any other animal. Have you ever seen a horse being born and then walking within minutes? We, on the other hand, are wired to attach to our parents because our survival is predicated on an absolute dependence for many years.

So in comes shame as a very sophisticated tool in both our communities and our psyches to promote the survival that only cohesion can provide. And here I'll drop another idea. It's big, and take it or leave it, but it is worth considering. Almost all shame is based in misogyny. There's a reason that one of our most basic and prolific myths is the Adam and Eve story in which a woman is responsible for original sin. It's preposterous, and it's also the root of so many of our society's ills. Now, we get to today's episode. This may seem like a 180, but my guest today is Gavin Creel. He's a hero to many of us in the theater world. To me personally, he has always represented excellence in every single way.

Talent, character, intelligence. He's who I really looked up to when I came to New York, and over the years, whenever we would encounter each other in any context, I had such admiration for everything about him. So, it's especially significant to me that he joins me on the show to talk about something as personal and as fundamental as shame. Now, if shame didn't exist, I would be out of a job. And yet, it's something we don't so readily talk about in public, or even amongst our friends, really. For Gavin to share so openly and transparently his experience of shame, and as you'll hear, for him to hold such space for my own, is a gift to me that only deepens my admiration for him immensely. And in terms of both of our shame, we agree on some basic truths.

That the messages in our culture, so heavily influenced by many forms of Christianity, I won't say all, and the toxic masculinity that comes along with it, are such powerful sources of shame. And that homophobia springs from the same source of misogyny, so that all of us, women, gay men, queer people of all stripes, and yes, even straight men, must spend the rest of our lives attempting to dismantle. We are taught to be afraid of our bodies, our sexualities, and any difference in who we are compared to the norm. And this is why I include straight men in this conversation, because there is this ridiculous pressure for men to be a certain kind of man in this world, that is its own unnecessary burden.

Gavin and I talk about how shame is really impossible to eradicate. It's just too primary to our earliest experiences. But it's certainly something to work with, and to have compassion for as a condition of the human experience. My hope is that this conversation will help you to step a little closer to your shame, and to make friends with it. Believe it or not, it has been trying to protect you. And now, the job is to step away, and make a little room for acceptance.

[4:06] Bobby Steggert: I've really been hoping someone would bring in shame. It's at the core of most of our experiences, and yet it's something that very few of us talk about. And I also just want to personally, you doing this feels extra meaningful, because I think you're a role model to a lot of people. When I was coming up in the business, I looked at you and I said, that is the way to do it. That is the way to have a meaningful career. That is the way to be a gay man in this business. So it means a lot that you're here, and that you're willing to share.

[4:45] Gavin Creel: I'm so... The minute you wrote me, I was like, yes. I think my reply was, yes, when, where, how, let's go. So I'm honored to be here.

[4:52] Bobby Steggert: Yeah, your enthusiasm was very exciting to me. And so let's just start really generally. And I know my shame, and I also know the clinical definition of shame. How would you define it before we talk about how you've experienced it? I want you... Will you also educate me on the clinical definition of it and everything?

[5:06] Gavin Creel: Of course.

[5:11] Bobby Steggert: I'll say mine first. I think shame for me is... I was thinking about this before we were going to talk. It's two things. It's the hidden something that I think could take me down. And I don't even know exactly what that means, but that could destroy my sense of confidence, my sense of self. So it's something like the hiddenness of something. And then also, I think it's got to do with control. If I divulge certain parts of myself or something were to come out, shame would disintegrate me so that then I would be ultimately left alone, which after many years of therapy and self-examination and meditation and constant pursuit of trying to figure out this life that I'm living, that we're all living, I have realized that abandonment and loneliness are two of my greatest boogeymen and I have to work on them all the time.

And I think the reason I'm excited to talk about shame today is because I think that sometimes is the pathway towards my greatest fear of being, oh, you're gross. That's disgusting. I'm going to abandon you and leave you alone. And that's very scary to confront.

[6:33] Gavin Creel: It really is. I relate to that deeply. Two things you said are spot on in terms of the universal experience of shame. And one of them is that if it's a part that is communicating to us, it wants us to feel that we're alone. It's actually the threat that speaks to us that if you reveal this badness, then you will be alone, you will be isolated. And in a fucked up way, that is a part of you trying to protect you because it's trying to keep you within the lines that are, quote, socially acceptable. The other thing that really resonated with what you said was the hidden badness, I think is what you said. And that's true of all shame. Shame is the belief that there is inherently something wrong with you. It is identity based versus guilt, which is behavior based. Guilt is I did something wrong. Shame is I am wrong.

[7:10] Gavin Creel: Yes. I was born in 1976. I'm 48 years old this past April. And I believe almost willingly and beautifully now after the work I've done in meditation and therapy and everything, that the rest of my existence as a human being will be this negotiation of this topic. I don't think it's something I will ever quote unquote cure myself of and that I'm okay with. I'm like, it will be my, I wake up and I have to find my ways through this. What's hard about it is I watch younger generations now and I will straight up admit I'm jealous of the young people who can come out when they're 10, 11, 12, 13, whatever as young gay people or trans people or non-binary individuals, genderqueer, anything. I did not have that.

I was not welcome where I grew up. It was still because it was not welcome when my development was in its most powerful informative stages. It's frozen in there somewhere. And I'm constantly trying to soothe that little wounded dude inside me to say, you're okay. Even if somebody has made you feel shame. I want to say one blanket thing about me is I have those things that drive you crazy or to me are pet peeves or my least favorite thing of all of human beings. There's two major things that I can't stand. The first being condescension. I cannot stand it. I will not abide when somebody makes another person feel small. And I think ultimately that's shaming someone. And the second thing is passive aggressive behavior, because I'm like, I actually think you're not telling me the truth.

You're gaslighting me into thinking that something that you feel is you're not actually being honest with me. But the first being condescension, and I've been thinking a lot about why do those things bother me the most? And I think ultimately it's because that voice inside me has been condescending and shaming me for my whole life. And I hate it when it's outside of me. So I become like this tiger attacking the person who is condescending. Don't talk down to me. When in actuality that person's intention may not have ever been to talk down to me, but that's how I receive it. Because I have had a lifetime of telling myself, you're not good enough. You're not straight. Your body is not good looking enough or is muscular enough.

You are not a good enough singer, actor, dancer to be in this business. No matter how much the outside world tells me or awards me or says, wow, here's another job. It's like, it's that definition of insanity. I am looking for someone to validate that voice in my head that tells me all these terrible things. And when they do, I hate them because they are saying the same thing that I've been saying to myself this whole time. So that's my journey now is to try to stop or to try to hold, not stop, but hold that part of myself that just wants to shame myself. Does that make sense at all?

[10:11] Bobby Steggert: God does it. Yeah. And what's so complicated about our psyches, even when they're young and undeveloped, is that voice that was internalized for you is a literal reproduction of external voices. The child's psyche will find a way to identify with that point of view to feel less alone as paradoxical as that is.

[10:32] Gavin Creel: Can you say more of that? Because I know that's it, but what do you, the paradoxical, so that I feel less alone. Can you say, explain that more?

[10:38] Bobby Steggert: So when a child has no control over their environment and they're stuck with the people or community that they're stuck with, if they're receiving negative messaging about who they are in any way, it would be scarier for that child to isolate themselves by disagreeing. There's no room to disagree. And so the child's psyche will agree with and join that point of view as a way to be less alone. Even if the cost is that less aloneness is harmful to their psyche.

[11:15] Gavin Creel: Wow. Wow. Makes total sense. Yeah. There's a quote by this famous psychologist named Ronald Fairbairn. I think he said, it's better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. Which means that it would actually be too terrifying for that child to understand that his caretakers and the environment he's in is evil or bad. And so it's actually more tolerable to believe that you are the problem.

[11:49] Bobby Steggert: Oh, that's too much. And that which leads me to growing up super Christian and being in the Methodist church my entire life. And still to this day, trying to like deprogram the pain that the church caused me and having such an aversion to organized religion and the ways that it creeps into laws and schools and like with great virtue behind what technically is isolationism. It's Jesus is the way. It's what I was taught all growing up. There's only one true way. And Christians, as born-again Christians, my relatives very calmly look at me and say, you don't need a therapist. You need Jesus. And I go, that is your interpretation. But also when that is repeated to you over and over again, when that is what is preached from the pulpit on the

[12:41] Gavin Creel: Sunday when you are told from the beginning of your existence by your God figures, your parents who you love, you're told to honor and obey, to listen to what they say. And mine were good parents, very faith devout Methodist parents and did what they thought they were to do to raise their three children, two of which are gay. They're not trying to hurt us, but they're doing what you say. They don't want to isolate their family. They don't want to isolate themselves within the community. They don't want their children to feel isolated. So it's blend, conform, do what others are doing, and especially in the eyes of God. And to which I'm just like, you tell me one person on this planet that knows really what's going to happen when this is ending.

The Pope doesn't even know. There isn't one person who knows. We could all go to one giant Plato filled romper room and that's what heaven is. It could be anything. It could be a field full of butterflies. It could be nothing. It could be emptiness. It could be fullness. There's no way to know. So when I really think about it, it's inane to think that anybody could have that kind of control, which is my second point, is that shame ultimately is about trying to control the situation and control my behavior so that I never have to feel as badly as I do when I am shaming myself or someone makes me to feel shame.

[14:11] Bobby Steggert: So when you were young and you were receiving the general messaging of Christianity, were you receiving explicit instructions on who to be in terms of sexuality or anything, or were these things that you intuited and internalized without any communication?

[14:27] Gavin Creel: I would say a little of both, to be honest, because I remember there being sermons about homosexuality or deviant lifestyles, but I don't remember them happening often. And I honestly think it was because the preachers did not want to preach about that. They were like, we're not even going to entertain that. It would come up from time to time. I think also, it really honestly was, and I still blame religion for this, because why would anyone without religion care who lays with whom, who loves whom? It doesn't really make sense other than religion, because if that wasn't present, then I think the other place I got it was school. And that was made to feel, and I honestly think homophobia at its core is really misogyny.

I always have this, I think the real victims in society are women. From they're treated the worst, and they're always the ones to fix the problem. And then women of color, black women in our country, to me are the ones who, as I have observed and watched and listened and studied and met and been taught by, and to me, those women are the ones who are the most heroic and the most trailblazing and the most, despite horrific behavior against them. They come up with the best ideas. They come up with the ways to get things done. I admire it so much. And yet they probably suffer the most from shame than almost anyone. And I just think this machismo, heteronormative, sports-saturated middle American, Ohio upbringing that I came up in, it's like, there's a way for a boy to behave and a way for a girl to behave.

And if you venture even a little bit outside of those patterns, here comes the shame train. And here comes being humiliated, being publicly done in swim lanes, where I swam all growing up, having the seniors, juniors, making fun of the sophomores, calling us girls, like misogyny, saying we were acting like girls. Me being interested in, thank God, Chris Alcott, who was a totally butch, straight dude, was also in the show choir and shaved his head in swim team, but went to the show choir competitions and I was obsessed with show choir. And if it weren't for him, I probably would've been beaten up in swim team. But they were like, okay, Chris Alcott's normal and a star breaststroker on the swim team, so maybe we don't razz Gavin as much.

But I think there's a reason why a lot of us theater kids found the theater, found music. It's because there were subtleties and smudged lines and there were ways to be communicative using art and music and your voice and your talent. Whereas if you didn't know how to throw a football, which I never really could, there was somewhere for me, thank God. Otherwise, I'm just, like you said, I'm isolated and lost and alone, and then who are my people? Where's my, where are my people?

[17:36] Bobby Steggert: We'll be right back. Were you shamed or did you experience shame even in the context of the arts as a kid?

[17:51] Gavin Creel: That's a good question. I think possibly no or very little, only because I think that my ability developed early. And I think that Shirley Jenkins, my first piano teacher, looked at me curiously when I started playing, wow, and encouraged me. And then Virginia Elderbrock, my next piano teacher, and then Sue Aiken, Nancy Glick in the fifth and sixth grade choir, glick club and ensemble, getting me into all three programs and then giving me a solo. And I think from a very early age, people regarded, oh, I think he knows how to do something quite well. That doesn't mean I wasn't made fun of outside of those realms, but I certainly was one of the better ones or in those organizations. So maybe I even got a little of the privilege of being like captain.

Oh, Gavin's a good singer, has really good rhythm or can dance well, or he's a good actor. So you hand power to the guys who swim in lane one and the swim team or like the fast ones. And I was in lane two if I was lucky and maybe swimming at the very end of lane one once in a while as I got older. But I think I was in the arts. I think I was regarded as someone who had talent or something special within him and therefore was encouraged by a lot of people. And that to me, Bobby, that's when I really think about what do humans really want is to be seen and heard and loved. And I think that's why a lot of my behavior didn't change for a long time. Oh, people love it when I sing. Oh, people love it when I act.

They think I'm good. So I'm going to try to do this more. And I went to school and studied it and I worked really hard, but I got lucky, I knew to get lucky and to get cast. And oh, I want this attention. I want to be validated. I don't want to be alone. So I kept going. And I got to be honest with you. I don't know how much I really loved it. And I still to this day, my closest friends are always like, oh, here comes Gavin. He's ready to quit the business again. It's all the time. It's all the time. I'm like, I don't even know if this is really what I meant to be doing on this planet. I don't know if I really love it. But I do know that my fear of being shamed and ostracized for a long time, I stayed doing what I was doing and didn't change my behavior.

[20:16] Bobby Steggert: It was a safe haven more than it was a place of true, authentic joy.

[20:21] Gavin Creel: Think so. And now, don't get me wrong, applause is addictive. And even if you're not that good and people clap for you, and it's wonderful to have somebody hand you an award or a nomination or whatever else. But at 35, I remember, between 35, 37, I was doing the tour of Book of Mormon. And besides being Andrew Rannells, who originated the role in a brand new, biggest show at the time, besides being the guy who originated the role, I was the first national tour and the West End debut. So besides being the guy who originated it, this is the biggest job I'd had in my life. I'd never bowed last before. I'd never had my name top billing and all this stuff. And I remember thinking, slow down. You're missing it.

This isn't no, because I kept thinking I didn't originate the role, like shaming myself that I didn't actually. Andrew did that, and Andrew's better. And Andrew's the things we do to ourselves. Oh, this person who I think is a hero of mine on the musical theater stage just got the part over me. Well, of course he did, because he's one of my heroes and he's so much better. X, Y, Z, whoever those people are. And I just think it's a shame, keeps coming up, telling me I'm not actually good enough. And people hear me say that and they go, Kevin, that sounds like false modesty. I don't believe what you're saying. I don't believe you, which is further gaslighting, because it's absolutely happening within me.

But then I realize I am so privileged that I sometimes need to keep quiet those doubts I have within myself and know what the right audience, be it my therapist, be it meditation, be it my closest friends who know who I am, because it's not really ultimately helpful to talk to. No, I disagree with myself. I love teaching more than anything, and I will stand in front of a classroom of students and say this to them. I do not know who Gavin Creel is. You have this person that you've called Gavin Creel. I don't know who that person is. I know who the person inside me is who went to St. Andrew's United Methodist Church and was terrified of being made fun of for being in the Curatorial Choir and then was on a swim team and felt skinny and had a bony chest and never felt like he was attractive and was friends with all the girls but really had crushes on the boys but couldn't say it.

I was the one who was called by a random guy asking me if I wanted a blowjob in high school, and I could hear giggling in the background. I think it was a bunch of guys who were trying to bait me and record me saying I wanted a blowjob on the phone, and I somehow had the smarts to go, no, I'm good, thanks, and just hung up, but I could hear giggling. I was shamed by mothers of classmates of mine calling me wimpy on the phone with their mother. It was a hefty cinch sack. It was a commercial about weak trash bags, and I could hear my classmate and her mom and her little brother were giggling in the background. Just things that sound silly and stupid, but I remember that, and I'm 48 years old, and it devastated me.

Or worrying that I was going to be made fun of. This was one of the worst. My ninth grade year, we did the ninth grade dance, which I hated the dances because it was so heteronormative, and I didn't even know what that word meant at the time, and just dreading going, having to ask a girl, not even knowing I was gay, not even knowing how to address that, but going and getting told that there were going to be different classrooms that were going to have different rides. It was going to be a fair theme, and one of the classrooms was going to be all these old tapes of us as young kids performing at our elementary schools. I had a borderline nervous breakdown. Please don't put those up. Please don't put those up.

People are going to see me looking effeminate and looking, singing proudly and with a lisp. They're going to call me every word in the book. It's going to ruin my reputation. I just want to graduate. It's going to ruin my life at high school. I called the mother who was in charge of that room. My mom said, then you need to ask her yourself. She belittled me on the phone and told me, oh, you're overreacting, Gavin. We're not going to take these down. You have to toughen up. She didn't listen to me. Thank God nobody went into that room because it was stupid. Nobody wanted to sit during the ninth grade dance and watch a bunch of videos, but I was beside myself. I didn't want to go. Things like that, all growing up.

I can hear it can be very easy for somebody to listen to it and go, move on, get over it. I said, but these are the things that imprint on our soul, inside out core memories. Mine weren't peaceful playing hockey joy. It was hiding and trying not to get caught out to be homosexual or even whispered that I might be effeminate or gay or anything and code switching so that I would not be isolated and humiliated in front of my classmates. I dealt with that same shame a lot by denial. I was able to understand that I was gay while all the other parts of me conspiring to completely ignore it and to go about life as if I was.

[25:23] Bobby Steggert: The question is, how did you manage the social aspect of being gay? You mentioned code-switching. What was it like in terms of how you navigated it? Did you do that? Did you know you were gay in high school, but didn't say it? I'm so curious. How were you able to mask it? I think that'll help me answer my question.

[25:56] Gavin Creel: The pain of it is that I was a super conscious little kid, and so I knew I was gay when I was three. I remember a UPS man coming to the front door and being attracted to this tall, muscular guy in his brown uniform, and knowing he had some sort of power over me, and understanding while not understanding what that meant. I also remember seeing AIDS on the news and understanding that those men were me. And so I was quite conscious of my homosexuality while also being able to compartmentalize it and keep it locked in a room pretty low down in the basement of my existence. So it was both. I think I'm similar in that I didn't come out to anyone until I got to college. That was just my classmates, and then I came out to my parents when I was 25, my sisters when I was 20, and then I guess professionally I came out when I was in Hair, when I was 33.

But I think this code-switching, for me anyway, I so identify with those feelings looking back, UPS-esque, and the understanding, oh, I was doing it this whole time. My parents had this book called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, and I used to take it off the shelf and put the paper binder back in on the shelf so it looked like the book was still there, but take the book up and hide it in my closet, which I know they found in there because the book made its way back to the shelf without ever talking to me about it. But I would just read the pages about homosexuality and masturbation because I was convinced that those were sins and I shouldn't have been doing any of this, but I could not stop thinking about my sexuality.

I was really sexually curious, and I'm an extremely sex-positive person now, and it's taken me a long time to get to that. But like you say about HIV and AIDS, I grew up, I was in health class in 1987, and they were telling us, if you're gay, you will die of this disease. The education was AIDS kills gay men. So I guess my code-switching was always, I'm not gay, I just have to figure out how I'm going to get a boner with a woman. I don't know, how do you get a boner? That was my whole thing. How am I going to get hard? Because I know I'm not gay and I'm going to have a wife. I just have to, soon, someday someone will teach me how you get a boner.

[28:19] Bobby Steggert: Did you ever try?

[28:22] Gavin Creel: No, I've never. Thank God. I love it. I'm always loving when people are like, how do you know if you never tried? I'm like, there are so many false equivalencies I could give you right now. I don't really need to shoot a gun at a human being to know. I don't think that's for me. Terrible equivalency. But I think for me, besides worrying how I was going to be sexually active with a woman, I couldn't picture because I was never given a model. There was no Will and Grace, which in its own way was huge caricatures of our stereotypes. But thank God it was made. And I love that show. But that didn't come on until I graduated college. It came on in 1998, the fall of my being first year in New York City.

I was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe this is on television. I cannot believe they're allowed. And people are like, oh, please. And I think that was yesterday to me. That was 10 minutes ago. And when I was in college, my classmates and roommates knew about me being gay. But I studied abroad for fall semester in my junior year, and I decided I was going to be known as gay from the jump. So I didn't want anybody there. I wasn't going to pretend. So I made sure I was like, hey, I'm gay. And a couple of my first exercises I did about being gay. And after a while, the classmates were like, okay, we get it. Calm down. Nobody cares. And then I realized, oh, nobody actually cares. That kid, that's okay.

That's an okay thing. But then a couple months in, I had a girl ask me, was I worried about parts of my body being defiled because I would have to wear diapers for the rest of my life because I was a gay man? She said that to me. And I was like, I didn't know. I said, oh, what do you mean? And she explained it to me. And I was like, oh, wow, I'll try not to do that. And right after everyone's telling me they're fine with it. And people think it's changed. I do think things are different. But I will tell you, I went and taught in Michigan, my alma mater for January and February this year. And I had the most incredible group of students that we worked on a new piece I'm writing. And I came home and about three weeks after I came home, I got a note from one of my students that I got to work with that he, two of them and one of their friends were beaten up, were gay bashed in their apartment building by a guy.

They got in a fight. And I thought it's 2024. They're musical theater majors at the University of Michigan. And some guy called them the F slur has been giving them a hard time in the hallway the whole time they've been living there. And they had it and they all got in a fistfight. And one of them had to go to the hospital because one of his teeth were broken. And I go, that's in a safe place, apparently. That's in 2024. So how are we supposed to stomach and just say, get over your shame or come out? Or when we're staring at an election and candidates who are trying to roll back in the name of Christianity, in the name of evangelical beliefs, trying to bring the Ten Commandments to be plastered on the wall of a classroom.

And that's legal in Louisiana, I think. Believe what you believe, but don't legally bring it into a space that should be freedom of religion, which means everyone should be free to wish you have that right to practice and believe whatever we want. But the people who want to enforce these rules don't want that. They want their way because their way is the way. And that's where I come back to where I started the conversation. It just makes me insane. It makes me crazy because I happen to believe to the core of my being that Jesus Christ walked this earth today. He'd be like, you guys are wrong. Gavin and Bobby and everybody who's listening to this, who are listening and agreeing with what we're saying, are right.

You walk with whoever, wherever they are in their lives. You do not shame. You do not condescend. If you want to believe in God, believe that God will be the ultimate judge. And I happen to believe in a God that loves me unconditionally, no matter what I've done. And my homosexuality is not a sin. It's the least bad thing I've done in my life. And anybody who's listening to this and may think that's part of what they're hearing in church, whoever is telling you that is wrong and is not looking deep enough into their own soul to see who Jesus Christ, if that's who they believe, was actually.

[32:55] Bobby Steggert: We'll be right back. I can tell that there's another part of you that is really cognizant of injustice, and there's energy in that. And I'm wondering if that part of you does help mitigate the shame when you feel it.

[33:11] Gavin Creel: Yeah, I think that's a really smart observation to something I never really thought about, but maybe. Yeah, I was very active in the marriage equality, mobilizing the musical theater and theater communities to broadly impact that we had to try to get people to get active in the marriage equality fight. And that was something I'd never been political before, and I've not been very political since. I've just kept to myself and voted the way I want to vote and talk to my close friends and discuss politics in a somewhat private manner. But I am really angry with the way that the DEI programs are being defunded and trying to be pulled apart. I'm really pissed off at the way that, I'll just say it, white people are allowing it to happen yet again, that we make progress and then when it comes down to it, I don't actually want to share.

It should be based on a meritocracy. The injustices that are happening that I'm learning about, and I have so much to learn, but against people of color in our country, gerrymandering, changing voting rights laws, getting rid of protections for people to have opportunities, affirmative action being dissolved, and nobody's asking why were they put in place in the first place? Why? It was because we have to, it's basically reparations for the greatest sin of our country. The justice for me now is not just for queer people, which queer people of color have it worse than I certainly do. As a white cisgender gay man, I have my challenges, but I have it way easier than my transgender friends of color, my family members, these people that I love and I honor.

And it really does piss me off. It pisses me off that anybody should be made to feel small or shamed, but that the courage that it takes to stand in who you are, especially in small-town America, those are the heroes to me. The transgender people of color in small-town Ohio, heroes. I live in New York City where I could light my hair on fire and walk down the street and somebody might offer me a blanket or they might be like, he's working a look, leave him be.

[35:27] Bobby Steggert: You have me thinking about something, which is one of the tragedies of shame is that it convinces you to isolate yourself for safety and then prevents you from one of the most important cures to shame, which is community. I have a lot of shame about my shame in the sense that I rejected other young gay men when I was young. I didn't know how to handle intimacy and I would have sexual experiences that then I would be in denial about and then I would treat those people with disrespect. That's something I'm still dealing with in terms of shame. I'm wondering how and when you were able to start authentically experiencing queer community in the way that you describe now. I just want to hold space for what you just said about your past.

You weren't that person anymore. I'm so inspired by you going back to forgive him. He did the best he could and hold him in that way. I know you do that because I know that's what you offer so many people through your work that you're doing now is a space of holding. If I can just tell you, I deal with the exact same things that you just said. It's like a hat on a hat. It's like me trying to punish myself for being bad then I have to pray to myself to say, I'm so sorry that you've hurt others with your actions. You hurt yourself. My other half of my answer then to answer what you just said is I have decided and the pandemic was a big part of this and it's a daily work. My meditation, it's writing, it's everything for the rest of my life, but I've decided to try every day to be in a dialogue with myself that practices self-compassion and kindness, but that also allows me to be a slut, owns my slutdom.

Slut has been branded a bad word and to me now, it's a sense of pride for me because what sex positivity, I learned this word from a friend of mine years ago, this phrase, but it's basically just I am a very sexual being and I love sex and I love the expression that sex allows for me. What was lumped together was sex is bad and homosexuality is bad, so therefore homosexual sex is terrible and bad. What happened to me during the pandemic is I went through a really horrible breakup and I was in a lot of pain and I didn't have a world to re-enter and so I had to just sit in that pain with the loss of my ex and the loss...

[38:05] Gavin Creel: My life and the people like you got to move on. You got to move on. I can't move on. The world literally doesn't exist. I can't leave my house. I can't go to a gay bar. I can't go out dancing. I can't go date somebody else. It's irresponsible of me. So I had to sit in the pain and the shame of what I did to my ex-partner, what he did to me, my anger, my pain, and I didn't have anybody to work it out with. So what I tried to do is start with myself and go, okay, you have what you can do, who you are with now is yourself. To go inward and go rooting out those voices that say you are skinny fat. Your muscles aren't big enough. You're too hairy. You have a bony chest. Little White, haven't you gotten that fixed?

You're getting a double chin. Your belly is growing and stop looking. I made a deal with myself to stop looking in the mirror and seeing a dumpy 25 year old and start seeing a hot 45 year old. Start accepting my body as it is now and going, yeah, I have a little bit more of a belly than I did. But what version of perfectionism am I trying to achieve? Because I can tell you one thing, I will never get there. I am never going to like my body enough. It's never going to look like the porn stars that I enjoy looking at from time to time. It's never going to look like the men who are at the gym who have the body that I wish I had. I would have to have a different skeletal structure. For me, the best thing I can do with, this comes back, the reason I love teaching more than anything is because when I'm a teacher, the only thing I want to do is demystify the distance between you and me.

You as a student and me where I stand. In this conversation we're having now, I'm being frank and talking about masturbating and sex and porn because as far as I'm concerned, everybody's practicing these things but we're not talking about it with any. Who cares? Touch yourself. Enjoy it. Don't hurt anyone. Don't hurt yourself. Enjoy what you want to enjoy. Don't listen to it. Sin, religion, whatever. Explore. Be sex positive. See what your body can do. How can it respond? How is it responding? Are you getting to a point where there's this great analogy of I wake up and I have chocolate cake for breakfast. I shouldn't have chocolate cake for breakfast. I should have healthy food. Okay, there's a should.

You're shooting on yourself. So let's put that down. Eat the chocolate cake. The next day, I want to have chocolate cake for breakfast again. Okay, do it. The next day, there's chocolate cake every day this week. I guarantee you, four or five days in you're gonna be like, I need some grape nuts. You're just not gonna do it. The same thing, sex is no different to me but yet it's told to us. It's punished. It's made to be this volatile, dangerous thing. So to answer your question, way too long of an answer, is to, in my late 40s, I have stepped into owning my slutdom. Being a proud slut. Saying to myself, I am allowed to practice sexuality in the terms and the ways that I want to. I am allowed to meet and fall in love with people who share my values.

And those values are not depraved or sin-based or corrupt or not gonna send me to hell, which is still in my DNA. I'm still like, even as I say this to you, I'm like, oh dear God, please don't let that be true. But I have to practice that. Because if I can't say that to myself to go, look, you're trying it. You're trying it out. I'm gonna tell you a lot of the things that I've tried, I've gone, that's not for me. And there's a bunch of gay men who are like, on those particular apps, let's say, and they're living their lives. Different partner every day. I'm like, do it. Be safe. Keep yourself safe. Keep others safe. Health. Get on prep. Use protection if you can. But ultimately, what it comes down to is when we're telling people like, oh, that's dangerous.

I just think that's homophobia. And also misogyny, because it's a bunch of gay men who are out there not acting like real men. And I go, so what does that mean? That means you're acting like a girl. I would give anything to act like a girl. Because women to me are the superior gender sexual power of the world. So please call me and tell me I throw like a girl. Tell me I walk like a girl. I talk like a girl. Tell me I'll never play straight on TV ever again, because I'm an out gay man. Fine. Guess what? There are plenty of straight people who are out there ready to play straight. Fine. I'm going to give you an honest, deep, character-rich portrayal of a man who questions his sexuality and discovers he's beautiful.

It's gorgeous. And you're also really making me think about something, which is that shame is so complicated. It's a big ball of wax. But ultimately, in the way that you describe it, it's body shame. It's shame about the very body you're in, and what that body wants to do. And it sounds to me like the cure for you, at least part of the cure, has been physical. That the physical act of connecting with other people has started to dismantle the shame on a larger scale as well.

[43:02] Gavin Creel: I have to be careful, because what can happen is I have to have both. I think being with someone sexually, getting naked with somebody is so vulnerable. Are they going to approve of what they see in front of them? Are they going to want to continue having this makeout session, this sex, whatever we're doing? It's a vulnerability. I'm proud to put myself in those positions, and I'm proud to say that I've tried that, but I can't depend. I depended on their validation too much. I have to have a balance of an in-source of looking at my own body with all of its imperfections and say, you're cute, you're good, you're doing well, even as I'm going to be 50 in about a year and a half. That's a big milestone.

And I've had a bunch of surgeries on my body, and this body continues to get on a stage and do things that I'm demanding it to do, and it is there for me. And I need to treat it with respect and love and say, I see you wrinkly, or I see you have those freckles, or I see those age spots on my hands that I never thought I would get, or I see the thinning along the crown of my hair. I always thought I'd be the guy that had a lot of hair until he was... I see you thinning. I see hair growing in part of my body that I'm like, why are you there? But you are getting me on that stage and you are keeping me alive. You are allowing me to have relationships and take my dog on walks and try new things and take risks and pursue a career and one day hopefully be a professor and teach people how to do what I do on the reg.

And I appreciate you saying my body issues are always my biggest issues. I shamed myself for the longest time for exactly that. And I am trying to just notch the dial back towards a balance of somebody just said, God, you're really good looking. Thank you. Not for the most of my life. Oh God, I feel terrible. Oh gosh, really? Or my double chin, or my big nose, or my buck teeth. Wow, I just insulted this person's taste. They told me I was handsome. Now that gets into us in another conversation for another day of like, should we be commenting on people's looks and commenting on people's bodies? That's another conversation for another day. But how about I don't burden that person who is just trying to be kind with you?

I just want to say you're really cute. That means the world to me. Thank you so much. Instead of not, I hate myself so much. I don't believe it so much that all I'm going to do is go, I'm having a horrible day today. Which basically it's not about them at all. It's just about me. My voice was louder than theirs. And that's what I'm trying to balance.

[46:06] Gavin Creel: Yeah, I guess to end, I would love to know when your shame speaks to you, how you're trying to speak back to it today. In my meditation practice, there's this technique, very basic technique called noting. When thinking, I am thinking to bring yourself back to the breath. And when you veer away, which I veer away 16 times a minute, thinking, bring it back. I just am trying to notice, note, shame has arrived. Shame is here. I am not shaming myself, but that shame has arrived. Fear has arrived. Anxiety. The way that shame wins is if it gets to call me what has arrived. You're embarrassed. You're an embarrassed person. You're a fat person. You're a skinny person. That it gets to name me the thing that I'm feeling.

And another one of the noting things is, oh, I'm feeling. Like when I was having so much pain in my breakup, I would be in meditation at the point where I almost had to bend over and hold my head because I couldn't sit up because I was in such pain. It's like, this is feeling you're feeling. It's okay. Try to get back to the breath. You're feeling again. This is just feeling. And for me, it's just that practice. And Kristin Neff, I will leave you with this. There's this amazing book called Self Compassion that Kristin Neff wrote that I've gone through twice now. And there's four little steps is when suffering shows up, name it. First up, suffering is here. This is suffering so that I can actually acknowledge that I'm suffering.

So I'm not gaslighting myself from step one. And then step two is something like suffering is a part of life, which connects me instantly to every other being in the world. Everyone else experiences suffering. So I am not alone only on step two. Step three, it's okay that I am suffering. That gives me permission to stay in it. It's okay that I'm suffering. And the fourth step, which I would have thought would be not have suffering. The fourth step keeps suffering there and says, you poor thing that you are suffering. You don't have to get rid of it. But you identify that, oh, I am suffering. It is here. And eventually, if you sit with it, if I sit with it, 90 seconds later, I'm breathing. I'm like, okay. I'm ready for an ice cream pop. And then you're not hiding from yourself. And that's what we learned so young is to hide not only from other people, but from ourselves.

[48:27] Gavin Creel: Oh yeah. Yeah. One more question. And it's a meta question. But when we talked earlier, you said about this conversation that you knew you wouldn't listen to it. And in terms of the theme that we're talking about, I have to wonder if there's any shame involved in that decision. I think she probably is. I think the reason I don't like listening to myself is because when I'm in the zone with you, it's why I love theater acting. When the curtain goes up, it's just you and me, or it's just us. Whatever happens, it's my job to pick up the fallen prop, or to pick up my line that I forgot, or to get through the crack, or to ride the audience's applause. But it's just us. I'm not watching myself. And when I do this, I pride myself on I'm here with you.

I'm thinking spontaneously. And what does that make me think of? When I go back and listen to it, it then becomes for me an editorialization of a moment that was live, was real, was us, was ours. And then I think probably your challenge, I may accept, is to listen to it, and to allow myself possibly to go remember how it felt. Because this has been a joy, and our exchange has been a joy. And again, to end, I'm so honored to get to be amongst these wonderful people, and these conversations, and so proud to know you as an amazing performer. And also now as an incredible healthcare provider for the most important healthcare there is, people's emotional, mental being. Because I know you see it. Poor mental and emotional health absolutely destroys the physical being. And that balance of both. So I'm so grateful. And maybe I will listen to it. I just might need a minute.

[50:19] Bobby Steggert: All right. You take your time. I will. I will.