‘Confessions of a Mormon Boy’: A Gay Man’s Story
Steven Fales strips his life bare in "Confessions of a Mormon Boy." (photo courtesy of Wanzie Presents)
Playwright-actor Steven Fales is excitedly sharing a deep thought about dreams and hopes and inner peace and choices when he cuts himself off midsentence.
“Whoa, I’m getting way out there,” he says with a chuckle.
It’s easy to get “way out there” when you’ve had a life like Fales’.
A gay Mormon living in Salt Lake City, he married and had two children. He turned to “reparative therapy” to change his sexual orientation, but when that didn’t work, he was excommunicated from the church. He divorced his wife, worked as a male escort to pay his child support, tumbled into depression and turned to drugs.
His children helped him find the strength to snap out of his downward spiral.
“I saw that my dreams, my real dreams, my relationship with my children, were slipping away,” he says.
Fales turned his story, which played out from 2000 to 2002, into “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” a one-man show he’ll perform at the Parliament House’s Footlight Theatre this weekend.
“Confessions” has spawned a bit of an empire: He has written two sequels — he refers to them as his “Mormon Boy trilogy” — and the show has successfully run off-Broadway. He’s taking it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland this summer and is working on an off-Broadway return with the complete trilogy.
Steven Fales wrote and stars in "Confessions of a Mormon Boy," the first of three autobiographical shows. (photo courtesy of Wanzie Presents)
“I never thought I’d be a solo performing artist, but it’s paid off in a lot of ways,” says Fales, 41.
Though his life has been full of surprises, being gay was not one of them. Before he married Emily Pearson, now his ex-wife, he told her he was gay.
“Anyone who gets married does it for more reasons than sex,” he says. “We did the best we could.”
It was not the typical Mormon family: Emily’s father was also gay and had died of AIDS. Emily’s mother, Carol Lynn Wright Pearson, wrote “Goodbye, I Love You,” a memoir about her experience as wife of a gay man and the friendship they developed after their divorce.
“My ex-wife has seen the play; my ex-mother-in-law has seen it. They are major characters,” Fales says.
When he struggled with his marriage, Fales turned to therapy to become straight: “At first I thought it was the answer. They gave a lot of false hope.”
When it failed, he confessed all to the church: “I turned myself in like a good Mormon boy.”
The subsequent excommunication sent him “reeling,” he says: “I couldn’t believe these strangers were going to judge me as a Mormon, as a human, making everything I had done as a Mormon null and void.”
He left Salt Lake City for New York. It didn’t take long to fall into prostitution: “When you are that angry and hurting and confused and broke … you come to the big city and get caught up.”
In 2003, he wrote the play. A reviewer for The New York Times in 2006 called “Confessions” a “fairly conventional, although admittedly compelling, piece of confessional theater,” saying the show’s many humorous moments reveal “a vaudeville comedian’s dependence on shtick.”
Fales was criticized by the Times for keeping his emotions under tight control; he says as time passes from the events he’s reliving, he’s able to open up even more.
“It was almost freakish to write it so soon, but I’m glad I did,” he says. “Now, with hindsight, I’m able as an actor to layer it with a lot more depth.”
Ultimately, Fales says, he didn’t write the play for critics or a mass audience. He had only his children in mind.
“I didn’t want my children to know my story through the filters of anyone but me,” he says. “I wrote it because I’m a dad.”
He had one of the off-Broadway performances recorded to give them, and he adapted the script into a book, sold on Amazon.com
Now 14 and nearly 16, his son and daughter still haven’t seen it.
“I think they’re getting ready,” he says. “Maybe they’ll read the book.”
He hopes among the lessons his children learn from his story is one of perseverance.
“Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better,” he says, “but it does get better.”
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