Nice Guy Like Me (eBook)

A Memoir

Spencer Keasey (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8711-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A no-holds-barred look at the last golden age of gay studio porn before the DIY OnlyFans revolution, A Nice Guy Like Me is one man's tale of finding industry stardom almost overnight-and how his demons caught up to him at the height of his success. As a child and a young adult, Spencer was raised on adventure. From moving to and living in South Africa at six years-old to becoming a 'boy toy' in London at the age of 19, he was exposed to feelings of wonder and excitement and to the rewards and lessons of taking chances. When his 17 year relationship ended at the age of 36, with a single email and attached photos, his life changed forever. Within two weeks he became an exclusive for Titan Media, the premier gay adult film company, and then spent the next 30 months as Spencer Quest finding himself at the pinnacle of the industry, on DVD and magazine covers, winning industry awards, and headlining a show off-Broadway. But his childhood was also filled with feelings of fear, abandonment and an understanding that, even at the age of seven and against his will, his body held power over men. During his short career in the adult industry, his past began to emerge, traumas remembered, and he began a descent back into a world of addiction, mental health challenges including severe episodes of self-hatred and self-harm that had haunted him all this life. More than just a porn memoir, A Nice Guy Like Me is a journey of life, a 'heroic journey' to the author, one he believes is similar to everyone else's. Filled with pain and joy, desperation and hope, and, of course, sex, the memoir offers deep vulnerability and a ruthless self-examination of the choices made in life, their subsequent consequences, and the lessons that emerge.

Spencer Keasey received his Master's of Arts in Teaching at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992. Since then he's worked several jobs including as a high school English teacher, mediator, fitness instructor, athletic director, educational grant coordinator, Vermont Department of Education consultant, and HIV outreach and testing counselor. He currently serves as the director of an art gallery and auction house specializing in historic Provincetown art. He has called Provincetown home for nearly 2 decades and continues to explore his creative side as a musician, artist, actor, and now, writer. This is his first book. He lives a charmed life with his husband and cats.

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A no-holds-barred look at the last golden age of gay studio porn before the DIY OnlyFans revolution, A Nice Guy Like Me is one man's tale of finding industry stardom almost overnight-and how his demons caught up to him at the height of his success. As a child and a young adult, Spencer was raised on adventure. From moving to and living in South Africa at six years-old to becoming a 'boy toy' in London at the age of 19, he was exposed to feelings of wonder and excitement and to the rewards and lessons of taking chances. When his 17 year relationship ended at the age of 36, with a single email and attached photos, his life changed forever. Within two weeks he became an exclusive for Titan Media, the premier gay adult film company, and then spent the next 30 months as Spencer Quest finding himself at the pinnacle of the industry, on DVD and magazine covers, winning industry awards, and headlining a show off-Broadway. But his childhood was also filled with feelings of fear, abandonment and an understanding that, even at the age of seven and against his will, his body held power over men. During his short career in the adult industry, his past began to emerge, traumas remembered, and he began a descent back into a world of addiction, mental health challenges including severe episodes of self-hatred and self-harm that had haunted him all this life. More than just a porn memoir, A Nice Guy Like Me is a journey of life, a "e;heroic journey"e; to the author, one he believes is similar to everyone else's. Filled with pain and joy, desperation and hope, and, of course, sex, the memoir offers deep vulnerability and a ruthless self-examination of the choices made in life, their subsequent consequences, and the lessons that emerge.

Textauszug

Chapter One

This isn’t a story of my childhood although this story, like all of our stories, is rooted in those formative years and so some details may be helpful before I dive into the what and how of my becoming an adult film star. This introduction is an initial whirlwind telling of these years, and while you may find yourself saying, “Whoa, hold up, tell me more,” please know that I will. We’re starting with an outline of my first two decades, an overview which includes self-harm and sexual abuse. My dropping bombs, casually throwing something traumatic at you and then breezing forward, isn’t meant to frustrate. These are the past events that began to come to the surface during my years in the industry, so I will go back to them and give them their due once my porn quest begins.

Up until I was about three years old, it was my father who “raised” me during the day while my mother worked to support us. My sister, two and a half years older, had the benefit of a stay-at-home mother during her first years of life while my father spent those years doing this job or that, including being a debt collector who, even in Lititz, PA, our small town in Amish country, carried a gun while he knocked on doors. My father ended up going back to school at night at Elizabethtown College in 1968 to become an accountant, however, which meant before I turned one-year-old, my mother left for work each morning leaving me screaming and in a tantrum at her daily departure.

When I was old enough to stand at the door looking out at her as she got in the car, I would be inconsolable. This image is still one my mother reflects back on as one of her most traumatic for a 22-year-old mother. It wasn’t just that I was upset, it was that she was leaving me with him, my father who, while he may have had a basic understanding that he should give me security and comfort, was incapable of giving it. He didn’t know how to give it and didn’t understand how a lack of nurturing at this age would forever affect his son, even though he was familiar with the feelings of abandonment—his own childhood having been marked by it in a different form. He also demanded quiet throughout the day, so I spent a lot of time learning to tiptoe around him in between biting and scratching my sister who seemed to get from him what I didn’t. My acting out, my intentionally seeking out attention no matter how it came to me, whether it was a scolding or punishment, started early.

My sister was clearly the one my father loved. She was his princess while I was the troublemaker, the crier, the bedwetting, night-terror-screaming child who probably would have tested any father’s patience. Even as a toddler I could recognize that he was capable of affection because he gave it to my sister. I didn’t understand why he withheld it from me. I got used to feeling like an annoyance to my father early on and would eventually write a story in my head years later that I was the unplanned child, not my sister who actually was unplanned, that I was the extra mouth to feed, and that my father resented me because I existed.

But with every difficulty in my life, there has always been some beauty. We lived next door to my mother’s parents, sharing a wall with them, and while my grandmother didn’t have time to provide all the maternal love I missed during the days when my mother wasn’t there, she gave me all she could. Including ice cream. My grandparents owned and operated an ice cream factory, Rosey’s Ice Cream, that sat just yards behind the house. My grandfather would churn out flavors to deliver to the schools while my grandmother would serve soft-serve swirls and scoop comfort to town foot traffic, including local Mennonites who came into the cone shop. My mother was a Rosenberg, a family that had a long history of providing food and panaceas to others, whether it was Rosey Burgers from the lunch wagon in the Lititz town square (a continuing century-old tradition) or tonics at town fairs all along the East Coast. My great-great grandfather was a well known traveling medicine man whose own handmade tonics, including Rosenberg’s Great Century Oil, claimed to fix just about any ailment.

This juxtaposition of feelings of fear and abandonment I felt on one side of the house with my father and the feelings of love and comfort from the Rosey side of the house became a familiar pattern during my childhood into my teen years. I’d spend decades trying to reconcile the opposites but would learn early from my father that I “had nothing to complain about ‘’ in life and that, even as a toddler, I’d better stop acting like a baby during what he considered my overly emotional moments. His disdain for crying meant he’d send me to the happy side of the house where my tears would dry—a relief for me, but a disappointment as well. When I was an adult, my grandmother told me that I’d come over to their side in tears and ask why my father wouldn’t play with or throw the ball to me.

We moved to Audubon, outside Philadelphia, when I was around three years old, after my father had finished his degree and started working for Price Waterhouse in the city. My world changed drastically. Suddenly my mother was present during the day and my father was not. I began to get love and attention from my mother and from the other mothers in the apartment complex. But by this point I had already turned into a sullen, sad, lonely, overly sensitive and somewhat angry child. I didn’t know how to interact with other kids and didn’t know how to be a “normal” kid, one that wouldn’t bother my father and that would know how to play with other kids.

While my mother, now that she was home during the day, was the most beautiful, wonderful, kind and caring person I could have hoped for as a child, I was still scared for when my father would come home. During those hours my father was at work, I tried desperately to forge an identity that gave me the attention I craved from him. I still wanted his love. I would do anything to make him smile because if he did, maybe he’d not scold me the next time I did something “childish,” as though a three-year-old should know that once you hit the age of three, acting like a baby was no longer appropriate. My need to please him started early, so while I had the tendency to steer clear of him when he came home miserable from work, a nearly daily occurrence, if I sensed he’d had a good day, I’d try desperately to get a smile and a touch.

There was another side of my father which, when it appeared, confused me. While there were occasional moments when I had a fleeting sense of security and comfort when he was near, there were also rare moments when I was shocked by the collapse of his hard exterior. One such moment I’ve carried with me to this day, cherishing its significance because it still proves to me that there was always something more to my father.

In 1971, an ABC movie of the week, Brian’s Song, showed me a side of my father I would only ever see again a few times in my life. It was a true story of two Chicago Bears players, played by James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, who were close friends at a time when racial divides were clear even in football. When James Caan died from cancer at the end of the movie, my father cried—hard. I didn’t know what was happening and didn’t know why; I just knew it was a movie about football and that it was sad. The one thing my father did love was football. He had been a star football player in a blue-collar high school in York, Pennsylvania. He could have been on the football team at Penn State had he not decided on playing cards freshman year and getting my mother pregnant instead. I didn’t understand any of that, of course. I just knew he liked football, wouldn’t play with me and teach me how to throw a ball—and now apparently it was okay for him to cry, but not me. Boys didn’t cry; that had been made clear, and even though I wasn’t quite four years old, I was so confused. I didn’t know at the time how significant that moment and that movie would be for me throughout my adolescence, teen years and into adulthood.

Resulting from the long period of feeling abandoned and lacking attention while living in Lititz, my main coping mechanism at this time, an early form of the dissociation I’d use in my life moving forward, was to become the goofiest kid imaginable. Disney mania had resurfaced across the country with the opening of Disney World in Florida in 1971, so it was these cartoon characters with whom I found companionship and my first experiences with escapism. Their faces were on my shirts, pajamas and sheets. My mother had a Disney piano songbook and spent hours playing songs from classic shows with me sitting next to her singing along. Our bedtime stories were from Disney Golden Books. When I say I was goofy, I mean I was, well, Goofy. I’d take on the slapstick mannerisms of the character before changing to another Disney character. I’d become Pluto when I barked at the dinner table with a chicken leg bone in my mouth. I made people laugh. I was a jokester. I got attention and a feeling inside that felt good.

It was at this time that a neighbor, my mother’s best friend in the apartment complex, taught me how to talk like Donald Duck. Not only did I catch on quickly, I was good at it and I suddenly realized I could have a new identity when I used the voice. Oddly enough, by speaking like Donald Duck, I had found my own voice. Most kids in the complex didn’t appreciate it; speaking like Donald only made me weirder and less desirable as a playmate. But most adults thought it was adorable, and because I spent so much...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8711-9 / 9798350987119