- 1 -

William was born in Hong Kong, where he, his parents, and nine siblings were crammed into a studio apartment in the Kwun Tong district. When he left in his early twenties, he made several stops in Europe before landing in Fairfax, Virginia.

Myky grew up with seven siblings in the predominantly Chinese district of Chợ Lớn in Saigon, Vietnam. After Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War, she slipped away on a boat in the middle of the night and eventually made her way to northern Virginia with her sisters.

William and Myky met at the Fair City Mall restaurant where William worked as a line cook. He saw her from the kitchen and sent out an order of dumplings on the house. They married, late at night to accommodate their restaurant worker friends. A year later, in June 1984, they welcomed a son and named him 胡健民 or Kevin.

My parents’ pursuit of the American Dream consisted of attempts at opening restaurants, first in Virginia, then in New York City, where most of my dad’s family had moved. As the firstborn, I had no shortage of relatives to look after me while my parents worked long hours. We relocated briefly to Florida, where my sister Kelly was born, for another restaurant. Then when that venture went bust, we moved back to New York.

- 2 -

My dad worked in food service, and my mom took English classes at a community college. Our apartment, one level of a Brooklyn duplex, was infested with cockroaches. While my mom taught me long division and made me drill problem sets before I even started kindergarten, I expressed my creativity by drawing all over the walls and building Legos. Everywhere I went, I carried a Miss Piggy doll with me.

We took a road trip to visit my aunt Judy in Virginia. There, I met my cousin Kathy and invited her to draw. When we returned to Brooklyn afterward, the floor of our apartment was blanketed with cockroach carcasses. The sight was so overwhelming that I cried myself to sleep. My parents seized the opportunity to impart a lesson: study hard in school if you don’t want to live in a dump like this. Our time in New York was drawing to a close as they prepared to buy their first home in Springfield, Virginia.

- 3 -

My childhood is full of memories of culture clashes — for instance, I realized that other kids didn’t speak Chinese with their parents after they teased me for it. On Halloween, I wondered why everyone was in costume when I had none.

Kathy hadn’t learned English yet, and I was tasked with chaperoning her at school. On the school bus, the other kids sang, “Kevin and Kathy sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G…” We sat in silence and took it, aware that we were being ridiculed but not fully understanding what it meant.

Any lucrative career that my parents learned about would be projected onto me. “Doctor” or “architect” were stock answers to the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Like many kids my age, though, I was consumed with dinosaur fever and had my sights set on becoming a paleontologist. I collected every dinosaur book, toy, and movie possible and could recite every known species along with its weight in metric tons. I begged to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

- 4 -

I was told regularly that I was “gifted” (a recipe for impostor syndrome and, for Carol Dweck fans, a dangerous foundation for a fixed mindset) and pulled out of class for more advanced reading and writing. By third grade, I was enrolled in Fairfax County’s “Gifted and Talented” program.

It was around now that I became aware of my attraction to boys although neither did I know the vocabulary for it nor was I aware that I was different yet. At birthday parties, relatives would often badger us to kiss our cousins, in jest, and we would play along by refusing. So on my eighth birthday, after I opened a gift from a friend, I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. The other kids shrieked in disgust, and I realized the mistake I’d made.

I coveted Kathy’s long hair, and at home, I would pull a pair of pants onto my head, don my mom’s lingerie, and swish around declaring, “I’m Kathy!” — much to my parents’ dismay.

I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, then a movie director, hatching a concept for a feature about killer jelly. Family gatherings provided ample opportunity to rope cousins into participating in my creative endeavors.

- 5 -

The next project to which I would subject my sister and cousins with my delusions of grandeur was a neighborhood detective club that I called Detectes. I fancied myself its Encyclopedia Brown-like leader. Suddenly everything became a “case” to solve — a strange noise in the woods, a muddy footprint in the house.

Meanwhile, at school, I was settling into my identity as an outcast. When a group of older kids bullied me to the point of tears, my friend Scott, a boy scout whom I had a crush on, put his hand on my face and said, “Don’t cry.”

I developed the habit of skipping. Of course, once I was caught prancing down the school halls, I learned that it was something boys weren’t supposed to do. So I stuck to skipping at home, traveling back and forth between two points and rebounding off a chair or wall at each end. It was during these skipping sessions that my creative juices would flow most freely, and I sustained this habit for the next 15 or so years.

One day, I walked in on my mom studying her belly in the mirror. “You’re going to have another sibling.” We went to the bookstore to pick out another K name to match mine and Kelly’s. My sister Karen was born on Thanksgiving Day.

By now, my parents had accumulated enough savings to upgrade to a bigger house in Burke. They kept the Springfield house and rented it out as their first investment property.

- 6 -

I was 10 years old the first time I tried to slim down. Left in an Atlantic City hotel room, I watched on repeat an infomercial for a contraption called the Abflex that promised rock hard abs with just three minutes of work per day. When I asked my mom to order it, she dismissed it as fake. So I tied a Bollinger waist trimmer belt around my torso as tightly as possible and wore it to school all day. It clipped my skin raw such that in the shower the hot water burned and left scars.

The contraption I was allowed to own was a 14.4k modem that I used to connect to America Online. I quickly used up our 10-hour free trial and racked up hundreds of dollars in bills from hours spent messaging strangers to help download Power Rangers videos and asking “a/s/l?” in chat rooms. Once I told a girl I was Chinese, she replied: you must be ugly.

My parents never talked about the birds and the bees. They assumed the teachers at school would take care of it. Teachers, on the other hand, assumed everyone already knew (they weren’t exactly wrong) and never broke down the mechanics. So I learned about sex along with Kelly and Kathy in a hotel room in Toronto, where a series of porn videos played on loop on channel 94. I was enthralled yet dreaded the prospect of having to perform those acts someday. For years, we referred to sex as “94.”

- 7 -

The popular kids talked about “liking” each other and dating. They wore Airwalks and PacSun and sagged their jeans, revealing boxer shorts, and listened to Metallica.

I desperately wanted to be part of their world. My parents balked at spending $60 on shoes, but I broke them down. I traded in my wardrobe of Hong Kong brands for oversized T-shirts and ditched the tighty whities, another source of friction with Mom. I told my piano teacher that I wanted to play Metallica instead of Mozart. Being popular was the most important thing in the world.

I played GemStone III, an online text-based RPG, with my friend Craig. But I resented how nerdy he was and how nerdy that made me by association. So I ostracized him in favor of the kids who ostracized me.

“I feel like I’m gonna die if I don’t go out on a date soon,” I wrote in my diary. Somehow I believed that I liked girls — a lot. In reality, I just wanted a girlfriend to fit in and decided I “liked” whoever was nicest to me of the popular girls.

- 8 -

I grew obsessed with becoming cool and popular in middle school. It hurt too much to be bullied for being a “dork.” In my journal, I detailed plans to up my social standing that involved learning dance moves, manipulating friends, and asking out a popular girl. In my head, the variables that affected how I was perceived by others were entirely within my control.

I was interviewed for the school paper. “Who do you think is the hottest celebrity?” I froze, racking my brain for an acceptable answer. Not like I could tell the truth (Devon Sawa). The boy next to me said, “I don’t know. Cindy Crawford.” I nodded in agreement, “Yeah, Cindy Crawford.”

Whenever the format of a homework assignment was open, I would flex my videomaking skills and submit a short film, edited linearly by feeding Hi8 footage into a VCR. My magnum opus was a 30-minute project “To Kill A Mockingbird in the 90’s” that was heavily inspired by Clueless.

In my quest to be like everyone else, I discovered pop music. It was one thing I actually liked that was acceptable to like. My cousins Kathy and Jenny and my sister Kelly shared this love, and together we leaned into our infatuation with the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls.

My parents started accepting sports bets from acquaintances in the Chinese community. We took a family vacation in London, where my dad applied for a license to set up a legal sports betting operation, but it was not approved.

- 9 -

Our obsession with the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls reached a fever pitch. We collected every piece of merchandise, official and unofficial, recorded every TV appearance, learned all the choreography, and stood outside Hecht’s at 4 in the morning to buy concert tickets.

The four of us were inspired to form our own pop group, called Abnormal — we’d embrace weirdness as our brand! We enrolled in dance lessons, and Kelly learned two chords on the guitar. I even emailed record labels asking for advice. Wholly committed to this career path, I told my parents I would not be going to college because Nick Carter didn’t go to college.

We attended a summer program called Institute for the Arts, where I took classes in acting, dance, songwriting, and filmmaking, determined to parlay the education into a viable music career. It was, truth be told, not the greatest arts education, but I adored the experience because it was one of the few times I was allowed to embrace my artistic side so openly. In one short film, I played a dork who undergoes a makeover, a narrative that I would revisit repeatedly as it mirrored my fantasy of a real life transformation.

Despite my dorkiness, I caught the eye of at least one girl. My first girlfriend Elaine was shy but not too shy to ask me out through her friend. We went to two after school dances and had one phone conversation. On Valentine’s Day, I bought a stuffed bear for her but couldn’t find her at school, so I gave it to Kelly.

In October 1998 (I know you were waiting for this) I was in the car when I heard on the radio …Baby One More Time by Britney Spears. I was an instant fan. Britney had achieved what I could not — popstardom as a teenager. I bought the album, an Enhanced CD, and watched the video on repeat.

- 10 -

My mom and dad had expanded their underground gambling operation. Several aunts and uncles were now involved. They set up office in the basement and took bets every day on multiple phone lines. With their earnings, they bought dozens of cars and investment properties in Virginia and Toronto, and we moved into a 9,149 square foot custom-built house in Fairfax Station.

I was self-conscious about our wealth. Friends asked what my parents did for a living, and I didn’t know. I would say they sold pagers, referencing a business endeavor from years ago. When I finally asked, my mom laughed, “We’re property managers.” I demanded the truth. “It’s true!” she shot back.

In April 1999, we were pulling into the driveway after dance class when we were flanked by a squadron of vehicles. FBI and IRS agents jumped out and streamed into the house. We sat in the living room for hours while the agents raided our home from top to bottom, confiscating every computer. They sawed open the safe and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. Both my parents were arrested, and the next day, Kelly and I went to school like nothing happened.

A neighbor who had witnessed the commotion stopped by to drop off a care package. When I told my mom, she cried. Because my parents valued privacy, we didn’t know our neighbors, and she was touched by this stranger’s gesture.

The government took every property in my parents’ names, and my mom and dad were sentenced to prison for tax evasion. Paranoid about losing more, they liquidated their assets and hid the money. They made poker chip dumplings and froze them (our “banana stand”). My parents transferred money to their brothers and sisters and asked them to keep it safe. Some of them spent it, causing deep rifts. Cousins who I played with as a kid I would not see for 20 years.

We moved back into the Burke house, which we got to keep because it was in the trust set up for me and my sisters. After my parents served their time, they both got jobs in real estate and built new careers from scratch. “Don’t break the law,” they told us repeatedly. “It’s not worth it.”

- 11 -

I hated high school. I hated having to learn about things that I considered unimportant. I was weird and different, and no makeover was going to change that. I hated myself.

I had gotten a C on an essay about Lord of the Flies. My mom yelled and yelled, impressing upon me that I was a failure in life unless I kept my grades up. I sat in the bathroom with the lights out, in tears, mulling over the different ways to end my life.

Another friend told me, “Crew is such a hard workout that girls lose their boobs!” So I joined the crew team to lose my boobs. I was consistently one of the worst rowers in the group, relegated to the bottom “8” and stuck doing drills on land when there weren’t enough boats. The day before a regatta, I invited everyone to my house for a carboloading party, and my mom cooked mounds of spaghetti. Only two teammates showed up.

December 3, 1999. I stood in front of the mirror (in that same bathroom), looked myself in the eyes, and uttered, “I am gay.” An enormous weight lifted off my shoulders. It felt almost exciting, my little secret. I was allowed to check out hot boys and suddenly felt hopeful about the future.

I found solace in movies and pop music. My favorite movies ran the gamut — Run Lola Run, Gladiator, Coyote Ugly, Mission: Impossible 2. You can be a director like John Woo, my dad suggested. I attended my first Britney Spears concert at Nissan Pavilion. We brought a new gadget, a Kodak digital camera, but security stopped us from taking photos.

- 12 -

I invited my friend Miruna to go ice skating at Fairfax Ice Arena. I had a secret to share and made her guess. We circled the rink for hours until I finally summoned the courage to come out to her as gay. Though surprised, she took the news well, and I was delighted to have someone to trade notes with in class about boys. Later, I told Kathy and Kelly in a similarly roundabout way (“I’m like Jack in Dawson’s Creek”). Both would write about my coming out for their college applications.

For the school talent show, with Miruna’s help, I dressed up as Britney Spears and performed Oops!…I Did It Again onstage. Teachers expressly forbade me from wearing a bra. The hoots and cheers from the audience made me feel a belonging I hadn’t felt in a while.

I had moved on from aspirations of popstardom and decided to pursue a career in filmmaking. My parents bought me a Canon GL1, and like in middle school, every homework assignment was an opportunity to shoot a film. I shot everything from an Oedipus Rex reenactment to Kathy’s Spanish project ¿Quién quiere ser millonario? to music videos of Britney songs.

My friend Richard and I made a short film called Graded, based on his fantasy of intercepting his report card before his mom received it. (I would later joke that every Asian filmmaker starts with a film about bad grades.) We submitted the film to Video Fairfax and won first place, which ignited a fire in me to continue on the path.

I harbored dreams of breaking into Hollywood — immediately — and got to work writing a feature film about time traveling teenagers (with makeovers!).

- 13 -

Right before senior year, I dyed my hair the shade of burnt auburn popular among Asians — another attempt at a makeover. My parents flipped. “CEOs don’t color their hair,” my dad insisted. I locked myself in the basement until my mom coaxed me out to dye my hair back to black.

Paradox, about a group of teenagers who time travel to pull off an elaborate heist by exploiting the Y2K bug, was supposed to be my feature debut and vehicle to Hollywood stardom. Things didn’t go as planned, but the experience was its own kind of reward. We shot on evenings and weekends over the course of many months and on a ton of favors. I screened the film to a packed house at University Mall Theater and turned a profit!

With cash saved from Chinese New Year, I bought a pair of front row tickets to Britney’s Dream Within a Dream Tour. To recoup the cost, I hatched a plan to scalp tickets to another show and thought I was so clever that I wrote an essay titled “Britney and Brains” for my college applications. Britney pointed at me during the encore.

With regards to college, I aimed sky high and applied to Ivies, UCLA (to be in Hollywood), and UVA as a safety school. I was accepted to only UVA. Undeterred, I traveled to L.A. over the summer and toured the UCLA campus with the intention of transferring after first year. I stayed for a month to work as a set PA on a low budget comedy. When an actor (from a well known 80’s TV show) took a dump in the non-functioning toilet in his trailer, it was my job to clean up.

When I declined plans to hang out with high school friends, Miruna accused me of taking them for granted. She was right. Always pining for a version of popularity I learned from Ryan Murphy TV shows, I couldn’t appreciate the people right in front of me!

- 14 -

My first year at UVA was a blur.

They say that queer people go through puberty twice — once during actual puberty and again when we come out and experience feelings we didn’t allow ourselves to feel the first time.

I met other gay people for the first time at a Queer Student Union garden party. An upperclassman told me that he didn’t have high expectations for QSU, so I shot off an email to the QSU leaders with my ideas for improvement. He would invite me to take the four-hour round-trip trek regularly to go clubbing in D.C. at a warehouse party called Velvet Nation. I had also never been around drunk people before. So when I saw my new friends’ behavior change under the influence, I panicked and wrote about it on LiveJournal. Between the presumptuous email and the LJ post, the UVA gays immediately regarded me as weird and judgmental.

I starved myself to look like the toned twinks on the Velvet Nation flyers and lost 30 pounds in the first three months of college. I hit my lowest weight ever and still hated what I saw in the mirror. By then, there was no room to go but to stop eating altogether, so I did just that.

Egged on by an online pro-anorexia community, I went on weeklong fasts, pretending to the world that I was too busy for lunch. I went running outside after a snowstorm and continued lifting at the gym, nearly fainting. After friends challenged me to look like Justin Timberlake on the cover of Rolling Stone, I hid in a Newcomb Hall bathroom stall and stuck a knife in my throat to purge.

Thanks to QSU, I performed in drag for their semiannual fundraiser, and I came out to my mom, who kept a straight face but didn’t take the news well. I also joined the filmmaking club and shot a film called Eyes On Me, a thinly veiled analogy to eating disorders.

Over the summer, I met Dave online. On our first date, I announced that I used to be anorexic. Dammit. When he broke things off, I spent an hour crying on the phone about how he thought I was fat. Then I purged every dinner for a week. My dad asked why my face was swollen.

- 15 -

I met Blake at the filmmaking club FMS, where I had taken a leadership position, and hoped to see him at QSU, where I had also taken a leadership position. We hung out watching Strangers with Candy until finally deciding to be boyfriends. We were each other’s first, and though we had zero clue what we were doing, exploring each other’s bodies while squeezed onto my twin size bed, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was consumed with what my relationship was “supposed” to be like, however, and ended things before they really took off. Blake wrote that “The First Cut Is The Deepest” reminded him of me, and Kathy chastised me, you broke his heart!

I settled into a group of gay Asian (and some non-Asian) friends that I called the Gaysians, all navigating school and life as newly out. Among us, I was the one who most wanted to make our clique a thing, and we did everything together. My closest friend told a white lie about his sex life, and I led the charge in a nasty falling out. “I hope you burn in hell,” I signed one email.

Inspired by Kill Bill, I shot a campy retelling of Rumpelstiltskin called The Miller’s Daughter. The production involved performances by my acting teachers, a cameo by Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker Paul Wagner, and a gunfight at Rapture in downtown Charlottesville. One of the Gaysians, Dan (not his real name), said, “What were you thinking when you made that?” and declared that we could never be close friends because he questioned my taste.

- 16 -

I was elected president of the Filmmakers Society (FMS) and shepherded a very ambitious group of aspiring filmmakers. I joined Kevin Everson’s cadre of “film phucs,” traveled to Richmond to work on a friend’s set, then went again in the dead of winter for a horror production called Cry_Wolf. It felt like I was in a constant power struggle with the younger filmmakers.

Concurrently, I was immersed in planning Queer Student Union (QSU) events, often butting heads with fellow Exec members. My proudest achievement was expanding our fundraiser Drag Bingo by adding skits and choreographed dance routines alongside the drag numbers. Drag soon became my raison d’être. (I could have paid more attention to the makeup though.)

Amidst all this, I decided to come out to my dad. It did not go well. He spent weeks badgering Kathy and Kelly to introduce me to girls and searched online for information about conversion therapy.

Dan was now in a graduate program at UC Irvine, and the Gaysians flew out to visit during spring break. We partied in West Hollywood until the bars closed, then gorged ourselves in Koreatown. Another Gaysian was graduating and starting med school. Despite my student leadership experience, I had no idea what to do with my life and felt like a failure compared to my friends. So I rewatched Legally Blonde and took the LSAT.

“All year, I’ve been plagued with the insecurity that I can’t do anything right. Now when grades come in, I will realize that not only am I inept in almost everything — I spend frivolously, I party too much, I can’t find a job by myself, I sleep too little, I eat too much, I make shitty films, I can't find a relationship, hell I can't even find meaningless sex — but I also get bad grades. I suck 100% at life.”

- 17 -

Fast approaching burnout from my involvement in student organizations, I considered quitting them all and relaxing during my final year at UVA. Instead, I was elected QSU president and sought to deliver a memorable experience for first years. One such first year was Oth, who we inducted into the Gaysians and took along for a New York City getaway in between frequent outings to Apex in D.C. (We learned about a clique of gay New York Asians that called themselves the “House of Flying Daggers,” so we briefly dubbed ourselves the “Fellowship of the Bitches.” Ha.)

At school, I lived and breathed Drag Bingo and spent all day and night conceptualizing drag numbers. After my final drag performance at UVA, I showed up in drag to a living wage protest, and Blake told the Associated Press. (I was also going through my libertarian phase and dramatically came out as “not liberal” on LJ. Much has changed since then. 😆)

The result was that I ignored schoolwork, and my grades suffered. Never mind that I was temporarily stricken by a desire to be an ACTIVIST (whatever that meant) instead of an Economics major and enrolled in a bunch of classes I had no place being in. It was all so overwhelming, and one night I randomly burst into tears in front of friends at Italian Villa. Furthermore, I still had no idea what to do with my life after graduation.

Somehow I had grown obsessed with moving to L.A., reading L.A. real estate blogs and listening to L.A. traffic and weather updates. “For what job?” my parents would ask. So I flew out to California for a week to visit Dan and got hired as an account executive at a Korean mortgage bank near Universal City. I felt grown up.

- 18 -

I had given my dad some PFLAG-like materials, and though he joked that I was brainwashing him, it was successful. Before I left Virginia, he hugged me and said he was really going to miss me, the only time I’ve ever seen him cry. I packed my car to the brim and and drove off after having phở for lunch, timing the road trip so that I would arrive on a Friday to go clubbing at a gay Asian party called GAMeBoi at Rage in West Hollywood. It was September 22, 2006. I would celebrate the anniversary of my move every year.

By day, I worked for the mortgage bank as an account executive. I was hired to solicit Chinese-speaking mortgage brokers in the San Gabriel Valley, so every day I printed out a stack of rate sheets and cold visited offices in between Hainan chicken and bún riêu lunches. Coworkers drove Porsches, and I watched as my boss rearranged doctored documents and said, “Sometimes in this business, we have to commit a little fraud.” After work, they would take me to Korean BBQ and ply me with soju.

I really wanted to be Paris Hilton. During my first year in L.A., I can probably count on one hand the number of Fridays NOT spent at Rage. Once, Dan and I were kicked out of the club for getting into fisticuffs. The next morning, I learned that Britney Spears had stopped at the Abbey just down the street. I celebrated my 23rd birthday at hotspot Koi, where my friends each paid way more than any of them could afford.

- 19 -

The mortgage industry was imploding. I decided to apply to business school, and Miki said my experience at the bank wasn’t strong enough. So the plan was to put in one year at her company, Kaiser Permanente. I was hired as an associate consultant and found the work easy, and my manager called me a pleasant surprise.

A UVA friend “Jen” got a job in the same department. I broke my lease to move into an apartment with her in Glendale — close enough to the office in Pasadena but not too far a drive over the hill to Rage. Jen and I operated on the same wavelength, and we broke into cackling fits over the dumbest jokes. We were extremely judgmental and felt above the stuffy corporate culture at KP, poking fun at each other for our “work voices” and telling mean jokes about our colleagues.

Jen introduced me to her friend Aaron, who had just moved from Chicago. Aaron was into Chinese food and typography, and we clicked immediately, such that Jen and I called him my “straight boyfriend.”

Even as I was studying for the GMAT, I continued stoking my interest in film and enrolled in screenwriting classes. Film Independent invited me to volunteer as the Cantonese interpreter for visiting filmmaker Pang Ho-cheung, meaning I got to accompany him for a weeklong all-expenses-paid retreat at Skywalker Ranch with a cohort that included Sean Baker and Barry Jenkins.

- 20 -

In the middle of business school applications, I had a revelation: I wanted to be a filmmaker! I “came out” to my parents over claypot rice and pivoted hard to look for work in the film industry. Living with Jen started grating on me. Instead of talking things out, I complained to our mutual friends and started hunting for a new place. Tensions boiled over when I announced that I’d be moving out. My roommates would be two frat boys who inadvertently found themselves in the heart of WeHo. Jen and I made up and joked that we went to couples therapy.

I lived in West Hollywood for 17 months, but it feels like I spent a quarter of my life there. Just a short walk from the Boystown bars, we went out drinking 4-5 nights a week and stayed up banging out Lady Gaga songs on the piano. Believing I had quit drag for good, I donated all my drag to neighbor Rhea Litré. When one older neighbor complained about the noise, I quoted Jamie Lynn Spears. “Move the fuck out!” He did.

Sex came easy, but dating felt impossible, the classic young gay man’s dilemma. Once, I called a Gaysian to log into my email after my phone was stolen but had to warn him that he would find an onslaught of replies to sex ads in my inbox. In retrospect, my sex addiction was easy to explain. Never feeling comfortable about my looks or body, I was constantly seeking physical validation. “If you can’t love yourself…”

J was a smooth-talking Spanish rice queen. I took him to dinner at SinBala, and the sex was awesome. After making tentative plans, I’d ignore all his calls to confirm, thinking I had to play hard to get. Then when he made other plans I would explode. “You need to learn to control your emotions,” he told me bluntly.

I met M through mutual friends. He was cute and smart and woke. We watched fireworks together and went to Catalina. Though we were sexually incompatible, I clung onto the idea of being with him because it felt like I would never find someone like him who would love me back. When things ended, I starved myself for a few days and couldn’t focus at work. At Jen’s suggestion, I started seeing a therapist for eating disorders.

- 21 -

While pursuing Hollywood dreams, I felt suffocated by the day job. “I can’t do this,” I told Jen and put in my two weeks’ notice at KP. After work on my last day, I threw a Funemployment party. I had nothing lined up other than an unpaid internship at Brett Ratner’s company, reading scripts twice a week.

I spent lots of time doing things I thought I should be doing to “break in,” like networking mixers and job hunting. Though I enrolled in a UCLA Extension directing class and made several short films I can be proud of, not much time was spent actually doing what I set out to do — write a feature screenplay.

I burned through my savings and went deep into debt, borrowing money from both Jen and my parents. At one point, I had no money for toilet paper and wrote about it on film school applications. After a few months, I took a temp job at a Century City accounting firm, leaving barely any time to write. Once again, I was failing at life.

Jen, still employed at KP and now pursuing TV writing, told me about an opening in my old department. I debated whether returning to KP was the right move. My goals remained the same. Would a high-paying job outside of the film industry be more conducive or more of an obstacle to achieving them? Jen had one word of advice: apply.

I was rehired. Fed up with the commute, Jen and I decided to move closer to Pasadena. She agreed to live together again on the condition that I continue seeing a therapist. We found a cute Craftsman-style house on Talmadge St in Los Feliz.

- 22 -

Therapy was a godsend. The relentless introspection you dear readers have observed in this series is largely thanks to the unpacking of my childhood done in that office on Beverly Blvd. Impacted were my relationships with Dan, Jen, my parents, and, most of all, myself.

Dan was “cool” to me, for lack of a better word. I coveted his disregard for other people. Once, an acquaintance said to me, “You are so much nicer without Dan around.” I did not take it as a compliment, for I wanted to be a Mean Girl. But it was always me proverbially holding Dan’s hair back, never the other way around. When I realized how toxic our friendship was, I pulled away almost immediately.

Strangers often mistook Jen and me as a couple, a sore spot considering we were both single and desperate. I sometimes now refer to her as my first boyfriend because we were indeed emotionally codependent. Our fights were strange. For instance, she insisted on apologizing for assuming she could move my TV for a party and I had no problem with her using the TV but was hurt that she insisted on apologizing. Another time, she was making miso soup and I suggested we join forces and she was mad that I messed up her recipe and I was sad that she didn’t want to make soup together. Therapy didn’t alleviate these tensions; it exacerbated them because we were talking about our feelings all the damn time. Jen finally made the wise decision to move to her own place. (It was then that I happened to interview actress Constance Wu as a potential replacement roommate, years before she broke out on TV.)

Despite my determination to “do” therapy correctly, I did not learn to love myself overnight. Kathy and Kelly both got married in the same year, and boy, did I feel inadequate. Love, let alone marriage, felt so out of reach.

I signed up for a weight loss boot camp. The class was all older women, and I found the workouts too easy. “I want to be yelled at,” I told a friend. He replied, “Have you heard of CrossFit?” On June 6, 2011, I completed my first WOD at CrossFit Merge, and the rest is history.

- 23 -

I adopted a Boston terrier from the Coachella Valley Shelter. “Don’t you dare name her Mochi,” Aaron said. So I named her Mochi. On Valentine’s Day, Blake moved to L.A. to pursue a career in comedy. Talmadge — now with Alex, Anne, Blake, myself, and Mochi — was a house fit for a sitcom, the stage for Starcraft vegan potlucks and Oscars parties alike.

After bouncing between a few departments in KP, I landed in the data department where I would remain for the next eight years, writing SQL and crunching numbers. I was very good at my job and got along with coworkers (one of whom introduced me to radical frugality, which is how I finally reined in my spending). And while I consistently resented the stuffy data analyst version of myself, it was undeniably a true piece of my identity.

“Hanging over me is the fact that my filmmaking career has still not begun,” I wrote in my annual recap, “not for lack of trying.” I went on solo retreats in different cities to hammer out that elusive first feature screenplay. Left alone in a hotel room, instead of writing, I would often invite over strangers for sexual escapades in a futile quest to satiate my starvation for validation.

Adonis and I met dancing at MJ’s. A musician, he was very passionate and, like myself, had fixed ideas about the way the world should be. We both loved food and traveling. Also like myself, he was always trying to lose weight, and we went on diets together, frequenting go-to spots like Souplantation and Chop Stop.

- 24 -

My sights were set on Sundance. I desperately wanted to make a film that would screen in Park City. When I took a solo trip there, crashing with the crew that made the Jeremy Lin documentary, I was blown away by the experience and even more obsessed with making my film festival debut.

After years of false starts, I finally completed a draft of a screenplay called Superdrag, about drag queen superheroes, as a writing exercise. It was an okay script and super fun to write. There was a lesson here. Only without the unrealistic expectations of Sundance riding on MY FIRST MOVIE could I enjoy the process enough to reach the finish line.

Adonis and I met up with Raul for lunch at ink.sack, where Raul introduced me to his friend Chuck. We ate sandwiches and parted ways, for Adonis had no interest in continuing on the Great L.A. Walk with Raul and company. We got into heated fights over the most trivial things — social media usage, Pantages tickets, Halloween costumes. At the time, it felt like he and I were too different, but in retrospect, we were too alike. After a pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road blowup over a miscommunication en route to Las Vegas, Adonis and I decided to break up.

- 25 -

Newly single, I joined Raul in November 2013 for the Great Los Angeles Walk, an annual 18-mile trek from downtown L.A. to the ocean serving as a way to experience the city on foot. Among his group of friends was Chuck. We chatted about drag, meditation, yoga, and CrossFit — I had six stitches in my left shin from missing a box jump. He said he was vegetarian, so I convinced the whole group to stop for lunch at Veggie Grill.

I had an idea for a short film called Before the Kiki, a dramatic reenactment of the monologue at the beginning of the song “Let’s Have a Kiki,” and asked Chuck to star. Absolutely, he said, but I couldn’t wrangle enough people to work for free and the shoot never happened. Still, we went on a moonlight hike at Coldwater Canyon Park and climbed Mt. Wilson.

After the New Year, I was having shaved ice with Steven and Grace when Chuck texted to meet for drinks. I wasn’t about to ditch my friends for a dude. “Go!” my friends insisted. So I went to join Chuck and his friends at Blind Barber. I said I liked Britney Spears, and Chuck bugged the DJ all night until he played “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

We went on our first official date on January 10, 2014 at Elf Cafe in Echo Park. It was delicious. We fell in love very fast. But we held off on saying so or living together too soon while staying honest about our feelings.

- 26 -

An ongoing battle with my parents was whether or not I should own real estate. Having accumulated the bulk of their assets in real estate both before and after their run-in with the law, they believed that every year spent renting was money down the drain. I, on the other hand, was finally learning to wean myself from parental approval and rebelling against being told what to do, complicated by the fact that most rent vs. buy calculators recommended against buying in overpriced markets like L.A. I lost the fight and, with my parents’ help, purchased a bungalow in Larchmont, having to leave the harmonious living situation that was Talmadge. On the day I moved in, a passerby found and handed me a Yorkie that had escaped from a neighbor’s yard. “That’s good luck!” my mom said.

Chuck had grown used to me pining about not having a film career but also not shooting anything. So he suggested that we apply to the Outfest Fusion One Minute Film Contest. With my relationship to my parents on my mind, I shot a film called Genius, a not-so-subtle jab at their style of parenting. Chuck shot his own film called Foolish, and we both won!

- 27 -

Season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race inspired me to dip my toes back into drag. Chuck and I watched YouTube videos and practiced our makeup skills week after week until I signed up for an amateur talent show called Popularity Contest at Precinct DTLA. For my first time onstage since my UVA Drag Bingo days, I performed “Amazing” by Hi Fashion and won. Chuck competed and won the following month, and we continued performing at Precinct and Akbar for a year. I joked to my therapist that I had become more famous as a drag queen than as a filmmaker.

When astronomers discovered Earthlike planet Kepler-22b, I had an idea for a film about a lonely young boy who makes contact with the distant planet, called “JA-9.” Having cut my teeth on running and gunning, I decided to embark on an exercise in making films the Hollywood way. My vision for the script — a busload of kids, an old shack full of vintage radio equipment — was unrestrained by budget considerations. We rented a school bus and crammed a 40-person crew into our house, Chuck cooked beef kebabs for everyone, and we made a last minute run to pick up misting fans. “This is my film school!” I noted. After the film screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, we went out for tacos.

- 28 -

Aaron called to say he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma while Chuck and I were on the way to Catalina. In between drag shows and screenwriting, I would make the trip to Orange County to visit him regularly.

He died a short year later despite having matched with a bone marrow donor against the odds and receiving a successful transplant. The last conversation we had was about paleo moon cakes. Earlier that summer, doctors had told Aaron he had two months left, and he refused to show it to the world, least of all to his closest friends. He was sick of the chemo and sick of the pity and was determined to live a normal life, going back to the office and exuding such enthusiasm for the company I desperately wanted to leave.

My parents were in town, and I had taken them to a taping of The Voice, an all-day affair, then to hotpot. Aaron’s girlfriend Susanna called in the middle of the night, and Chuck and I rushed to the hospital to be by his side, but really, to be by hers. Watching one of my best friends die of septic shock in the ICU was one of the worst experiences of my life.

Aaron had not written a will. His parents distributed all of his belongings, allowing Susanna very little say in the process, while Albert and I tried in vain to advocate for her. We surmised that she must have upset them, but their reasoning was that they weren’t married even though Aaron had planned on proposing.

Aaron and I shared many great memories together, but wow, his death and its aftermath were traumatic. Sometimes, it feels like he is on vacation in a faraway place, like we will meet again and catch up.

- 29 -

In an effort to change the office culture at KP, management tasked me with leading a committee to improve the department morale. So we organized group lunches, workouts, and Happy Hours to encourage social interaction, which, on a team of introverted programmers, proved to be quite a challenge. As I urged my colleagues, many of them much older, to participate in the activities we planned, I wondered what went through their minds. This became the idea for my next screenplay, Vivian Lee, Senior Programmer.

I was more committed than ever to finishing a script to direct as my first feature film project. I woke up early to write every morning then booked a getaway at a geodesic dome house in the Inland Empire to knock out a draft of the script. Later in the fall, I went on another solo retreat, this time at Lake Arrowhead, to rewrite Superdrag. During that stay, I set an alarm for 2 in the morning to buy a single ticket to see the Spice Girls in London the following summer.

On New Year’s Eve, Hayley hosted a party and offered to do tarot readings as we rang in 2019. “You’ve had an amazingly productive year,” she remarked. “Now is the time to work on your relationships.”

- 30 -

Quite a few of our friends have called me and Chuck the perfect couple over the years. It always tickles us because we don’t think of ourselves that way at all. The reality, as any long-term couple can attest to, is that relationships take work, compounded by the fact that Chuck and I are so different. Some days, it simply felt like we were incompatible. We read books, oh so many books, then went to couples therapy to unpack the baggage that we carried into the relationship and to learn to communicate with each other.

Those lessons went out the window during a blowout fight over unmet expectations on my birthday. This was it. We were breaking up after five years. How would we tell our friends? I had ordered an engagement ring — a cobalt band with a diamond inset — but never presented it. Well, it was moot now, so I gave it to Chuck to keep. He started driving to Masako’s, and I messaged Blake.

We decided to give us another try. Over July 4 weekend, we joined a group of 23 on a camping trip at Table Mountain near Bishop. On the next to last day, everyone, either suffering the effects of altitude sickness or exhausted from camping with an infant, decided to pack up and leave early. Left by ourselves at an enormous campsite in the Eastern Sierras, in front of the campfire and under the stars, Chuck and I discussed our future and decided to get married.

After we got home, everyone wanted the “proposal” story, so we sugarcoated it a little.