Genesis



In the fall of 2010, a rash of suicides by gay teenagers led Dan Savage to create the It Gets Better project to enable young gay people to be aware that eventually, it will get better. While I appreciated the sentiment and the message of hope, I didn't think it answered the one question that I had as a young gay man stuck in a small town: “Exactly how will it get better?”

I studied what young people talked about in coffee shops, in social media, in bars/pubs. To me they talked about South Park and shows on Adult Swim. They recounted plots of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They talked about music, cartoons and funny stuff they saw on the internet. They would share something if it was relevant to them, or if they thought it was too cool or hilarious to pass up. After studying viral videos and the phenomenon of video blogging and cults of personality, I thought “What if I could make 'reducing homophobia' go viral?” What if I could create a cult of personality about a gay man stuck in a small town to portray the effects of homophobia on his life?

I do have some experience in this regard. In 1998, I put a webcam up in my home office and within months I was receiving over 10,000 visitors a day from all over the world. I decided to make it a 24-hour webcam portraying my life in real-time showing everything I do as a gay man. This was pre-Will and Grace and to the large majority of young gay men they had no idea a man could live openly and honestly as a gay adult. From watching TV, to having parties, to sleeping, eating, having sex, and falling in love. Over the course of four years, visitors were able to share my life and due to the thousands of emails I received over the years, I know I helped many, many people come to terms with that. I was invited to speak about my experience at South By Southwest in 2001 and 2002 and eventually published a book that contains nothing but cam captures sent in by viewers. So taking what I learned from that project, I set out to apply it to this one.

At this time, I had suffered a tremendous loss due to the devastating flood in Nashville. Due to a series of life events, I found myself back home living with my parents and having trouble dealing with the transition of once being an out gay man who never gave 'being gay' a second thought to being called “fag” on the streets and dealing with my very own family's homophobia. The loss of all my possessions, meant I had no clothes so my mother started purchasing things I would never wear, feeding me horribly unhealthy food and invalidating my feelings on every level. 20 years had passed since I had lived with my family, but for them time had stopped. And I was back being a 17-year-old child subject to the whims of my parent's lifestyle that was so different than what I had grown accustomed to.

What remained of my possessions was my laptop, my external hard drive and my car. Everything else was gone. As the days went by an my options seemed hopelessly limited, I needed a big project to work on and pass the time until I figured out my next move.

In Nashville I had worked as a graphic designer, web developer, video editor and had a strong grasp of Internet technologies. I had also been an actor, novelist, poet, dancer (as a Jeerleader for the Nashville Rollergirls for 2 seasons), and celebrated 3D/stereo photographer. As ridiculous and broad-spanning as my resume and skill-set was, it had long resulted in me being unfocused and unable to do just one thing. In addition, over the past 20 years, I have worked in marketing and promotions for some of the biggest brands in the world including Kellogg's, Marlboro and Nintendo and worked in viral/guerilla marketing for Attack! On various crazy and life-threatening promotions.

A friend encouraged me to pick just one project that would use all of my abilities and be able to be a showcase for everything I could do. So after digging through my hard drive, I cam across an episode of web series I had started in 2007 called COUNTRY QUEER, CITY QUEER about the lives of two clueless gay men living together in a mid-sized city. Beau Ratliffe would be from the country and thought he was living the dream in this new awesome gay-friendly life. However, his roommate Stephan Fageaut was from a much larger city and really struggling with this small town. The series never really got off the ground, but when I ran across those episodes again, I knew that I could take my story and fuse it with Beau's and create something new and also work through some of the pain by making fun of it.

Having no budget, no actors and no writers, I decided early on that the series would be a “found-plot” type. Heavily based on improv (and whatever props I could find) I would base the episodes about what was going on at the time. And that my parents home would have to be the set...and really where Beau happened to land, that would be the story. A sort of “anything goes” approach and I came up with the title ANYTHING BEAU'S to be reflective of that chaotic nature. I also decided to make Beau an inspiring character filled with optimism because a lot of horrible stuff had happened to him (and me) and even though I wanted to portray those stories, I didn't want it to be a total downer. However later episodes would get pretty emotionally rough but that is all part of the character arc I will discuss later.