JACK MACCARTHY: Paul, could I start by having you say and spell your full name?

PAUL OUTLAW: Okay. Yes. My name is Paul Outlaw. My last name is o-u-t-l-a-w. First name Paul, p-a-u-l.

JACK MACCARTHY: And where were you born, Paul?

PAUL OUTLAW: I was born in Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

JACK MACCARTHY: Tell me about where you grew up and what that was like. You grew up in the Lower East Side.

JACK MACCARTHY: Tell me about growing up in the Lower East Side and what that was like.

PAUL OUTLAW: So yeah, I grew up in the Lower East Side on Avenue D between 9th and 10th Street. I grew up in the housing projects, so public housing, the Jacob Riis projects. And the buildings, these were these brown, big brown brick buildings that kind of went from 14th Street all the way down to Delancey Street. They were built

PAUL OUTLAW: in the late 40s, and they replaced tenements. When my parents moved in there, I think it was 1950ish, around there. When they moved in there, the neighborhood was kind of a mix of Italian, Irish, Russian, Ukrainian, Black lower income people living there. It was like that through the sixties

PAUL OUTLAW: and beginning of the seventies, and around that time, a lot of the white people, the Irish and the Italians moved out of the neighborhood, that was the so-called white flight. They moved to the suburbs or to Jersey, Staten Island, and the neighborhood became more predominantly Black and Puerto Rican in the seventies. I remember when I grew up, people would say that my neighbor was a dangerous neighborhood. I never felt that way.

PAUL OUTLAW: I felt there was a very strong community. Strangely, it was dangerous for me and for members of my family, more than would be for someone from the outside, I think, because I was queer. I didn't know at the time, but I was always treated differently. I think people knew that I was queer before I did. And at

PAUL OUTLAW: that time, the sixties and seventies, people didn't always react very well to that. Also, my mother was very religious and strict in terms of how we could behave. So we didn't curse, we didn't hang out in the streets. We were considered kind of prudish from a lot of people, a lot of our neighbors. And

PAUL OUTLAW: my parents put a lot of emphasis on our education, so my brothers and my sister and I, we were all kind of taught to try to get a good education. Let me see. I just lost my train of thought.

JACK MACCARTHY: We were just talking about your siblings a bit. How many of you?

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah. Okay. My parents had six kids, six of us, five boys and one girl.

PAUL OUTLAW: My parents were also older parents. My parents married when my father was 40 and my mother was 30, and then they had six kids. So by the time they had their last kid, my little brother, my mother was 44 and my father was 54, you know. That's older parents. We got a sense of that. We felt that as siblings, like my older three siblings,

PAUL OUTLAW: they got the most of the strictness of my parents, but they also got a lot of the attention. There's a lot of home movies and photographs, videos and stuff like that from them. For the younger three, me and my two brothers, I don't think there's any home movies of us. I think my father was kind of over it by then. I mean, at that time, he was in his fifties with the last three. I think his energy was a little bit depleted. And as far as talking about

PAUL OUTLAW: my parents' need and drive for us to get an education, part of that came from the fact that they both were from North Carolina. Not from the same part of North Carolina. They actually met in New York in the forties, but they both were from kind of poor post, not even post mid-Jim Crow, North Carolina. They didn't have a lot of opportunities. My mother was a pretty bright woman, but she didn't get past high school. I don't

PAUL OUTLAW: think my father even graduated high school. Of my siblings, three of us really went for education and three less so. I mean, our personalities, I think, our mentalities were different. One of my brothers went to Stuyvesant High School, and then he went to Princeton and then he went to Yale Law. My sister went to Seward Park High School,

PAUL OUTLAW: and she went to NYU, and then she went to the University of --UMass Amherst. Then I went to a private school in Manhattan, Grace Church School, which was maybe a ten-minute bus ride from our house, down the street, more or less. I got a scholarship to go there. Then from there I got a scholarship and I went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Then I got a scholarship to Harvard,

PAUL OUTLAW: a full ride to Harvard. And then my path kind of goes like this because I went to Harvard for a year, freshman year, and I really hated it. And I can tell you why, it's a long story, but I'll get into that. But I was there for a year, then I took a year off, ostensibly because I had skipped a year in high school, I needed to have time to kind of adjust to being around people who were a year older than me and,

PAUL OUTLAW: what they called a gap year now but we called it a year off then, would've been good for me, to kind of catch up. But I really took the year off to try to get out of Harvard to apply to other schools. I applied to NYU, to the drama school, and I got in and I left Harvard much to the dismay of everyone, parents, advisors, whatever. But I ended up at NYU where I ended up getting my BFA.

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah, my experience at Harvard was -- Well, I hated it because I came out literally within a month of getting there. I think subconsciously I knew that I could come out. I felt safe because I was in a big city like New York where I came from,

PAUL OUTLAW: but I was not with my parents, you know, I didn't have my family around. Also, I had come from a boarding school where you had to go to all your classes. If you missed more than three classes, you got restrictions, you lost privileges and stuff. Then suddenly you're at a college where you don't have to go to class. You just need to basically do the work and do your term papers or whatever you needed to do to pass the final. So you get a lot of kids going wild, you know,

PAUL OUTLAW: you're in a big city, you're in Boston in the mid-seventies, where gay liberation was just beginning to kind of bloom. There were a lot of gay bars, and I think that's why I picked Harvard. I got into Princeton and I got into Yale and I got into Brown and Amherst and I picked the one that was in a big city because I kind of knew it would give me license to be myself. But

PAUL OUTLAW: at the same time Harvard was a cliquey place at that time. I don't know if it still is, a lot of class kind of stuff going on, even the gay students who are openly gay had this kind of attitude of "We're open about it among ourselves, but you don't talk about that." Kind of a country club gay mentality. I was always a little bit -- What's the word?

PAUL OUTLAW: No, the word that came into my head was tacky. But that's not really what I mean. But I was not a -- I mean, even though I went to prep school and I knew prep school life, I wasn't a preppy. I spent the first five or six months at Harvard knowing that I was gay, but not knowing how to explore it, like with my classmates or with other Harvard students, there was nothing happening.

PAUL OUTLAW: The two or three people I knew who were gay, who were friends of mine, were not my type. I didn't even know I had a type, but they definitely were not my type. I finally, I think, in the beginning of the spring, I answered an ad, a personal ad, which for those people watching this who don't know what that is: You take the LA Weekly; in the back of the LA Weekly would be not just

PAUL OUTLAW: ads for things you buy or ads for events, there would be personal ads, and it'd be like: "Looking for blah, blah, blah to meet." Then you would answer the ad and would go to a mailbox. Your phone number would be in your response. That person would then check their box, a physical box, not like a voicemail, real like a box. They'd get their messages and then they would respond to people.

PAUL OUTLAW: It was a long process because it was all done by mail, like snail mail. I answered this guy's ad, and I was 17 at the time, and the person whose ad I answered said they were in their early forties. They said they were 40. I found out recently that they were actually ten years older. But this was a guy, doctor, I shouldn't even -- Actually

PAUL OUTLAW: I can say his name because he has been profiled. He's deceased, but he's been profiled recently because his home was a very strange place all his life. I experienced this home in nineteen seventy--I'm trying to remember. It was in the '70s and it was in Boston, in Back Bay or the South End, which is now one of the most thriving gay communities. But at the time it was a kind of a rundown

PAUL OUTLAW: dangerous community that had all these townhouses that were falling apart. Totally not gentrified, but Ralph, his name was Ralph, he bought one of these houses. I got his address and I went to his house. Like in Brooklyn, those kind of townhouses. You go up the stoop and knock on the door, ring the doorbell, and it was the only house on the block that really

PAUL OUTLAW: looked like someone had put money or invested into making it nice. I ring the doorbell and this young Black man, my memory is, young, dark-skinned, attractive Black man, answers the door, and that was not what I was expecting because that's not the description of the person whose ad this was. Supposed to be a white guy in his forties. The guy opens the door, lets me in me, and gives me this look,

PAUL OUTLAW: kind of knowing, kind of hmm, and points to the staircase. I look at the staircase and the whole ground floor of this house is in dark red velvets, mahogany wood. There was a gold miniature statue of Michelangelo's David, very Victorian. It was a Victorian house, but it was done up to look like a Victorian whorehouse, to me anyway, like a bordello. I go up the stairs

PAUL OUTLAW: and I hear a voice saying, come in here. I go into this room with a four -poster bed and also lots of curtains, velvet, dark wood. There's a pale guy with thinning hair and glasses in this bed. We proceeded to have sex. Now, the weird thing is

PAUL OUTLAW: that this is so many years ago. I can remember the room, I can remember what he looked like, but I can't remember what we did. All I know is that when we were done, he was like, "Is this your first time?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "You're really good at this!" And I'm like, "Well, it's not my first time having sex." I mean, I had a girlfriend and at the time I still had a girlfriend. It didn't seem much different. I mean, it was just a different body type, but it was just sex,

PAUL OUTLAW: it's no big deal. That's how I lost my virginity with a man. Although I still to this day keep thinking, did I lose my virginity? I mean, how do you define sex? We definitely had sex and we definitely were naked and there was definitely orgasm. But what we actually did, I don't know. And so this -- Let me see.

PAUL OUTLAW: Like 20 years later, I was in Boston doing a movie, and I was living around the corner from that address. It didn't really hit me until I was there. I was like: "Oh, this is where it happened." So one day I walked over to that street, it was Wellington Street, and I'm walking down Wellington Street and all of the houses are gentrified. They are beautiful, beautiful old townhouses. And I get to, I think it's 9 Wellington Street.

PAUL OUTLAW: Actually I was across the street because I didn't want to be on the same side of the street. I'm looking across the street and I see this house that looks like it's in ruins, all of the wrought iron railings are rusted, the house is covered in ivy, but like thick, tree -trunked ivy. There's a falling apart bicycle attached. It made me think of Great Expectations and Miss Havisham, you know, It's like the house

PAUL OUTLAW: kind of just fell apart. But I knew that there was someone living there because I saw their bicycle. I also saw there were curtains in the window. I did not ring the bell, but I remember thinking, this is like a really weird metaphor, the place where I lost my virginity looks like Miss Havisham's house, or like the picture of Dorian Gray. You know, it's like, this is what the painting looks like, just a horrible mess. I actually went around the back and looked at the garden.

PAUL OUTLAW: The garden was also like a jungle, overrun. This was like 1996, I think. I think Ralph-- I found out recently, because I researched him. I Googled him. I think he died in 2013, and there was a whole article in some Boston magazine or some art magazine about the inside of his house with photographs, and it looked exactly the same, like every inch of the house, like some Victorian antique shop with just weird

PAUL OUTLAW: items and stuff. He was actually a very well-known eccentric in Boston. He was pretty eccentric when I met him, so that just probably got increased. So yeah, I just bounced around so many places just now .

JACK MACCARTHY: I have a roadmap in my head, and I'll jump back to some other stuff from childhood in a minute, but--

PAUL OUTLAW: You're gonna cut this up anyway, right?

JACK MACCARTHY: Well, the full interview is gonna pretty much be intact, but if we make a shorter video, then we can pull pieces all around. But while we're on Harvard, what happened at Harvard to make it -- You started to go into this, you mentioned that you came out as soon as you got there, but things with your friend group were not ideal. Tell me.

PAUL OUTLAW: Okay. Yeah. What happened was, and I should use this as a preface, so people ask, "When did you know you were gay?" And I have a very, very strong will and a very, very, very complex mind. That sounds weird, but what I mean by that is, I think I always knew I was gay, but I was in extreme denial and extreme repression

PAUL OUTLAW: literally until the summer before Harvard, I think, in that, if someone asked me, "Are you gay?" I would've said, "No, no way. No fucking way." If they said, "You're bi?" which we didn't really say at that time, I would've said, "No, no." But all the signs were there. I mean, I had a lot of several hero worship relationships with men who were

PAUL OUTLAW: usually not that much older than me. Like if I was a sophomore, it'd be a senior. I would fixate on guys. Or the fact that I was obsessed with Diana Ross and The Supremes when I was 13, 14, or even twelve, should have been a sign. I remember one of the first records I ever bought when I was in high school was Diana Ross and The Supremes' Greatest Hits, the double album. That's dark blue with them wearing these kind of chiffon

PAUL OUTLAW: dresses, a painting of them. I remember listening to that over and over and writing down all of the lyrics. It's like I had a little notebook of the complete lyrics of their hits and I could lip sync to all of their songs. That should have been a clue that's a little gay boy kind of thing. But I didn't think about it. I was into theater,

PAUL OUTLAW: I performed a lot of musicals. I remember, also, that one of my classmates, he was a few years ahead of me at Exeter, he wrote a memoir on some blog maybe 15 years ago where he talked about -- We lived in the dorm together, and he, to me, at the time, was clearly a gay person. The way he talked, the way he always wore an ascot, he seemed gay. I remember

PAUL OUTLAW: the signals in my mind were, be careful, that's not you. But he wrote in his memoir, essay or whatever, he wrote about me as this Black effeminate kid, and I was like -- I read that when I was in my thirties maybe, or my forties. I remember being offended because that's my own internal homophobia or my internal misogyny for that matter, because it was about me being femme

PAUL OUTLAW: when I was 13 or 14, which I never thought, but it would explain so much about when I'd walk down the street in New York and cars would stop when I'd be eating ice cream, and they would say, "Little boy, can I buy you another ice cream?" This was in Greenwich Village when I was a kid. Or like the neighborhood people who bullied me, called me faggot and stuff like that. I was always like, "This is not me. I'm not that, I'm not that, I'm not that, I'm just me. I'm just me."

PAUL OUTLAW: But I was in big denial. I had girlfriends. I had girlfriends in kindergarten, and a lot of -- Well, of course, also I had a lot of women, I should say girl-- Hello, hello. That's not me, by the way. That was the computer. So, yeah, so I mean, I had a lot of girlfriends, friends who were girls as well as girlfriends, which is another, to me, looking back, a sign of queerness, the boy who's surrounded by girls.

PAUL OUTLAW: I also was not into sports at all. But like I said, deep denial. I would not let that come to the surface. The summer before Harvard, I was 16, I'd skipped a year in high school. I had a job at the Social Security Administration in Queens, and I was living in Manhattan with my family, so I had to take the subway every day. Toward the end of the summer, I remember

PAUL OUTLAW: coming home from work, I would sit in the train, and a couple of times, maybe it was only two times, I mean, in hindsight, I might be blowing this totally out of proportion, but there was this guy who was on the train with me, and he was a white guy. He had very short hair, I guess something like a Caesar cut, big eyes.

PAUL OUTLAW: I mean, looking back, if he walked in the room right now, I wouldn't recognize him, of course, but I have this memory of him as a beautiful man, beautiful young man, sad big eyes. He would sit across from me and just kind of look at me, and I would look away. I wouldn't look at him. I remember this one time he came over, I was sitting in the seat that only seats two people. Not one of the long ones, but one of the

PAUL OUTLAW: small ones. He came and sat next to me and I froze. I stared straight ahead and he sat next to me and he comes rubbing his leg up against my leg. I didn't react at all. Not reacting is reacting, because a lot of guys would be like, you know, but I just was sitting there frozen. Then he got off the train,

PAUL OUTLAW: one stop before my regular stop, and I didn't move. I watched the doors close, and he was looking at me through the doors, the train pulled away and I see those sad eyes. And I turned--the train left. Well, I got off at the next stop, my stop, and I ran back . I think he got off at 14th Street and I got off at West 4th Street, and I literally ran

PAUL OUTLAW: back ten blocks. But he was gone. But I saw him again. But I think that he kind of was not pursuing me, but he did give me those sad eyes. Right then and there, the fact that I got off the train and went back should have told me something, probably did tell me something. But this is literally a month or so before I went to Harvard. Now I get to Harvard and September and in --

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, yes, so one of my best friends from high school, from Exeter, was also there as a freshman. We ran into each other in the orientation line and he was with his roommate. His roommate was this guy who was like 17, white guy from Tennessee, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and he and I hit it off immediately.

PAUL OUTLAW: We just really liked each other a lot and we became best of friends, Arthur and I. We did everything together. I mean, we wore each other's clothes, we went to events together. I'm not sure if we took the same classes. I don't think so. But we just were really like, you know, everyone thought that we were boyfriends. This is 1974 or 5 or something, but in the mid-70s. People talked about

PAUL OUTLAW: being gay. It was not a big deal. But at the same time, we weren't -- I mean, I was in love with him, but I'd never made a move or anything like that because I had never made a move on anyone. I actually had a girlfriend that I was very into at the time, who was not at Harvard. She was still in high school. Around Halloween, we were playing this game, like, a hypnosis game where you take a little watch

PAUL OUTLAW: and hypnotize each other. We had all the lights low in the room, sitting in a circle, that's six of us. And under hypnosis, I said that I was in love with Arthur. Fortunately, Arthur didn't freak out. In fact, I mean, his response was great. He was like, "Oh, I am not into guys as you know." I mean, he had two or three girlfriends.

PAUL OUTLAW: But I said, "I love you very much and I'm your friend, whatever, so it's very cool." And Bobby, who I went to high school with, who was Arthur's roommate, had a girlfriend, she was still at Exeter, she was an Exeter student. She'd come down and visit on weekends. She and Arthur hooked up and that sent Bobby into a mini -nervous breakdown. Bobby

PAUL OUTLAW: left Harvard, took a year off in the middle of the term and went home to Miami. A side note, Bobby came back a year later and he was totally gay , and we remained really good friends. But he left, and that left Arthur without a roommate, and I stupidly moved into the room. I moved into the room with Arthur. It was a one -room double, so it was a large size room, maybe the size of this room.

PAUL OUTLAW: But each of us had a bed in the corner, but there's no walls in the room, so no privacy. He's having sex with girls in this room. He had the girlfriend he stole from Bobby, his girlfriend that he had already. I mean, he was a cute guy, so I had to deal with him sleeping with people in the same room. And literally, by the end of the year, I hated his guts. That was also, I think, part of the reason why I left Harvard, because I was kind of miserable about that.

PAUL OUTLAW: But that was how I came out. That was step one. Although I have to say, I'm still coming out now, by the way. I'm very much a work -in -progress. Like, I came out for the first time when I was 16, and I've been coming out for decades. I have still have not actually officially come out to people in my family, and I probably never will.

PAUL OUTLAW: I'm talking about my immediate family because we don't talk about that stuff. Like my sister and I, I definitely came out to her back then, I came out to my mom, but I've never had a conversation with my brothers about I'm gay or I'm queer or whatever. Although my brothers all know my husband and he's been a member of the family since the nineties. It's not so much

PAUL OUTLAW: that it's a secret or a mystery step that it's not a topic of conversation. And I should say many things are not -- I don't talk about my work with them. I mean, we are not a super communicative family in terms of talking about deep things. At least not among me and my brothers. Also, I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, like: "You don't tell me about your stuff." My little brother recently remarried

PAUL OUTLAW: and I've never really met his wife. "So why do I have to be the one to tell you about my life if you don't talk about your life?" So yeah, that.

JACK MACCARTHY: And Harvard did not have a theater program?

PAUL OUTLAW: I don't even know if they do now. I'm pretty sure they do now, but at the time they did not have one because they felt like we are not a professional--

JACK MACCARTHY: Sorry. But they did not have one what?

PAUL OUTLAW: A theater program. Yeah, they didn't have a theater department. They had lots of extracurricular theater, but no department because they were like, "We're not a professional school," especially not for undergrads. They didn't have a graduate program then either. The American Repertory Theater Company [ART), which is based in Boston and uses what was called the Loeb Drama Center,

PAUL OUTLAW: that theater was actually one of our extracurricular theaters at the time, so I did a number of shows there, but now I don't think it's accessible to students. It was a great little theater, actually. My freshman year I did, I think -- Did I do theater that year? I don't remember if I did any plays that year. But on my year off,

PAUL OUTLAW: when I was trying to get into NYU, I got a job at the law library, so not very far from Harvard Yard, literally steps away. I got an apartment in Boston that I never furnished, and I did a lot of theater. I did a lot of the extracurricular theater because it was not just for students. I mean, auditions were open to the community, so I did four or five shows that year. I ended up dating a girl

PAUL OUTLAW: that was in one of the plays that I did, the fall of my year off. I ended up living with her. She was a junior, I think. She lived in Dunster House. I basically lived with her that year with an empty apartment of my own in Boston that I rarely slept in. Besides the fact of being

PAUL OUTLAW: really young and feeling uncomfortable in queer society at Harvard, I decided I wanted to learn to be an actor. I wanted to train, and I couldn't do that there either, so that led to me applying to NYU and going back to New York. Which was tricky because I had been in boarding school for three years and I'd been at Harvard for two years, including the year off. There were five years where I was

PAUL OUTLAW: only at home part-time, like on vacations, and now suddenly I go back to NYU and I'm living in my parents', in our apartment. Small apartment with my mother, my father, I think my sister, her baby, who was like a year old, maybe even not even a year old, and one or two of my brothers. And I had come out and I had been living on my own to a great extent. Suddenly, I have to kind of fit myself back

PAUL OUTLAW: into my childhood box. Not easy. That was for three years, I did that. Three years. And more or less, as soon as I graduated from NYU, I ended up moving into my own apartment with one of my classmates who was -- I got stuck in a thought there because I was teaching. Boy, I'm all over the place. .

PAUL OUTLAW: I need guidance. Guide me, please .

JACK MACCARTHY: All right. Well, before we go too far down that rabbit hole, let's talk about how you got into theater in the first place.

PAUL OUTLAW: Okay. Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: We'll rewind , I'm also readjust myself on the .

PAUL OUTLAW: All right, so yeah, theater, okay. I think I mentioned, I grew up -- We lived on Avenue D between 9th and 10th Street on the Lower East Side

PAUL OUTLAW: and on the corner of 10th Street and Avenue A, which is maybe three blocks west, was one of the clubhouses of the Boys Club of New York. The Boys Club of New York was an organization that was and is, I don't know what's going on with them now, but it was designed basically to keep boys off the streets, underprivileged, disadvantaged youth, give 'em a place to go after school.

PAUL OUTLAW: This clubhouse in my neighborhood, it had a gym, basketball courts, it had swimming pool, it had pool tables, pink pong tables, but it also had an auditorium and a stage. There was a guy, a man named Fred Feldt, F-E-L-D-T, who for years, I don't know how long he did it before I got there, this is the sixties, he basically

PAUL OUTLAW: directed afterschool theater plays, but also adult community theater. I don't know his entire background, but it was a professional theater background. And maybe he had -- I don't know whether he had done Broadway or summer stock, but he definitely knew what he was doing. Some of the adults who were in the adult productions, they were also professionals. They had done Broadway or

PAUL OUTLAW: regional theater, but they were New York based. When I was, I guess, eight, I often say six, but I don't really know.

But I did The Wizard of Oz. That was the first play that I ever did. I played the Scarecrow. It's a musical and I loved it. I have this memory that might be a fake memory, but it's definitely a memory that I have,

PAUL OUTLAW: of singing that song, "If I Only Had a Brain," and standing on stage and feeling these big spotlights, because we had all the tech you needed. It was like community theater. I remember just feeling these spotlights on me and hearing this people clapping, all this applause and just soaking that up and just loving it. I did a number of kids' plays. Those were the afterschool events. I did

PAUL OUTLAW: maybe five to ten of those in about seven years. But I also did one of the adult ones. I loved the adult ones because they would do Mame or Kismet. I'm thinking people watching this, only people who are old will know what I'm talking about. But these were adult shows with adult actors. I mean, there were very few kids in those, and those were put on at night and they were done--maybe

PAUL OUTLAW: three or four of those a year. But they did this play Finian's Rainbow, which is a musical. They needed kids for that, so I played the main kid whose name was Henry, and Henry could interpret.. One of the lead characters was deaf -mute, and she only communicated through dancing. I could interpret what she was saying and I would tell the people what she said. I loved doing that

PAUL OUTLAW: because that was-- All the adults were in that. One of my brothers was in that, too. It made a big impression on me. That was my start in theater. Also, they had a glee club where the boys would learn contemporary songs. When I say "contemporary," I mean basically Broadway showtunes and stuff. We would then perform at--I didn't even know what this was at the time. They would say,

PAUL OUTLAW: "We are going to get on a bus and we're gonna go to the Plaza Hotel." Or to the Hotel Pierre, or to the Sherry Netherlands, to the ballroom. And we'd be trotted out on stage and we would do a half hour of songs for these grownups. Mostly white people, probably all white people, sitting at these tables. And I realized these were Boys Club fundraisers. I didn't really put that together. I always liked saying I performed at the Plaza Hotel

PAUL OUTLAW: when I was ten years old . There's a lot of musicals. I think not all the shows, but almost all the shows I did were musicals. I also weirdly played Tom Sawyer, which, if you look at me, that doesn't make sense. But they did a production of Tom Sawyer when I think when I was 13 and I got a call from Fred, they had some guy who was supposed to do the part, but he

PAUL OUTLAW: couldn't do it. He dropped out three weeks before the show was supposed to happen, and would I do it? I said to Fred, sure. I had to learn 400 lines in three weeks and play Tom Sawyer, and I did it. Since then, I actually never have a problem learning lines. In fact, I don't like to learn lines. I find different ways to do it that's more organic than trying to learn something by rote. But I'm never really worried about that after that particular show.

PAUL OUTLAW: Then when I went to Exeter, my freshman year, I was like, "I'm hot shit, I've been doing theater for years." The weird parallel to my Harvard experience with gay life was my Exeter experience with theater life. My first year, I didn't get into any shows. All of a sudden, I was a small fish in a bigger pond. All the people who did theater, they've been doing it, they were

PAUL OUTLAW: seniors or juniors, they were doing it. I didn't get a cast in anything. I was really bummed out about it. I didn't really think about the fact that most of the shows they were doing, there weren't really parts for me in them either. But I would go to theater and I was really impressed. The theater teachers at Exeter were really gifted people. They directed really demanding shows. There was a show I saw,

PAUL OUTLAW: I think it was my freshman year, it was the senior project, it was called America Hurrah, which is a play by Jean-Claude van Itallie. That is an extremely political, extremely challenging ensemble theater piece. And they did this with -- I think five or six of the seniors and juniors were in that. I mean, it was intense, and they were great. I mean, these are kids who were 17 and 18 and they seemed like they were in their twenties to me. I was really,

PAUL OUTLAW: really impressed. Especially, I mean, I remember the show that I saw, the performance I saw, there was a stomach flu that had gone around, and so the entire cast was sick and they did the show and they would go off stage and throw up and come back on it, and you never even knew. It brought another whole level of intensity to that performance. But my teacher's name was B. Rodney Marriott. He was the drama teacher at Exeter and he had a theatrical background, professional background, that he

PAUL OUTLAW: basically put on hold to teach, and he taught for decades. When he retired, he went back to theater. That was around the time that I was at NYU. I actually had a friendship with him, after I was a student. But after doing all the Boys Club of New York shows where I was like, "This is fun, it's great to be on stage and be in front of people and sing and dance." Rodney made me realize that theater was

PAUL OUTLAW: an art, that acting was an art. I learned this particularly in one production. They did a production my second year when I finally started getting cast in stuff. The senior project that year was Marat/Sade. It's a very intense piece of theater that's set in an insane asylum around the French Revolution. All of the non-seniors, we played the ensemble, the inmates.

PAUL OUTLAW: I remember we did these exercises to discover what being insane would mean to you individually. And those exercises were very upsetting, but really good. I mean, it helped us develop a physicality for the characters and activities that we would do when we were just alone in the background. I had never thought of acting that way before, you know, of something that was that serious and

PAUL OUTLAW: not just like, "Hey, look at me, look at me sing." That was when I knew I wanted to be an actor, even though I denied it the same way I denied my queerness and went to Harvard to study Latin and Greek, which I had been already doing. But I realized after that first year at Harvard that I wanted to learn, really, the craft of acting, which is why then I tried to get into NYU and got in.

PAUL OUTLAW: I'm lost again.

JACK MACCARTHY: I wanna start to connect the dots between finishing at NYU and leaving for Berlin. But before we go to that, you had come out at Harvard or --

PAUL OUTLAW: Began the process of coming out

JACK MACCARTHY: Began the process, the lifelong process, and

JACK MACCARTHY: then you moved back in with your parents. What happens for you personally? You've said it was difficult, but how did you go about juggling all the different things you were holding?

PAUL OUTLAW: Okay. Remember, as I mentioned that my parents had six kids and that they were really strict with the first three and less strict-- So even before I went to Exeter, when I was doing plays at the Boys Club, I got to stay out late,

PAUL OUTLAW: be rehearsing or performing. Plus, when I was at Grace Church School, that's eleven, twelve and 13, I was suddenly around wealthy white people who lived in the village or uptown. I was allowed to actually go to their homes. I think there might have been sleepovers and stuff. I had a little more autonomy than my older siblings had.

PAUL OUTLAW: Of course then when I was at Exeter and I'd come home for vacations, I also had some level of autonomy. So suddenly living in the house under my parents' roof again, I still could do things I wanted. But obviously I couldn't bring men home or boys home. I remember I was dating this NYU graduate student, he was Australian.

PAUL OUTLAW: I'm actually not even answering your question, but he was living in an NYU faculty housing. I basically slept over at his house the whole time. And my parents didn't really complain about -- I just did it. I had to find a life outside of that apartment. He actually asked me, he wanted me to move in with him, he wanted to keep me. He made me a very, very,

PAUL OUTLAW: very interesting offer. This is when I was 18, I think. And I'm so dumb. I was so dumb. said, "No, I will not do this." Well, he wanted me basically to move in with him and he'd take care of me. And I was like, "I'm not in love with you. I love hanging out with you, love having sex with you, love going to bars and clubs and stuff and dinner, but I don't wanna make this kind of commitment." Then I was basically thrown back full-time into

PAUL OUTLAW: living in my parents' apartment. When I looked back on that, I'm like, what an idiot. It would've been so nice. He had a really nice apartment, he had nice friends, but I was like, "My integrity says I have to love you to move in with you." He wasn't even asking for that. He really wanted just to be my sugar daddy. But it was a weird thing. This is me at age 18. He was in his mid-twenties, late twenties. He was not an old guy or anything. But, no, I didn't. I let that go.

PAUL OUTLAW: I remember I look at my diary, my journal from that time, I wasn't happy. I remember my 21st birthday. I got up that morning and I had to go pick up the dry cleaning for my sister and take care of my nephew who was, let me see, three or four years old. And I was like, "What am I doing? I need to get out of this house. I don't want to be here." I did

PAUL OUTLAW: get out sooner than later.

JACK MACCARTHY: When you got out, were you making a living as an actor?

PAUL OUTLAW: Well, no. What happened was, I was studying at this conservatory studio on Theater Row, which was new at that time. This was 42nd and 9th Avenue. I think there were a couple of new

PAUL OUTLAW: theaters that were put in these old buildings, renovated buildings. It was the Harold Clurman Theater, Playwrights Horizons, a few other ones. There was a school in one of them, the Actors and Directors Lab, which no longer exists. It was founded by a guy named Jack Garfein, who had been a protégé of Lee Strasberg and I think had founded Actor Studio West, which I don't even think exists anymore. But

PAUL OUTLAW: Jack was a Holocaust survivor. He started this Actors and Directors Lab in New York with basically classes for actors and directors. That's where I was my final year or my final year and a half. I was studying with Jack and this was method acting, Stanislavski -based, a lot of work with sense memory. In fact, there was a sense memory track that was sort of adjacent to the main acting classes.

PAUL OUTLAW: Jack asked me, when I graduated--I intended to stay on and study privately postgraduate anyway--he asked me if I wanted to be teach sense memory class, the beginning sense memory class. I was 21. I was very young to be teaching, but I said yes. For the next three, four years, I taught first sense memory, then advanced sense memory, and then beginning acting.

PAUL OUTLAW: That's how I made my money, and one of my classmates who was also one of my students had an apartment on 15th Street and 8th Avenue, so Chelsea. But this is Chelsea before it was Chelsea, Chelsea. It was Chelsea when it was still kind of a rundown neighborhood on 15th Street. This is a fifth-floor walkup. I said, yes. I moved in. It was a really crummy apartment. The whole building was

PAUL OUTLAW: kind of scary. There were these two men, two old men, and I wonder how old they were. Let me think. I mean, my memory says that they were in their seventies , but they were like Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot. They hobbled around, they smelled really bad. Their apartment door, sometimes, would be open. You had to walk by that on the way to get up to my apartment, and these huge roaches

PAUL OUTLAW: were coming out, and a terrible smell. I mean, this was how I thought of Chelsea, not quite the Chelsea that we know from the '80s and '90s. But we were there for a half year and we were looking for a better place. Nick and I, that's my roommate, Nick found a place down near Chinatown. It was a building that only had two stories. Oh, actually three stories. The ground floor was a florist and the first floor

PAUL OUTLAW: was an entire apartment. The second floor was an entire apartment, so nice. The apartments were u-shaped around the stairwell, so very unusual. I mean, they were not like the projects where I grew up, but they also were not like other New York apartments. I've never actually seen an apartment like that before. We got this apartment and we lived there for, I lived there from 1980 to 1983. Then I moved to Berlin. And I had

PAUL OUTLAW: several different roommates. Nick, at one point, moved out and I had a couple other roommates. It was a sweet deal --until it wasn't, which I don't even know if I wanna get into that, but there's a whole violent thing that happened the year before I moved to Berlin. I gave parties there all the time, and my parties were wild. We'd go on the roof, which is right above my apartment, which we were not supposed to, but we did it anyway. There were all kinds of actors and artists running around

PAUL OUTLAW: and we kind of annoyed--I don't wanna say -- I guess "annoy" is the best word. Some of the neighbors in the neighborhood didn't like us, including our landlord, who had the florist shop. These were people who were attached somehow to the mafia because next door to the florist was a funeral parlor, and they did a lot of work for them. Whenever we had parties, you could feel them looking at my friends coming into the building and

PAUL OUTLAW: leaving the building and being kind of "Who the fuck are these people?" kind of thing. At this one party, my best friend, who is still my best friend, was on the roof and was throwing stuff off the roof, which, not a good idea. At first, maybe throwing flowers or throwing coins or throwing pieces of clothing. But at some point there was a Styrofoam cooler,

PAUL OUTLAW: empty. And this Styrofoam cooler doesn't weigh anything. They toss this off of the roof and it hits the car of one of those neighbors who have been looking askance all the time. The next thing you know, there's glass breaking, there's people coming up the stairs. I get smacked in the head by a two -by -four. I was tripping and drunk and I'm like, "What's going on here?" Boom. They hit me.

PAUL OUTLAW: We call the police, my friends are running out in the street. Half the party of people tripping the balls off. It's just a madhouse. I always say, I have always tied this knot to the fact that we were artists or that we were people of color, it was all mixed. I think there was a bit of homophobia in there, in terms of their aversion to us. But that was the last party

PAUL OUTLAW: I gave, and I love giving parties. A year later I moved to Berlin. The move was not connected to that. It just happened to be -- That was the last straw of that apartment, anyway.

JACK MACCARTHY: Just checking the time. How are you feeling? Do you need a break?

PAUL OUTLAW: I might need a break, but where are we? Where's our next step?

JACK MACCARTHY: You moved to Berlin, what it was like coming to Berlin, your life in Berlin is what we're moving into. I also want to make sure we touch on the bathhouse culture.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, God, there's so much. Let me tell you one story and then we'll break. Because it's also on your list, so I'll just cover this. We were gonna talk about

PAUL OUTLAW: Robert Conrad's ass and how that connects to when does a person know that they are gay or queer? When I was a little kid there was a TV show called The Wild, Wild West. It was a drama, but it was a spy drama. I think the main character,

PAUL OUTLAW: James West, was an early FBI kind of agent. But he was definitely an agent. Every episode was some dealing with some criminals or some conspiracies. He traveled in his own train car with his best friend, who was also his spy colleague, Artemus Gordon, who read very gay by the way. In later years, this particular character, Artemus,

PAUL OUTLAW: because he was very, he's kind of Orson Welles-ish--.But let's not get off on Artemus. The show was in reruns when I was a kid, but was also -- I think I might have seen the first run of it. My parents watched it. It was on CBS, I think. We watched it at night and I liked the show. Didn't think much about it. But sometime later, this is when I'm in my twenties or my thirties, it was in reruns.

PAUL OUTLAW: I think this is probably before, maybe before I went to Germany or after, I don't remember which. But anyway, I see the TV listing and it says The Wild, Wild West. The first thing I think about is, oh those pants, oh, those tight pants. Now the costumes that Robert Conrad wore, which he, by the way, had a hand in the design of were like Bolero jackets. They only went to the waist and then these super, super

PAUL OUTLAW: tight, tight blue pants that he always wore. He had a great ass. I remember when that thought popped into my head, I thought, wait a minute, how do you know what his ass looked like and why do you remember those pants? I did the math and I thought, well, when I was six or seven I must have been gay because it made an impression on that little boy enough that the grown man,

PAUL OUTLAW: that's the first thing. This was probably, actually probably around the dawn of the internet, so early '90s maybe. I go online and there'd be chat rooms and the people talking about those pants, people my age. So obviously there were a lot of little boys who, whether they knew it or not, were checking out this man's ass. Then I found out in these

PAUL OUTLAW: chat rooms and these bulletin boards, that there were all these spaces devoted to bondage and James West. Because not only did he wear those tight pants in many episodes, he would be shirtless and tied to a post and whipped by the villains. I'm thinking, what are they thinking? They were thinking something. I mean, Robert Conrad, there are rumors to this day about his sexuality. I've had friends who told me that he came on to them,

PAUL OUTLAW: but he was also married several times and had like ten kids. I think if you go to his Wikipedia page, there's nothing about him being queer. It's like, no, they didn't get into that. But he helped in the design of his costume, he also knew about the scripts and stuff. So this whole bondage and whipping stuff, he knew what was going on there. But that's why I can say when I said before that I was in deep denial for years, I really

PAUL OUTLAW: was because that little me was really into that man's ass, clearly. Well, why else would I remember it?

JACK MACCARTHY: Since we were just looking at a picture of him, before we move on to Berlin, will you tell me about your Uncle James?

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah, my Uncle James. Yes. My father's younger brother, I think.

PAUL OUTLAW: He was a performer. I don't know a lot about Uncle James and this has -- What it comes down to is people in their teens and twenties who have older uncles or cousins who could be really interesting people and maybe even similar to you or could give you help and advice, a lot of times in our culture,

PAUL OUTLAW: we don't really honor our elders that way, or if we do, it's elders who are not related to us, interestingly, who might be your mentor, but Uncle James traveled around the world performing with this contraption that he made. It was his one -man band, although, according to this article that I saw, but with a picture of him, it was called his Detroit Symphony Orchestra,

PAUL OUTLAW: but it was like hubcaps and found objects made into this thing you could wheel around. There's a photograph of him in the German version of National Geographic in 1980, where you see him standing next to this contraption and he would play it for money on the street. But I was told that he also traveled to Europe with that. But I never talked to Uncle James about his life,

PAUL OUTLAW: about his artistic life, about his traveling the world, about his love life. All things that may have been interesting to me, because I gather -- I don't think he ever married, but he was mostly involved with white women. He was a snappy dresser. When he was in his seventies, well, his eighties, he would wear a plaid suit with bell bottoms,

PAUL OUTLAW: matching shoes and a plaid hat, rings, bracelets. He wasn't queer, at least, I don't know him being queer, but he was a character. My mother would often say, "You get that from your Uncle James, your musical inclination or your performing stuff." But I also know that my father, his brother, wrote poetry. He wrote my mother lots of love poems. He had notebooks full of these things. He had a little typewriter,

PAUL OUTLAW: so he typed everything on the typewriter using carbon copies and then signed them with a big flourishy signature. When he was in the nursing home at the end of his life, some of his poems actually got published in these senior magazines from the nursing home. So, this kind of artistic bent, which I don't think of that much when I think of my family, has been there. I think several of my brothers actually

PAUL OUTLAW: did do plays at the Boys Club the same time that I was doing plays. There is somehow a literary and a musical tradition in the family. But it's a shame when I think back now that I didn't really use my uncle as a resource, but the same is true. I have nieces, grand nephews and nieces who are trans who do not contact me.

PAUL OUTLAW: I remember a couple of years ago, my older brother's grandson had announced that he was bisexual. And immediately, everyone said, talk to your Uncle Paul. We had one conversation, text message conversation, that was very monosyllabic and not very deep,

PAUL OUTLAW: and that was it. He never contacted me again. This is the one who is now trans. Same thing. I understand, I mean, I kind of get it, I'm twice his age, more than twice his age, and he probably thinks that there's nothing that I have to tell him, which is weird because I got a lot to tell him, especially since, even though I'm a lot older than him, I'm not set in my ways. If you were to be doing this

PAUL OUTLAW: interview with me ten years ago, I wouldn't look the way I look right now, as far as my hair color, my eyes, my jewelry, whatever, or how I even perceive myself. When I say that I'm constantly coming out, I've been coming out for the past five years as gender expansive, which I would not have been able to define ten years ago. So yeah,

PAUL OUTLAW: we started with my Uncle James but it went somewhere else. Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: When you say you're gender expansive, I feel like that means something different to each person. What does that mean for you?

PAUL OUTLAW: Well, what it means to me is that if I had been born in the nineties,

PAUL OUTLAW: if I had been born in 1990, I would be 32, 33, I believe, I don't think I'd be trans, but I would be non-binary. But because I grew up in a time where we didn't have these labels or this understanding that we do now -- The same way that I

PAUL OUTLAW: might have suppressed being gay for the longest time. I think my notions about my gender expression, I suppressed even longer, or I diverted. I look back on my work as a performer over the past, since the eighties. I noticed there's a recurring theme in a lot of my pieces where the characters I'm playing are in drag, or I'm playing

PAUL OUTLAW: a character who is -- Okay, once I did a play, which will lead to something you wanna talk about anyway, I played a character who was an identical -- Not an identical twin, a fraternal twin. This is a boy, and his fraternal twin sister had worked in this nightclub where the play was set, and she had died of an overdose. He wanted to find out what

PAUL OUTLAW: happened to her, who gave her the drugs, why she had this tragic fate. He started taking over for her. He was in drag, became part of the nightclub staff, and that was the first time I did something like that playing. I played a male character who was playing a female character. A lot of my roles I would play would be involving some kind of

PAUL OUTLAW: genderfuckery. But this was always on stage. It was always part of a role. Then of course, sometimes, like at Halloween or for parties, I would put on makeup and stuff. It was always in kind of a sanctioned space for that performance or party. In 2018, I guess, I did a project with Sara Lyons

PAUL OUTLAW: that was about the relationship between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. I remember auditioning for this, having to submit a video as to why I would be right for a project that was dealing with gender expansive people. I realized that that was me, that even though I had been putting it into

PAUL OUTLAW: my work or into parties, it was because I couldn't put it into my everyday life. But then I started looking at photographs of myself in Berlin in the early nineties, and I would see myself, at Pride, for example, and I'd be wearing a black leather jacket, a shirt and a tie, and then a green satin skirt. I would be half -boy, half -girl,

PAUL OUTLAW: or I'd see some other pictures of myself where I'd be wearing a vest and a tie, cut off shorts, combat boots, but then a fully made up face and super short hair, so it was always there for me, but I didn't have the words for it, and I also didn't know what it was. But working on this project, the I'm Very Into You project. It made me kind of confront

PAUL OUTLAW: the fact that this is something that I want to be in my life and not just in my work. For the past five years, living here in LA, I've been putting on makeup when I want to, not just for performance, and not also to make myself look younger, but to make myself look like myself. I love buying jewelry. I love wearing jewelry. If this was a walk -and -talk interview, I'd probably be

PAUL OUTLAW: wearing a skirt. It's different because I'm not in New York, I'm not in Berlin, I'm in a place where I can put all my stuff on, get in my car, drive to the next place I'm going, get out of my car. I'm not really dealing with this in the way I would be dealing with it in New York. Or for example, in Berlin last summer, I had some trepidation

PAUL OUTLAW: about really exploring this. I tended to explore this when I was in a group, as a Black, older, gender expansive person, I felt like I'm a target. As you all know, what's going on in the world right now, I am a target, so I would take Ubers or have my friends drive me, or I'd even feel fairly comfortable if I was on a bike. Although riding a bike with a skirt is hard to

PAUL OUTLAW: negotiate for me. I'm not used to it yet. But when I was in my teens and twenties, someone like Marsha P. Johnson was for me, not a role model, but kind of a cautionary tale. Like a lot of the people who were trans or trans adjacent, they would get arrested, they would go nuts and be put into mental hospitals, they'd commit suicide.

PAUL OUTLAW: And I was like, once again, not a conscious thought, but somewhere in the back of my mind, that's not what I want. In fact, when I'm really hard on myself, I say basically cowardice, I was chicken shit, I didn't want to go down that route of self-exploration because, somehow, deep inside I knew it would not lead to a good place. But I missed out on a lot, too. But then again, like I said, if I'd been born in 1990, things would be

PAUL OUTLAW: a lot different. We'd go home to my grandmother's house in the summer a lot when I was a kid, and I remember being in a car with my grandfather, my grandmother, a couple of my siblings, driving in this small town and seeing this person on the side of the road who was light -skinned, could have been someone who was white who was just like

PAUL OUTLAW: really sunburned, or could have been a mixed race person. There are a lot of people down there like that. Long hair, matted, though. Not long, long like this, but like long standing up and matted and walking by the side of the road, talking to themselves and walking very slowly and walking like this. And no one in the car noticed them or said anything. But I noticed this person walking by the road, and again, this is me at age nine,

PAUL OUTLAW: but my mind transforming or translating what I'm seeing, that this is a queer person. This is a really queer person. This is a trans person, though I didn't have the words for that. This is a crazy person. This is a homeless person. These are all the things that I didn't have words for. But the whole message that came across was: "Danger, danger, danger, danger." Or somehow I recognize myself in that

PAUL OUTLAW: and I reject it, but the fact that I remember this decades later is obviously significant. But this was someone--That's the only way they could get by in life, talking to themselves, walking down the street, and yeah. My mind was like, "Nope, no, no, no, no." But I'm at this point now, as an elder, where I'm like,

PAUL OUTLAW: "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes." I'm still a work -in -progress as far as that's concerned. I don't know in five years what I'll be doing. I just jumped over there from a different question .

JACK MACCARTHY: I asked you what being gender expansive means to you.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, then I didn't.

JACK MACCARTHY: I think, I think you were right, right, right where I was asking.

JACK MACCARTHY: We could either get into getting to Berlin, or we could talk about bathhouses.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, gosh. Okay, on the subject of bathhouses, you had said earlier that you were looking for more kink people. I mean, how in-depth did these interviews get on the subject of sex?

JACK MACCARTHY: That's up to interviewee .

PAUL OUTLAW: Let's see what happens. All right, so when I moved back to New York after being at Harvard, and I was at NYU, so we're talking about the years between 1976 and 1983, because '83 is when I went to Berlin. If you take Stonewall as 1969, right?

PAUL OUTLAW: And 1976, seven years later, we are in the middle of gay liberation, this first wave, not the first wave, but this particular wave of gay liberation. New Yorkers have got a lot of bathhouses. I lived on the Lower East Side, as I mentioned. There was the Club bathhouse, which was on the corner of 1st Avenue and 1st Street, which is from my parents' house, five -minute walk,

PAUL OUTLAW: ten-minute walk. Then the St. Mark's bathhouse, which was on St. Mark's, near the corner of 3rd Avenue, which is also very close. Then there were the uptown ones that I didn't really know about. Mount Morris, I think, Everard, Continental Baths. That stuff, not my scene. I don't know anything about that. But I know about the Club and I know about the St. Mark's Baths, and the Club bathhouse was my bathhouse.

PAUL OUTLAW: I mean, I'm smiling, I think , because I look back, I loved that place. It became, later, Lucky Cheng's, I think, drag queens, Chinese food, and I don't know what it is now. I think it's gentrified out of existence, but the building's still there.

PAUL OUTLAW: At Harvard, I had moved in with Arthur, who I was in love with, but my original roommate was a Black guy named Martin, who was from Brooklyn. We became really good friends, even though I abandoned him to move in with Arthur. In fact, we became kind of off -and -on lovers for a decade or so. But he was my age, maybe a little older than me, but he was

PAUL OUTLAW: a lot more worldly than I was. He introduced me to the Club Baths. I went with him and I blew his mind because... I was probably the definition of a twink at that time. You have to understand that. I mean, I'm six feet tall, and I was six feet tall then, except like now I'm six feet tall and I weigh 175 pounds. Then I was six feet tall and I weighed 125 pounds,

PAUL OUTLAW: so super skinny. I mean, I guess you can find photographs of the interior of this, which you should show -- Because I wanted to describe it, and I can't. I just can describe the feeling that -- My culture is not really supportive of nudity.

PAUL OUTLAW: We don't walk around naked. We don't have that kind of comfortableness with the body. Also because of the religious part of my upbringing, we don't talk about sex. My father and I never had a conversation about sex. So I'm in this room, this space where all of these men are naked or wearing just a towel. That,

PAUL OUTLAW: in itself, is totally erotic to me. Just like, wow, this idea of being in a steam room or being in a place that's really well heated so that you feel the air on your skin, you're seeing other bodies. To this day, that is a really positive trigger for me, nudity. The bathhouse is set up where there's an area with lots of couches and comfortable seats,

PAUL OUTLAW: and fairly well lit, people talking. Then you go further into the space, and then there's labyrinths and little rooms, where there's group sex or just one-on-one stuff. But I remember being there with Martin, might have been the first time I was there, and him telling me afterwards that I blew his mind because he watched me have sex with five people at the same time.

PAUL OUTLAW: Every one of my openings was was occupied. I can remember that to this day, that was probably the first time I was ever in a bathhouse, how much I loved that kind of complete availability of myself and of men. I think there was one behind me, one down in front of me on his knees, one kissing me,

PAUL OUTLAW: couple touching me. Just heaven, bliss. The St. Mark's Baths. I don't remember it. I mean, I know where it is, or it was, I know that I went there from time to time. I don't even know why, maybe because I just wanted to see what the other place was like. But it was the Club that was my place. And this was --

PAUL OUTLAW: Because also, the thing was between '76 and '83, this is between Harvard and Berlin, the NYU years and the post -NYU years, I didn't really have boyfriends. I mean, the guy who wanted to keep me was one. I had flings. I had affairs and I had lots of unrequited love, people that I would really fall madly in love with, but it didn't work out for whatever reason. The bathhouse was a

PAUL OUTLAW: place where I really could explore sex, my sexuality. At that time, I was always the kind of person who would -- I could create a whole love story in three minutes. Even these bathhouse experiences were super romantic to me. In my journal, I have this whole section about this one night where there was a guy I saw in one of the darkest places there, but his

PAUL OUTLAW: body and his profile reminded me of one of my students, which is weird. But anyway, he reminded me of my student, Tony, and I created this whole poetic love story around this hunt -and -find -and -have -sex -in -the -corner. It was this magical thing. It was literally maybe an hour of my life, but it was a whole book. The bathhouse was good for that, you know,

PAUL OUTLAW: for my way of thinking of making a whole production out of just a trick. Yeah. That was my first experience of bathhouses, which continued into when I went to Berlin and being in Europe and beyond. I mean, bathhouse is not really, at all, a part of my life now, for a lot of reasons, but it was a really

PAUL OUTLAW: big part of my life back then.

JACK MACCARTHY: So tell me how you got to Berlin.

PAUL OUTLAW: How I got to Berlin, it's very simple. One, around 1983, this is a couple years after I got out of school. I'm living in Chinatown, but hanging out

PAUL OUTLAW: in the East Village and several guys that I was dating were European. There was a British guy I was dating, he was more like a fuck buddy from The Bar. The Bar on 2nd Avenue and 4th Street. I met him there. He was British. We'd hang out, great time. Then there were two German guys I was dating who were, like, I think studying at NYU on Fulbrights. One of them,

PAUL OUTLAW: the second one, invited me to come back with him to Berlin when his fellowship was over to start a theater company. We had met through NYU theater, through the Experimental Theater Wing. Now, at that same time, I had worked with a director, Anne Bogart, who had been to Berlin and had taught as a guest lecturer at the theater school there. While she was in Berlin, she had

PAUL OUTLAW: discovered this nightclub called Chez Romy Haag, which was this little hole -in -the -wall cabaret with a super tiny stage, and Romy Haag was a trans woman and had been David Bowie's girlfriend, I guess in the late '70a. Anne was kind of obsessed with the space, so she created this theater project

PAUL OUTLAW: that was kind of the East Village version that was a jump -off point of this bar. I had seen Anne's work a year before, and I'd been following her work. She was teaching at NYU and was doing really nice, interesting experimental theater productions, site -specific kind of work with some, with friends of mine. They knew me and basically introduced me to Anne and said, "We should work with him." So she cast me in this project

PAUL OUTLAW: that was, like I said, Berlin -inspired. There was also an actor who had been one of her students in Berlin who came over and was involved in the development of the project, so I had that inspiration. I had Andreas, the boy that I later was dating, all kind of pointing me in that direction. This was also in the first or second year of Reagan's term,

PAUL OUTLAW: it wasn't a conscious thought, but I felt that there was nothing for me in this country as a queer Black artist. I didn't think it consciously, but when I got the offer, "Come to Berlin with me and start a theater company and I'll pay your ticket." I thought, okay, I'll go for a couple of months and see what it's like. But I think I knew somewhere in my soul that I was not gonna be coming

PAUL OUTLAW: back anytime soon. So I did go, this is the fall of '83. I went with Andreas to Berlin and we did one or two shows together. One was a show I'd already written and co-directed in New York. It was a one -woman show. I brought the actress over. Then he and I did a show together, but we were very incompatible as collaborators. Also, we had

PAUL OUTLAW: a really bad love story because he had a boyfriend, you know, was cheating on his boyfriend with me. His boyfriend came to New York to nip it in the bud after he'd already bought my plane ticket, so our little summer romance was cut short. By the time I got on the plane, I couldn't stand the sight of him.

We lived together for three months in Berlin. But after those three months, I was like, "I'm not going back. All I've been doing is working my ass off to get these two projects up.

PAUL OUTLAW: I haven't seen Berlin really, or Germany. I haven't seen Europe." So the three months got extended to ten years . In the ten years, I went back three times, and each time I went back I was like, "I don't wanna be here." The first time, I really was overwhelmed by how New Yorkers are

PAUL OUTLAW: very competitive with each other in terms of friendships. Like, if you go out to a bar, everyone -- I always had a feeling people were talking super-fast and trying to kind of one-up each other. I also felt like the way people dealt with money was completely different in Europe. I mean, I don't know how it is now, but let's say you go out to dinner with five people, right? And you're in a restaurant

PAUL OUTLAW: and one person will have an appetizer, main course, dessert and a beverage. And then there's one or two people who will say, "I'll just have a salad." Your first thought might be, oh, because they're super weight -conscious or whatever, but it's because that's all they can afford, and people have a lot of shame around that kind of money, at least they did back in the day. Whereas in Germany you go out to a restaurant or bar and there's gonna be someone who's got money and and

PAUL OUTLAW: most people don't, and they're like, "I invite you, have whatever you want." The people felt so much more open, kind, generous. Not to say -- I mean, I loved my friends in New York and I loved living in New York, but this American way of life, this mentality, things you take for granted being away for a year, it was like, "Wow, I don't wanna be here." Not to mention the whole thing about being a Black

PAUL OUTLAW: person in Europe and a Black person here. I mean, I said I had no boyfriends. I suddenly had lots of boyfriends or lots of options for boyfriends when I was over there, and a lot of it was a mixture of being exoticized, which is very problematic. But at the same time, it's just, you know, you're appreciated. That part of being fetishized is an appreciation. So after a year

PAUL OUTLAW: when I came home, I went straight back to Europe and I didn't come back to the States for another three years. And that trip was with my then boyfriend who had never been to the States before. We came back and spent some time with my family in New York, but we also then went to the Grand Canyon, and to these national parks out here, which I'd never done before, so that was really amazing to me, that trip. But the same thing, three weeks, I think it was.

PAUL OUTLAW: That's enough. Went back. Another three years passed, I came again with my then boyfriend who is now my husband, showed him my family, showed him parts of the States, went to Florida. And yeah, I just felt like, you know, America did not feel like a place I wanted to have as my home. It wasn't until

PAUL OUTLAW: a full ten years after moving there that I felt a need to leave Germany. And that was a combination of things: the Wall came down in 1989 and literally, overnight, it became a different place. Growing up in New York, I had my armor in an urban environment. I knew where to go, where not to go,

PAUL OUTLAW: how to behave in certain places. I had this trick I would do when I lived in New York where if I was out at three in the morning or four in the morning in a dangerous place, I would start singing at the top of my lungs, and I'd act like a crazy person, kind of like, "Don't fuck with me," and it worked. In Berlin, I never really had that the first six years I lived there. I felt safe everywhere.

PAUL OUTLAW: I never felt a sense of danger. But as soon as the Wall came down, I'd be in parts of East Berlin that I'd never been before, because I hadn't been open to me, and I was uncomfortable. I had little old ladies yelling at me on the street. I had friends who were not even people of color, but who had a hairstyle that looked gay, get beat up.

PAUL OUTLAW: It bled over into the West because there was no longer West or an East, it was all one thing. I mean, I got, even in what was formerly West Berlin, feelings of like, if I were to see a group of young white men coming towards me, I'd walk in the other direction. Yeah. Suddenly, the party ended, so to speak. Or the idea of Berlin as the fantasy retreat

PAUL OUTLAW: for queer people and for weirdos became a little bit more wishy-washy. Even though, I mean, still to this day, Berlin is a destination. And we're talking -- I left Berlin -- By the way, this is my anniversary year. Forty years ago I moved to Berlin. Thirty years ago I moved back. And

PAUL OUTLAW: I still officially live in Berlin. I live in Berlin several months of the year. But I haven't lived in Berlin full-time for 30 years, which is a really weird thought because my life in Berlin is in some ways as active and as vital as my life here in L.A. Definitely a lot more vital than my life in New York. I barely get to New York these days, although I want to

PAUL OUTLAW: change that. But I mean, Berlin is still home. Where was I gonna go with this? I don't know.

JACK MACCARTHY: The timing of when you were there is

JACK MACCARTHY: full of obviously very potent moments in history. You're going there in 1983, as the AIDS crisis is beginning, and you're there for the fall of the Berlin Wall. I'm curious how your artistic life process.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, I'll tell ya.

JACK MACCARTHY: Tell me.

PAUL OUTLAW: Alright. I went there four years after graduating from college as a "BFA acting person." That's how I arrived in Berlin. When I left Berlin ten years later, after my ten years of full-time, I had been a minor rockstar in Berlin. I had been a movie actor.

PAUL OUTLAW: I'd been a teacher. I taught for the first four years as an acting coach. I walked into Berlin as an actor, and I left Berlin as a multidisciplinary artist that I am now. In fact, if people say "What are you?" I would never say I was an actor, even though that's part of what I am. But when I got to Berlin, I was very much an actor. But I had this great fortune that

PAUL OUTLAW: I came across a group of actors who had their own independent company where they did a lot of training and I started training them once a week. I created my own system that was a combination of Stanislavski Method that I'd been teaching already, plus the Viewpoints work that I had been doing with Anne Bogart. I created a kind of a Method -based, movement -oriented way of acting.

PAUL OUTLAW: It was my own system. I did that for a couple of years. I directed also, which I had not really done in New York. But one of the actors in this company was a musician. He played the guitar and the clarinet. He was one of the guitarists of this guitar-based post-punk band called Die Haut, which translates to the skin. They were kind of a

PAUL OUTLAW: legendary cult band already at that time, and they worked with guest singers a lot. They worked with Nick Cave, they worked with Lydia Lunch, they worked with Debbie Harry. They worked with basically a lot of different singers over their career. I worked with them from, I guess, '84 to '86. I was working with them as guest singer and guest lyricist. Because a lot of the tracks were instrumental,

PAUL OUTLAW: so the singers would come up with their own lyrics, and I'd never done it before. It was an incredible experience for me. When I was asked to do it, I said, "No, I can't do that. I've never done it." But my friend was convinced I could do it. I would go into the rehearsal room and there'd be three guitar players, a bass player and a drummer. They'd start playing their tracks that already existed, or they would jam a couple of new stuff, and I would just improvise

PAUL OUTLAW: to come up with my lyrics. The way I improvise was sometimes I would just stand there and look around the room and start like, riffing, almost like scatting, like, "Ooh, Italian lamp, red face boys, white Eames chair, wooden floor." Just do that. Or I would take really well known, like, Motown tracks or even, like, Cole Porter and improvise over this

PAUL OUTLAW: intense guitar stuff. We recorded everything. Then I would go home and I would see, "Did I come up with anything useful?" I would pull that out and I wrote songs that way. That's the first way I started writing songs. I also said that this guy was a clarinet player, he and I decided to form a separate band. We formed a swing band that was clarinet, guitar,

PAUL OUTLAW: bass piano, saxophone, and two singers. Me and this American woman, Janet, who had been a friend of mine in New York, who I brought over with the one-woman show. We were doing this kind of swing cover band, at the same time as I'm doing this avant-garde guitar band. That was kind of my entree into music that wasn't theater. For a huge chunk of my time

PAUL OUTLAW: in Berlin, I was doing a lot of music. I also met some people later who were into electronic music who taught me how to do programming. I started writing my own songs and creating my own arrangements for them electronically. I had basically kept the theater and the music separate. There was even a period where I was so disillusioned with theater that I didn't do any new theater for about six years.

PAUL OUTLAW: The only thing I ever did was shows that existed already that were going on tour. But I didn't do any new stuff. But I was doing a lot of new stuff with bands. I think I was a lead vocalist for three bands, several small projects. I was also a backing vocalist for some stuff too. I found it really fulfilling, more fulfilling than theater, at that time. I was really frustrated with theater, with having to do it all myself,

PAUL OUTLAW: with also being in a country where I was trying to create a bilingual theater, but a lot of my references and what I was talking about as an African American often didn't translate to my audience there. Music was just a joy, being on stage, this immediate kind of connection to an audience. But what I found out, of course, a lot later, this was now after I moved to LA, so 20 years later,

PAUL OUTLAW: was that my interest a lot with theater is synthesizing music and theater. It's not the musicals like Mame and Kismet and Finian's Rainbow that I grew up on, it's theater with music or music theater, but not musical theater. I find myself the past 20 years, there's always this thing of, "What do you do?" I say, "I do music theater." "Musical theater?" "No, music theater." They say,

PAUL OUTLAW: "Oh, what are you?" "I'm a performing artist." "Performance artist?" "No, performing artist." These little nuances in terms of terminology. But yeah, I mean, Berlin, with the cliche about Berlin is that it's a place of reinvention, but it's true. And it's certainly true for me, of finding out all the things I can do

or that I have

PAUL OUTLAW: talent for that I didn't really think about when I was in New York before that.

JACK MACCARTHY: At what point in all this did you articulate -- Well, I've written down your mission statement, but I'd like to hear you say it.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh, okay. That mission statement.

JACK MACCARTHY: Your mission. Yeah. Your artistic mission statement.

PAUL OUTLAW: Oh. Let me see if I can quote myself: "The central themes of his artistic practice are

PAUL OUTLAW: the constructs of race and sexual identity and how violence has haunted them throughout Euro-American history." I think that's what it is.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah.

PAUL OUTLAW: That formulation didn't actually happen until probably the late 20th century or the early 21st century. I didn't think about that at the time, but it has always been

PAUL OUTLAW: what my work has been about, whether I knew it or not. But I think I formulated that because of a specific piece I did in 2003 that I was performing until 2008 all over the place. A play called Berserker, and Berserker was the second solo piece I'd created. It took the premise of: "What do Jeffrey Dahmer

PAUL OUTLAW: and Nat Turner have in common?" Sit with that for a second. The answer to that question is: This is what they have in common. The piece was about violence. Nat Turner led a revolt, slave revolt, over 50 people were killed in one night. And Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer

PAUL OUTLAW: who killed like 20 men, mostly of color, over a ten year period, in the '80s and '90s. The idea of putting them together offended, and offends, a lot of people because Nat Turner was a hero, Jeffrey Dahmer was a sick villain, whatever. But this intersection of it was, I was the intersection of that. I would've been one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, I'm pretty sure, if I had been in Milwaukee

PAUL OUTLAW: at that time period, because he was totally my type. Not always, but there are some pictures of him where I go mm-hmm . I would've been in that refrigerator. And the Nat Turner part of it is, the idea always for me was, if I had been around in the 1850s as an enslaved person, how would I have survived? Would I have survived? I feel like when you read

PAUL OUTLAW: The Confessions of Nat Turner, which it's dicey as to if those are actually his words or if there's a white person who took them down, rewrote them. But there's certainly a strain of, he was a Messiah -type figure, a visionary person. He heard voices, he heard God talking to him.

PAUL OUTLAW: And part of me goes, he went crazy. His mind snapped and he went and said, I can't take this anymore, and he led this revolt because it is an untenable situation to be enslaved and to be conscious. How do you survive that? Do you survive by blending in, taking it and just getting through your 70, 60, 50 years of life?

PAUL OUTLAW: But there's so many slave revolts that we have not even heard about because they have been kept under wraps by mainstream history. But people did lose it. I talk about that a lot in that piece, violence as the solution. As far as Jeffrey Dahmer is concerned, yes, he was crazy. Yes, he was a villain. Yes, he was a horrible person. But I believe a lot of that

PAUL OUTLAW: came from the fact that he could not process his sexuality or his attraction to men of color any other way, but to kill them, to possess them, to eat them. So I'm sort of this nexus, this kind of meeting point of those two things. It's something that when I wrote it, I knew at the time that it was challenging. It was challenging to me, and it still is. I still have a hard time articulating

PAUL OUTLAW: the impulse behind it. In fact, the original impulse was I was working with a dance company at the time here in L.A, and every so often, the choreographer who led this company, Rosanna Gamson, she had funding that was left over, so she would produce a new works evening. She'd use the money from the grant to invite members of the company to do short theater works. One of the

PAUL OUTLAW: principles behind this evening was, do something that takes a major risk and takes you outside your comfort zone. I wanted to do a piece about vampires, because I have an Anne Rice obsession, among other ones. I took Jeffrey Dahmer, Nat Turner and Dracula, the historical Dracula, and I made it into a piece about blood thirst

PAUL OUTLAW: in this different forms. There's a 20 -minute version that actually had a whole Dracula thing in it. When I decided to develop the piece into a full-length piece, the Dracula stuff kind of went by the wayside. It became a little too extraneous and not necessary. I took that vampire theme and put that in another project later. But Berserker was what led me to the articulation of my

PAUL OUTLAW: mission statement, and it's true, basically, whenever you're talking about the history of people of color in this country, violence is a part of it. When you talk about the history of queer people, violence is always a part of it. And I'm probably gonna rewrite my mission statement slightly after this interview. I've been thinking about it for the past week.

PAUL OUTLAW: It's not just lynching, and when I say lynching, I'm covering all of the lynching in Jim Crow as well as Matthew Shepherd and all the trans people who are killed today. But also, I say violence, I mean psychic violence as well, which we often tend to overlook the mental health of people, and the psychic violence is actually more extreme than the physical violence, even though people are

PAUL OUTLAW: killed on a regular basis or beaten up and attacked, the emotional and mental violence that we undergo 24/7 is also part of the themes of my work as well.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. We don't have a ton more time.

PAUL OUTLAW: What did you say?

JACK MACCARTHY: We don't have a ton more time.

PAUL OUTLAW: Okay. Yeah.

PAUL OUTLAW: I know you're on the clock. You only get paid by the hour.

JACK MACCARTHY: No. I mean, I'm happy to go however long we go. I don't wanna wear you out.

PAUL OUTLAW: Nobody can wear me out .

JACK MACCARTHY: But will you tell me how you met Ray?

PAUL OUTLAW: Sure. This is a love story for the ages. I had been

PAUL OUTLAW: in Germany, Berlin, for almost a year, and Martin, who is the guitarist, clarinetist, actor, really good friend of mine, rest in peace, he had studied with an African American Method teacher who had basically set down roots in Europe, and that was his introduction to the Method. Every summer this guy, Walter Lott, would do

PAUL OUTLAW: a summer workshop in Greece where they were the whole summer, there'd be three sessions I think. And these German, Swiss and Austrian actors would go and train with him on this idyllic island on -- This was Zakynthos at that time. And so Martin was convinced that I needed to work with Walter to kind of refresh my Method bonafides. I was skeptical, but he said, "Come to Cologne,

PAUL OUTLAW: Walter is teaching at some school there, an independent acting studio. You should meet him and maybe he'll hire you as his assistant for the summer course and then you can be his assistant as well as take classes with him." I thought, okay, so I went to Cologne to introduce myself to Walter. We went to the school where he was teaching and the students there said, "You're gonna spend

PAUL OUTLAW: the weekend, a couple of nights in Cologne." They said, "One of our alumni lives is not far from here. And he said, oh, he said you can stay in his apartment because he's actually gonna be in Hamburg or somewhere over the weekend." We go to the house to get the key to the apartment, and I walk into the kitchen, and the person who let me in is Ray, who is now my husband. He basically said, "This is the

PAUL OUTLAW: apartment. This is where the bathroom is, this is where you're gonna sleep. Here's the key. See you later." And I didn't see him again for three years, but I remember thinking, this is a handsome tall man and he's got his shit together. Which I guess was important to me, that perception. I know that his perception of me was just "cute, skinny

PAUL OUTLAW: African American, probably only dates dancers." Then we didn't see each other for three years. Now, in the three years intervening, one of his best friends from that acting school, she moved to Berlin. I had met her -- I did end up going to Greece and she and I became really close friends and we were roommates. She would talk about him a lot during those three years. But he never came to visit and I never saw him again.

PAUL OUTLAW: But three years later, he was doing a self-produced play in Berlin. I took my boyfriend to see this play. Because, for some reason, he'd made an impression on me, stayed in my mind. I went to see the play and it was a very dramatic evening because it was on May 1st, and every May 1st in Berlin, at that time, were riots in the streets of Kreuzberg where I lived, where the police would come out in force,

PAUL OUTLAW: the people'd be in the streets, burning shit down, going crazy. This particular May 1st was a very intense one where they burnt down a supermarket, which is now a mosque. The police were all over the place, days of warfare in the streets. So he's performing a play that's a post-apocalyptic play, where outside you're hearing explosions in real life and fire everywhere. After the show,

PAUL OUTLAW: I introduced him to my boyfriend. He remembered me. He said, "I'm moving to Berlin." A couple weeks later he moved to Berlin and then another three years pass. In these three years, we only saw each other through our overlapping circle of friends and also through the queer scene. He did not like me during that time. He thought I was arrogant, a little bit of a bitch. I wasn't crazy about him because some of his

PAUL OUTLAW: friends that he hung out with I thought were the biggest flakes. I thought, "What is he doing with them?" My whole initial impression of him being this serious person was like, "No, what's going on?" Plus he had a mohawk, huge mohawk, no eyebrows. I mean he was the same thing with reinvention. He was doing that too. But six years after our first meeting, I was sitting in a bar one afternoon by myself

PAUL OUTLAW: (and I don't even know why I was in this bar because it was not my favorite bar), but a voice in my head said, "Go to the door of the bar." I go to the door of the bar and I look across the street and there he is. He's looking like he doesn't know where he is. I yelled at him, I said, "Ray, come over here." So Ray comes over to the bar, we sit in the bar, look at each other,

PAUL OUTLAW: drink tea or juice, and something's very different. He's really looking at me the way you look at someone you want to eat up. I'm talking to him, and without extending this story, let's just say a month later we were in bed together and we have been together ever since. This is 1990. Ever since, with a break. We broke up for a year and a half. When he moved to San Diego to study massage therapy,

PAUL OUTLAW: I stayed in Berlin. But then, when I moved back to the States, we got back together in the fall of '93, which would mean that this is also 30 years since we got back together. Our actual 33rd anniversary was a week or two ago. Yeah, that's the short version .

JACK MACCARTHY: Then you had a series of commitment

JACK MACCARTHY: ceremonies in different --

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah, so we were long distance. I was in New York from '93 to '98. Back in New York, not happy. All of my creative work was happening outside New York, in New England, different places. I'd be doing college tours where I'd be talking about Berlin, about my work in Berlin. Ray was in San Diego studying and teaching massage therapy.

PAUL OUTLAW: In '97 we said we want to get.. Commitment ceremonies, we want to celebrate our relationship. He was in San Diego and had a whole community there. I'm from New York, so I had my small --what was left of my community there. Then in Germany, we had a community, so we did four ceremonies in four weeks. We did a formal event for like 70 people in San Diego. We did a--

PAUL OUTLAW: just the two of us at dawn at the top of a volcano on Maui on my birthday. Then we did New York, a champagne cocktail hour for twelve, 15 people. Then we went to Germany, to Cologne. His parents catered a luncheon for 40 or 50 people. That was all in the course of one month.

PAUL OUTLAW: Then a year after that, we found this house here in LA and moved in together. We've been living here--this is another anniversary, this is 25 years. In September it'll be 25 years since we moved into this house. Giving a big party. Yeah, 25 years ago. I just lost my train of thought again. Oh yeah. Then in 2013,

PAUL OUTLAW: we got married-married. We had this ring since '97, these rings, but in 2013 we went down to Norwalk, the county clerk, which is weird. It's like getting married at the DMV. Even though we both had nice seersucker suits and we had witnesses, our four commitment ceremonies were much more what we

PAUL OUTLAW: consider our real weddings. Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: Do you want to touch on the Holy Trinity?

PAUL OUTLAW: The Holy Trinity? Diana, Prince and Bowie. I should talk about them because I already talked about Diana. But they're my Holy Trinity

PAUL OUTLAW: because they kind of inform my sensibility as a queer man or as a queer person, but also as an artist. Because Bowie and Prince both really played around with gender appearance, or at least, I mean, by the same reason when I said if I hadn't been born in 1990, I would be different, I think if they

PAUL OUTLAW: had both been born in 1990, they would've been different. Because they both kind of toyed with gender, but in the final analysis came out on the side of being straight, or at least their language for that. I mean, as I said, if they'd been born later, they might have had a different language. Plus there's the whole closet thing. I mean, you can talk to many people who knew Prince, were around Prince, and you'll hear some stories where people said, oh yeah, he did

PAUL OUTLAW: sleep with guys. But to the public, he never ever admitted it, to the point where I can't even say if it's true or not. In fact, my heteronormative mind tends to think he didn't, because it's easy for me to think that. With Bowie, we know that he did. But with Bowie, that's also tied into drugs, a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol. Then at a certain point, when he started changing

PAUL OUTLAW: his image and becoming the '80s blond Bowie that I hate so much, that's the heterosexual Bowie. But as far as what they did as performers and as artists, I will never be able to deny how much it liberated me, even if I didn't know at the time, because I was into Bowie when I was 14, 15. Before I even let myself be aware of my queerness,

PAUL OUTLAW: I was totally into his queerness. It was a gift to me. And Prince, you know, I was out and about when Prince was out there, and still he was more outrageous in his early days than I was until recently. Seeing him live back in the day, wearing garter belts

PAUL OUTLAW: and furs and bare -chested and high heels--the high heels being because he was only 5'3", so he needed to have those heels. But you know what I mean. They just informed my sense of drama, my sense of freedom, this kind of bold exploration. And with Diana, that's just,

PAUL OUTLAW: you know, gay boys need their divas, . She was not only a diva, she was trailblazing. I mean, I was watching her on television when I was a child, not knowing how revolutionary that was, for three young Black women from the ghetto to be giving you glamour on an international stage

PAUL OUTLAW: and international cameras on them. I just loved it. I loved it. I mean, it's funny, I've seen Diana Ross perform live probably ten or so times. I saw Bowie only once live, and I seen Prince about 50 times. But the one time I saw Bowie was in Boston, in 1975, I think.

PAUL OUTLAW: It was one of the most amazing experiences. It was the Music Hall, I was sitting in the front row of the balcony with my girlfriend at the time, and Bowie comes out wearing this big white flowing shirt, jodhpurs and boots with a riding crop. It was the Young Americans tour, and his backup singers included Luther Vandross. So Luther Vandross is singing backup for Bowie, then there was this woman, Black woman, Ava Cherry, and she was

PAUL OUTLAW: wearing a jumpsuit -- to this day, I love jumpsuits -- and she had bleached blonde hair. An amazing concert. I've seen recordings of Bowie live, but being literally there, I will never forget that, that one time seeing him. Yeah. That's just my trinity of musicians, performers, icons.

PAUL OUTLAW: I mean, the funny thing is that these two men, basically straight guys playing with gender, and then you have Diana Ross, who is like the most heterosexual woman ever, married three times or twice, but mother of five or six kids, queen of femininity. It's like if you mush them all together, it's me .

JACK MACCARTHY: As tends to happen, we haven't gotten to everything that was on my list. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to?

PAUL OUTLAW: We talked about James West and his pants . We talked about Berlin, we talked about my gender

PAUL OUTLAW: expansiveness as it developed over the years. We talked about my husband, we talked about Germany, we talked about my Uncle James. We covered a lot. We talked about LA, New York, Berlin. Well, I don't know how you'll use this, but I'll just say what's sometimes confusing or perplexing or,

PAUL OUTLAW: I don't even know what the word is, is the fact that I'm still alive because I belong to the generation that is considered the generation that was wiped out because of AIDS. But I'm still here. I mean, it's funny, among a lot of people who know me, that's one of the things that makes me an elder is that I am still here. But at the same time, it's a confusing thing because most of the elders of my generation

PAUL OUTLAW: supposedly aren't here. I'm not really fitting into my generation in that sense. But I guess I'm a lucky person and also that move to Berlin probably had a lot of effect on the reasons why I'm still here,

PAUL OUTLAW: when I left, when I came back.

JACK MACCARTHY: How was the AIDS crisis playing out in Berlin?

PAUL OUTLAW: Same as here, just a few years later. Everything is just a few years later. It wasn't until the digital age came that everything caught up. So in 1980,

PAUL OUTLAW: I think it's '83, '84 was when things started exploding here, it was more like '86, '87 there. When I left New York, within a year, I was hearing about friends who were sick. In Berlin around '85, I mean, it wasn't like I escaped it, it was around, I had friends who died in Berlin,

PAUL OUTLAW: friends who got ill. My brother died of AIDS. He wasn't queer though. He had been formerly a heroin addict and was clean, had been clean for seven or eight years when he died. But that may be simply because his immune system was compromised through the addiction.

PAUL OUTLAW: There was a lot of shame around his health because we didn't even know that he was HIV -positive until a couple of months before he died. And he also died within--I mean, my little brother got married on March 26th, 1993, and my brother Joe died on March 29th, and he was at the wedding and there are pictures, so he was not like --

PAUL OUTLAW: He looks frail, but he always looked frail. He looked frail when he was a teenager. He was 6'4" and super skinny. So the pictures of him at the wedding, you could say, oh, he looked sick, but it wasn't like he was sick in bed, but he literally died of pneumonia three days later. It has always been in my consciousness or in my community, but for some reason it just passed me by,

PAUL OUTLAW: especially the American part of it, because it feels like it was a bigger thing here than it was anywhere else in the world, which I know it wasn't, but it feels like it. But I think I was looking at the list of questions that you had and the final ones will probably cover some stuff that we didn't cover, the ones that you ask everybody.

JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. So final four, what would you tell your teenage self?

PAUL OUTLAW: My teenage self. I would tell my teenage self: "Don't go to drama school. Don't go to drama school and incur student loan debt. You are young, you are cute, you are talented. Even though you are queer and not mainstream, it's smarter for you to go out to New York where you are now anyway, find an agent and start working right away.

PAUL OUTLAW: Just start doing plays and movies and learn the craft that way and don't waste that time." That's one thing I would tell him. Or I would say to my younger self, my teenage self: "Get on a plane and go to Paris now. Just go to Europe. Go to Europe now and never come back." That would be the other thing I'd tell my younger self. Then the third thing I would tell my younger self is: "When you're 40,

PAUL OUTLAW: you're going to be the person that you wanted to be when you were 20, so don't worry about it."

JACK MACCARTHY: Do you believe in the notion of a queer superpower? And if so, what is it?

PAUL OUTLAW: I will answer that in an oblique way. The project that I'm working on right now, sort of my main project that should have

PAUL OUTLAW: its premiere next year, is based on Kafka's Metamorphosis. In it, a conservative white woman, heterosexual, conservative white woman wakes up in the body of a Black man. It's about the transformation that this woman undergoes and then

PAUL OUTLAW: also the transformation that this man undergoes, who's hearing this woman's voice in his head. The idea right now, I'm in the middle of expanding and writing the script, is that at the end they reconcile with each other and they become a third being, which is in fact a superhero who flies away -- how are we gonna do that on stage we'll see -- but who also

PAUL OUTLAW: burns down certain institutions with laser beam eyes. That's not really the answer to the question, but I am thinking about queer superhero-ness right now, the idea that a gender expansive or non-binary being

PAUL OUTLAW: is itself a superpower is sort of what I'm exploring. The idea that a trans, and not even a trans traditional, because this being is neither male nor female, it's this other thing, is in fact an Afrofuturist god-like figure. Maybe the answer to your question is that queerness itself is a superpower.

JACK MACCARTHY: I love that. Why is it important to you to tell your story?

PAUL OUTLAW: I was gonna get up and get something out of that thing, but I think since you'll probably cut to an image, I'll say it's important to me ... When I was first approached to do this, my first reaction was, no, I don't want to do it because it's like a lifetime achievement award. My life isn't over. I didn't want to do it. But then I realized

PAUL OUTLAW: that when I was 18, I think, or 18 or 19, there was a documentary film called Word Is Out that was produced by this Bay Area collective, I think, the Mariposa collective. And this was a documentary with interviews of all of these queer men and women including Harry Hay, who was one of them. But all from all walks of life. I saw this movie

PAUL OUTLAW: in the theater when it came out and it blew my mind. I was so excited to see these queer peoples' lives and they brought it out as a book, which is on my bookshelf, which had the transcripts of all these interviews. That was actually a tool that I used to come out to my mother, even though we never had the conversation like, "Mom, I'm gay," because we couldn't have that conversation. I gave her that book as a Christmas present and I wrote some inscription in there and it was clear

PAUL OUTLAW: what I was saying with that. When my mother passed away, I got the book back and it's now on my bookshelf. I think 25 years after it came out, they did a restoration, and I saw it at Outfest and it had the same impact on me. It made me feel like I was not so much alone and that there was so many people in my world. They were not my story, they weren't telling my story, but they were telling stories like mine. And I thought, I have to do this

PAUL OUTLAW: because maybe some 18 -year -old would find my interview on the internet at some point and it does something for them. That's why I thought it was important.

JACK MACCARTHY: What is the importance of a project like OUTWORDS that records these stories?

PAUL OUTLAW: I think I answered that with this. Yeah.

PAUL OUTLAW: To go off on a slight tangent, this is why -- Oh, I'm gonna get in trouble for this so you may not use it. I'll just say Pedro Pascal, Whitney Houston, Tom Cruise, three names, very different names by the way, but they have one thing in common, which is somehow a need not to be out because of your career and to

PAUL OUTLAW: turn it into something else. Like Tom Cruise, you can't even use what I'm saying now because you'll be sued. Because whenever someone attempts to say that he's gay, he sues them. This is like, with Tom Cruise and with Whitney Houston, a form of denial that you actually believe the lies so much that it cannot be said out loud. With him, it's to the point of lawsuits. With Whitney, there have been accounts that -- I was just watching

PAUL OUTLAW: this video. Someone I know was asking on Facebook, one of those games where every day you pick a song and it has a theme to it. The theme yesterday was "a song that you'd never get tired of hearing." I was on YouTube and I found the Whitney Houston video for "I'm Your Baby Tonight," but it's the European video. And I watch that video, it is the queerest thing. It made me realize Whitney was not that much in denial.

PAUL OUTLAW: She's actually playing a Marlene Dietrich figure where she's flirting with women. At the end of it, a woman gets on her motorcycle. It's a totally queer video that was not released in this country. This kind of image of putting out "I'm not gay," but still being gay. Pedro Pascal, you could probably get sued by him too, but I doubt it. I mean, he's considered an ally because his sister is trans, but all the people who knew him in New York say he was also gay. But for some reason that can't be said right now,

PAUL OUTLAW: and that makes me angry, angry, angry. Everyone has to come out in their own time and in their own way. Yes, this is clear. But the fact is we need testimonies so that rather than normalize Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and their behavior, we need to normalize me, you, us, our behavior.

PAUL OUTLAW: We are normal. I've spent my life being so proud of the fact that I'm different or that I'm special, but the fact is I'm not special and I don't want to be special. I just want to be a person who is the way I am.

JACK MACCARTHY: Mic drop

PAUL OUTLAW:

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah, no, I think that's it.

JACK MACCARTHY: Alok, who was Urvashi Vaid's sibling, spoke about her at an event I was at, basically they were saying like, to be called unprecedented is a wound.

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: And it erases the fact that

JACK MACCARTHY: it's not something new. We're not something new. So, yeah, totally agree.

PAUL OUTLAW: Yeah. I've always said that, I became more aware of this after I turned 40, if I have a thought or a reaction to something and I go, "Oh, you're so brilliant" or "You're so this,"

PAUL OUTLAW: at least one million other people have had that thought, and it could be like Robert Conrad in those pants. I thought, "Wow, that's an insight." A thousand million people have had that insight. In some way, we are very much connected as people, but people wanna make us seem like we're outsiders, but we're not. There are really no outsiders in that sense. Yeah. Yeah.