Today's Blind Items - G******* P***: A Dancing Boy Story

When a homeless man dies - including in this one major city - it doesn’t typically make the news. But when a homeless man dies in this one way - much to the horror of onlookers - it tends to make the news. What wasn’t reported? He was…a dancing boy.

His death, and the events preceding it, are the subject of a double episode of the forthcoming series, entitled (and this is a place name, highly local) G******* P***.

In his last months, he was living in a squat in a previously notorious neighborhood - it’s surprising, really, that there are any vacant or derelict buildings left there. But there are, and I know because I’ve been there. Who else has been there? The one former child superstar of two from the last dancing boy blind item, Truth or Dare. Is he an addict too? Nope. He was there in the opposite capacity - to urge this man and his fellow former dancing boys there (who were more well known for this one type of acting, associated with one coast more than the other) to get clean. And the sad part is that they really did have reason to this time.

You see: they had all left acting by the time they finished high school, determined to have normal lives. But after all the abuse that just wasn’t going to happen.

And literally all of them - each in his own way - had tried to come forward about what had been done to them. And that had gone well for exactly none of them. Even the one who had support from the former mayor of this city - the one all of you will know - ended up sued by his own abuser for trying to go public. In the end, at that time, who was going to believe this former actor kid who was visibly high at the deposition and had a long list of priors for mostly petty crime: possession, shoplifting, conning tourists out of their money. He lost what little he had left.

As a result, these men - who by recent times all lived together in this one squat - had a code of sorts: they didn’t talk to cops; they didn’t talk to lawyers; they didn’t talk to the media. 

So, what changed?

He and they were visited by this one kind of cop - he was long aware of them and the allegations they had made, and thought they might be telling the truth. It’s just that he like they couldn’t previously prove it. (I’m told he was the person the one detective on the long running network series is based on.)

Obviously, he wasn’t there to bust them - he just wanted to talk. And he knew that the newest and youngest member of their club of sorts - a millennial, new to the streets (and like the rest of them a surviving dancing boy) - would be mostly likely to hear him and his female partner out. Their instrument of persuasion? Chinese food.

What had happened was that the feds picked up one of the principals - one of those who had abused all of them - in a trafficking and porn sting. In his possession were thousands of images and videos, some of which included all of these men…as boys.

But what ought to have brought them together ended up driving them apart, leading to their own separate ends. Most of them, anyhow.

The ringleader - this is the man mentioned at the start (who will played by me in the dramatic reenactment of these men’s final weeks; we also play ourselves, as this is, you know, reality tv) - who had already lost his marriage and custody of his son, and would soon lose the latter relationship too. (I can hardly write this, but the boy literally believed that his father - who he hadn’t seen in close to a decade - had some kind of noble secret life, that he was a super hero of sorts. The boy was so confident in his conviction that he brought along his girlfriend to meet his dad after he turned 18. But all he found out was that his mother was telling the truth all along: that his father was a serially abused former child actor turned homeless addict who had effectively abandoned the family.)

I’m friends with the ex-wife/mother - who wishes to remain anonymous (she had acted as well and like her late ex-husband wanted and wants nothing to do with any of that) - and one of the things she told me is that four or five years ago she was cleaning out her son’s room, and found a box of tapes under his bed - videotapes. Concerned they might be porn, she watched one of them, and was astonished to find out they were videos…of the boy’s father - a compendium, basically, of much of the filmed work he had done as a child. Where did he get them? The internet, of course.

This is what her late husband told her - she’ll be played btw by my high school friend (the one then on the network series): in the earlier years of the internet, he’d searched for himself online, and found numerous links to auction sites and craigslist ads selling this type of video. And he knew right away these weren’t being traded by the now grown up fans of him and other kids. Because he knew that any number of the letters he had gotten coming up weren’t actually from girls and sometimes boys around his age - they were from men. He spent thousands literally trying to buy them all up, and destroy them. But it’s kind of like the drug war: it’s never ending. 

What really stopped him in his tracks though? One of the sellers - this was on craigslist, I think - told him that he had other things - images and videos - that he couldn’t advertise online. He asked the man who they were of. The man said: the kid in the video. Do you know who the f*ck you’re talking to, he said. The man hung up, and a few days later the number was disconnected - it was probably a burner phone.

But having lost virtually everything and everyone - and I’m sorry I can’t get into all the details here, but they’ll be in the show - he was determined to save the one among them who could be saved: the millennial kid. And this meant ending his own life - in dramatic fashion.

He gave this young man his most prized possession - a key to this one place in the city, an almost literal garden of Eden, only accessible to the owners (I’m probably not supposed to say this but it was given to him by the patron of our dancing boys; you might as well call him Charlie, after the show, but he is the titular head of a certain private equity firm, and his name is Jean-Pierre) - and saw him off to rehab. Then he put a can of gas and a book of matches in his backpack and left the squat for the last time.

I can tell you who will be playing the millennial, because I haven’t mentioned him before - obviously he’ll also be appearing as himself. Yes: he is very much a dancing boy, having done that dance in front of his middle school class on a short-lived sitcom more than a decade ago; this is the episode about the highly communicable childhood illness. Also? He played the dancing boy of dancing boys on that biggest of stages - the one in the musical.