The Todd Glass Situation

by Todd Glass

  One of Our Best Doctors arrives. His name is Dr. Dohad and goddamn it, he is good, lowering his body to meet me at my level, using that reassuring voice you get from pilots and Tibetan monks. “Well, it doesn’t look like we’re going to have to do open-heart surgery . . .”

  That’s a relief. Then I hear a nurse in the background. “Why are his pants still on?”

  A single thought gets stuck in my head, playing and replaying itself in an endless loop: Just fucking great. I’m having a heart attack . . . and they’re going to see my dick. I’m having a heart attack and they’re going to see my dick. I’m having a heart attack and they’re going to see my dick.

  Couldn’t they at least give me a warning, a chance to fluff it up a little bit and make it presentable? I can tell you that “heart attack dick” is worse than pool shrinkage. I was afraid the second my pants were off someone would say, “It says here the patient is Todd Glass . . . Who’s the young lady we’re operating on?”

  I guess morphine has its limits: It works well enough to take my mind off a heart attack, just not so well that it keeps me from worrying that a group of trained medical personnel, who have seen it all and then some, are going to get a glimpse of my dick.

  Now it’s 4 a.m. They’ve put a stent into my coronary artery and I’m resting in a recovery room. My friends are still here. So is Chris—he had just arrived at Coachella, fighting his way through who knows how many hours of traffic, when he got the call from Sarah, turned around, and drove straight back to L.A. Somehow he found the time to buy me a flower. But the room is full of people, so he tries to be as casual as he can—which is “not very”—as he awkwardly jams the flower under my pillow.

  When everybody leaves I stare at the ceiling for a long time. I thought that I might be dying and Chris and I couldn’t even show our true emotions. What the fuck am I doing? If I die—when I die—how fucking foolish is this all going to seem?

  A few days later, when they wheeled me out of the hospital, I had an epiphany. My senses felt heightened, like I could hear everything: jackhammers, cars, and yeah, the fucking birds were chirping. My eyes began to water. I broke down in tears.

  Maybe it’s time to rethink my life. I could at least tell a few more friends, right? At least the ones that probably already know. It can’t be healthy to live this way.

  I looked up at the sun and took a deep breath. Things were going to be different from here on out.

  And . . . scene! Whatever epiphany I had seemed to disappear a few days later—thinking about change would be as close to change as I was going to get. Aside from replacing cigarettes with Lipitor, I went right back to living the same hidden life as I had before.

  NOW WHAT?

  CHAPTER 32

  THE BLIND SPOT

  Todd comes to terms with his reasons for not coming out.

  I met Charlize Theron at a Halloween party. I was dressed like a cop in a very authentic-looking uniform. Charlize pointed to the owner of the house, who had spent maybe $20,000 putting this party together. “Pretend you’re a real cop,” she said, “and tell him that you’re here to shut the party down.”

  I continued to yank the poor guy’s chain for a few minutes, insisting there were a half dozen police cars outside that were ready to shut the place down if he wouldn’t. We all got a good laugh out of it when I confessed that the joke was Charlize’s idea.

  She also knew that I had a new idea for a sitcom and suggested I come by her production company’s offices so she could hear the pitch.

  Even though we’d already met a few times, I was still really nervous and intimidated. I don’t usually get starstruck, but I do get talent-struck, and Charlize has a lot of talent. She greeted me with a hug and a reassuring squeeze.

  We sat down in the conference room and I began my pitch: a series of funny situations that revolved around a stand-up comedian in L.A. who is trying to stay in the closet. I told her that it was based on my real life—about Chris and me and our situation—and painted a picture with some of the more hilarious things that had happened to us.

  When I was done, she told me there was one part that she just couldn’t get her head around:

  “The audience isn’t going to understand why your character is still in the closet. I mean, who really cares anymore? It doesn’t make any sense for him to be carrying this secret, especially in Hollywood.”

  “I know,” I tried to explain. “It seems ridiculous, but isn’t that what’s funny about it? If you’re Jewish and hiding in Nazi Germany, that’s sad. But if you’re Jewish and you’re hiding in a synagogue, that’s comedy.”

  “I don’t know, Todd. It’s not really such a big deal to be gay anymore.”

  A wave of frustration passed over me. How could she just dismiss everything about my life with one statement? Not a big deal anymore? I was angry, but couldn’t find the right words to articulate my frustration.

  I’d find those words a few months later, thanks to Louis C.K. I was opening up for him on his tour and we had been spending a lot of time traveling together.

  “Louis, there’s something I want to tell you . . . ,” I finally said one night after a show.

  “Okay.”

  “But I can’t . . . Can you just say it for me?”

  “Uh . . . You’re gay?”

  “Wait . . . You knew? How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. But a few minutes ago, when we were talking about how I dealt with the word ‘faggot’ on my show, you really started to sweat a lot.”

  We went on to have an amazing conversation. I told him about the meeting with Charlize, eventually getting to the part where she couldn’t understand why I’d still be in the closet, especially in Hollywood. Leave it to Louis, a straight guy, to explain my decision with more clarity than I’ve ever had.

  “You didn’t start hiding it in L.A.,” he said. “You started in Philadelphia, a long time ago. She might be right: Maybe the world has become a little more accepting over time. But you were already comfortable hiding it.”

  That made perfect sense. The world had changed drastically since I was a kid, but that didn’t mean that my original fears were unfounded. Those memories helped to define me. I couldn’t just shake them off because people like Charlize thought the world had become a more accepting place. It was great that she’d surrounded herself with open-minded people in an open-minded town, but that wasn’t the world I grew up in, or even the world that a lot of other people are still living in today.

  There I was, weeks later, finally able to articulate the feelings that led me to leave sweat stains all over Charlize’s conference room. I wish I had been able to say all of this to her back then. Instead I got up and said:

  “That’s a really good point, Charlize. Do you guys validate parking?”

  CHAPTER 33

  SEPTEMBER 2010

  Todd finally finds his motivation.

  Five suicides in three weeks.

  A nineteen-year-old in Rhode Island who hung himself in his dorm room. The freshman at Rutgers who jumped off the George Washington Bridge. That kid in California, the one who was bullied so much by his classmates that he had to be homeschooled, taunted at a park until he just couldn’t take it anymore, who tied a rope to a tree, wrapped it around his neck, and jumped, spending a week in a coma before finally passing on. He was thirteen.

  Every one of the kids had a name—Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas. And what about the thousands more whose names I didn’t know?

  I remember feeling sadness and anger bubbling up inside of me. Suddenly the struggle with sexual identity didn’t feel like a comedic situation anymore. As far as I was concerned, these weren’t suicides—the kids might just as well have been murdered by a society that wouldn’t allow them to feel comfortable about who they were.

  And I wasn’t doing a goddamn thing to help.

  But what are you going to do, Todd? You’re not a politician or a famous actor with a soapbox. You’re a come
dian. Your job is to make people laugh.

  Then I thought about a quote I once heard—I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

  I thought about the George Carlin albums I used to listen to when I was the same age as a lot of these kids—albums that were not only hilarious, but filled with sharp insights and social commentary. Carlin always spoke the truth, no matter how controversial it might sound.

  Great comedians are truth-tellers. I couldn’t even be honest with a lot of my friends about who I was. But when I did tell people, the responses were overwhelmingly positive. When I finally explained to some of my friends that my “friend” Chris, who I’d been dragging back to Philadelphia for the holidays, was actually a lot more than just a friend, they seemed genuinely happy for me.

  Still, for weeks after that, I would watch them like a hawk, trying to see if their attitudes toward me had changed. I got the proof I was looking for one day when my old friend Kevin Sousa grabbed a can of soda out of my hand. Ever since hearing those conversations in the ’80s about catching AIDS from sharing a drink with someone, I’d been prepared for people to get the willies around me—even reasonably intelligent people might think, Hey, even if there’s just a 1 percent chance, why take the risk? But—and I swear to God it felt like slow motion—Kevin put the can to his lips and took a giant sip. He didn’t ask, he didn’t think about it, and he didn’t make a comment after he put it back down. I breathed a hundred sighs of relief.

  I called my new manager, Alex Murray. “Alex, I feel like I’ve got to do something. I really think I can bring some clarity to this issue, maybe even get people to see things in a different way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I’m not going to change the real homophobes. We’re probably just going to have to wait for them to die. But I’m starting to think that they’re not even the biggest problem. It’s the people who are mostly accepting—the ninety-percenters. The people who want to be on the right side of this thing, and really could be, if they just went that last ten percent to help these kids feel awesome about themselves. I grew up with these people. I’ve been passing as a straight guy for years. I know how they think. I know how to talk to them.”

  “That’s great, Todd. What’s stopping you?”

  “I don’t know. I still don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Maybe you’re going to have to do this before you’re ready.”

  Fuuuuck! I knew that he was right. But how the hell was I going to do it?

  I know some people who have sat down with a list and called everyone important in their lives, one by one. Others save time and write a group email or make an announcement over family dinner. I also knew that none of those options was for me.

  You’re not getting off that easy, Todd. You hid it publicly; now you’ve got to come out publicly.

  CHAPTER 34

  I’M NOT FUCKING GAY! (BUT I AM.)

  WTF?

  The ability to shoot cheap video—like we did with Todd’s Coma—wasn’t the only newfangled technological innovation to change comedy. In the mid-2000s, “podcasting” suddenly became a thing.

  The first time I did a podcast was my friend Jimmy Pardo’s show, Never Not Funny. Now listen, if you’re reading this and you did a podcast five years before Jimmy Pardo and you’re like, “What the fuck, Todd? Why does Jimmy Pardo get all the credit when I started a podcast before him?” Relax. I’m just saying that Jimmy’s show was the first time I heard of podcasting.

  I instantly loved it. It’s easy to see why comedians were attracted to the format—podcasting offered a kind of freedom that wasn’t available in a medium like radio. There are a lot of suits in radio. There are a lot of suits in every line of work, but radio always seemed to suffer the most. You could have a number one show for ten years and the suits would still tell you what you could and couldn’t do.

  I’m not trying to shit on all of the suits in the business. There are a few brilliant ones, maybe 10 percent of them, who should be loved and revered for what they do. But the majority of suits are just like the rest of the world—comfortable with what they already know, looking for a slightly new slant on something that is already recognizable. “It’s like Friends, but they’re forty!”

  But if you say, “It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard or seen before,” well, a suit is going to have a hard time wrapping his or her head around that concept. The end result? Creativity is going to get stifled, not because the creator lacks imagination, but because the middlemen can’t climb inside the creator’s mind.

  People used to wonder what would happen if they could get rid of the suits. But that’s all it ever was—something to imagine—until podcasting came along and answered the question.

  It could have been a nightmare. The suits could have had the last laugh. “It’s so funny . . . They always thought that they didn’t need us, but everything they’ve done without us has crashed!”

  But that isn’t what happened. What would happen if we got rid of the suits? Magic, that’s what.

  I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that a lot of great comedy podcasts arose from the ashes of failed radio experiments. Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Death-Ray Radio (now Comedy Bang! Bang!) podcast began in 2009 as part of Indie 103, an incredibly creative and well-regarded radio station that—due to the realities of the industry—had switched to an Internet-only broadcast earlier that year. Marc Maron hatched WTF during after-hours at the progressive network Air America, another failed attempt at trying something new on the radio.

  Marc’s show in particular has become an influential force in the comedy world. He has a way of using his very open neuroses to get other people to talk freely about all kinds of issues in a way that’s both honest and hilarious. As I considered all of the vehicles I could use to come out in a public way, I saw WTF as a place where I might feel safe enough to actually go through with it. More importantly, his podcast has a big audience, including a lot of the comedians that I work with on a regular basis.

  I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it more than once.

  Leading up to the day, I had doubts that I’d even be able to do it the one time. I was scared shitless. Part of it was my fear of the unknown: I was forty-seven years old—is that really the time in life to shake everything up and hope for the best? Was I really about to let go of the lie that had been with me for my whole life?

  How were the people around me going to react? I knew most of my friends were going to be okay with the news, but there were a couple of people—including comedians I love and respect—who had made homophobic comments around me in the past, unaware of my situation. How weird and strained were those relationships going to be?

  Would audiences respond differently to my jokes? I wasn’t a household name, but I still had a fan base, and they were going to have opinions. It was going to feel mighty strange for complete strangers to know intimate details about my life.

  But my biggest fear was that my intentions would be misunderstood: What if people thought that I was coming out publicly as a form of self-promotion?

  The day before Marc’s show I went for a walk along the beach with my friend Daniel Tosh. I knew that he’d be brutally honest with me.

  “I just don’t know,” I confessed. “Is this a cheesy or a selfish way to do this? Am I going to sound overdramatic?”

  “Look, Todd,” Tosh said, “not to make you feel bad or paranoid, but people have asked me about you.”

  “They have?”

  “Not like every twenty minutes or anything, but a decent amount. They don’t care in the way you think. They mostly feel bad that you feel like you have to hide it from them.”

  It suddenly dawned on me that hiding who I was from people, especially the ones that already knew, was totally delusional. And self-delusion is not a quality of a good comedian.

  •  •  •

  I didn’t sleep much
the night before Marc’s podcast. I tossed and turned thinking about what I was going to say and how it was going to come off. I knew I’d only get one shot at it, so it was very important to me that I said everything I wanted to say and not sound angry or bitter.

  For the last few weeks I’d been carrying around a piece of notepaper, a place for me to jot down my thoughts about what I was going to say. But the only thing I ever wrote down on it was “Talk about people that knew.”

  I didn’t want the headline the next day to be, “Todd came out on Marc Maron? Big deal, like we didn’t already know!” I suspected that, like Daniel Tosh, a lot of people in the comedy business already knew about me.

  I reminded myself that I wasn’t coming out for these people. This was about the people who didn’t know, whose lives might get a little better if they did. And this was about me being completely honest with myself for maybe the first time in my life.

  I finally quit trying to sleep. Instead I plowed through It Gets Better videos on the Internet, watching teens and even preteens bravely share their stories. I remember one kid who couldn’t have been more than twelve. He was sitting on a bed with his dog, talking into the camera about being gay. Look at that dog, I thought. He doesn’t care at all. The dog just loves this kid for who he is.

  I was way too nervous to drive, so my friend Brian offered to give me a ride. It was about a thirty-minute drive to Marc’s house. Brian made a few jokes to lighten the mood, but we didn’t talk much. I was too busy thinking about how I was about to pull the curtain back on forty years of lies in front of 250,000 listeners.

  I walked into the garage where Marc records the show. It was warm and inviting, filled with books—stuffed on shelves, stacked on the floor, crowding the desk where he sits during the interviews. I sat across from him, shifting nervously in my seat . . .