THE SELF-EVIDENT EXCEPTION

A Six-Year Record of Inevitable Victory

By Michael Moriarty

Juliebaby is gay. He’s been a part of my administration, so to speak, ever since 1973 when I was handed a script called Find Your Way Home and told to look at the part of Julian Weston, a mild young clerk in a London record store who’d had a brief but profound love affair with a married man. The affair ended, Juliebaby went off the deep end with rough trade, almost getting beaten to death – because that girly man just never knows when to keep his blisteringly razor-sharp tongue silent – and, then, of course, his married lover walks back into his life. My performance as Julian Weston at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway won me a Tony Award. Juliebaby’s presence in my life has affected my outlook on everything ever since I played that part 33 years ago.

I was still, as far as I knew at the time, utterly heterosexual and merely an actor performing just another role. That truth was so obvious to everyone in Manhattan that New York’s gay community staged a small protest at the Actors Studio against me because, as they declared: "Why should a heterosexual be playing a homosexual on Broadway? It’s anti-gay prejudice!"

Hmm… I’m still not quite convinced of that. It worked for decades the other way around with Rock Hudson.

Anyway, I’m here to tell you that playing that part in Find Your Way Home planted some kind of seed in my psyche, turning me into a big gay man all these years later!

Let’s just all sit around and protest everything, all at once and be done with it at last. "Life sucks and so do we!"

What does Juliebaby bring to our "cabinet" table? An unerring, drug dog instinct for detecting hypocrites. That bitch-dog smells them out, jumps the leash and bites deeply. He has two hypocrite-hunting compatriots here as well: Friedrich Nietzsche and Sir Winston Churchill.

He is indeed a standing example of American gay courage, manhood and individual freedom.

He is now rabidly anti-abortion, for he knows if they ever found a "gayness gene," homosexually-oriented fetuses would be the first ones aborted under the New World Order.

Finally, gay souls are the sine qua non of any, even remotely self-respecting sophistication. Homophobes of any variety are absolute dead-meat for a true sophisticate. A foreign policy of any sort without sophistication is like a song without a singer.

Juliebaby is allowed to sit on the arm of my chair, since he is the most immediately helpful of my cabinet. He types, organizes, makes coffee in the morning – daily reminders for the shopping lists which Margie memorizes before leaving for her market rounds – prods me to my feet when I’m too lazy to tend to the obvious, like taking my robe off before getting into bed. Margie always threatens to make me do all the laundry since the robes are the heaviest and most boring of the garments to wash and my sleeping in them stinks them up! Juliebaby is a "crackerjack."