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Coming out as an American teenager in the early 1990’s was a strange and frightening time. It was the height of the AIDS crisis and news was breaking about Jeffrey Dahmer coercing boys my own age home from the mall and dismembering them. My survival mechanism was to come out to friends and family on principle but to never act on my sexuality.

Alienated by organized religion, I made the mistake of equating religion and spirituality, forsaking any personal cultivation of spirit. This led to a life of extreme duality: my mind vs. the world. My intellect was both my salvation and my taskmaster. Years of steady outward success (valedictorian, ivy league college, two advanced degrees, a professorship…) masked the private tyrrany of my intellect over my body and spirit.

In a world of uncertainty, the one thing I had absolute control over was my body. I drove it to extremes: anorexia, compulsive exercise, cutting, smoking, and finally, drinking. Feeling like my integrated, gay self was denied by family and culture, I created and managed a series of compartmentalized personas to express the various aspects of self that were being repressed. Brody grew into Dr. Fox the professor and Broderick Fox the artist. As I began to explore my queer identity, these were soon joined by Rick the club kid and Dina Brown the drag diva.

These performances were exhilarating at first, but with no sense of spirit outside of self to fuel me and the management of these multiple performances becoming more and more unwieldy, things began to come apart. Rick became a sex worker, all of us became alcoholics, I became a stranger to myself, and my body finally reached its breaking point in the Berlin subway on July 23, 2005.