Gunn's Golden Rules (26 page)

People get very defensive if they think you’re saying what they’re doing isn’t normal. I don’t think it’s about normal. It’s about acceptable. When we talk about a situation that we need to change, it’s better not to think about whether or not it’s normal, but instead about whether or not it’s acceptable. Some things are contextual: People blow their noses on the street in India with no tissues. If you’re over there, you can do that. But if you’re on an American main street, you’d best break out the tissues.

Other things are never okay. It’s not acceptable to be abusive to a family member, or for a child to behave destructively, or for a job to make you miserable. You need to figure out what to do about those things, and there’s no shame in admitting you need a shrink, or your pastor, or your family, to help you out. It can make all the difference in the world just to have someone impartial to talk to once a week.

I say ever so glibly, “Go get some therapy,” but the value depends on the quality of the therapist. There’s a huge difference between a good one and a bad one. When I was young, my parents sent me to a lot of doctors, and some of them were far crazier than I was.

You have to shop around for someone who suits you. I think a therapist of the same gender sometimes helps with empathy, but you know when you’ve found someone you click with.

After trying a bunch of duds, eventually I wound up seeing a truly wonderful therapist five days a week—Dr. Phillip Goldblatt in New Haven, Connecticut. His sense of caring was palpable. He didn’t have to say anything; I could just sense his goodness and concern. I had the maturity of a gnat and a lot of issues. He made me deal with them. It took a long time. He would keep returning to things that came up. He absolutely gave me my life back.

Why, you may be thinking, did I have to go to therapy five times a week? Well, it wasn’t my idea, I’ll tell you that. It was an intervention that was thrust upon me. I’ll come clean: When I was seventeen, I made a serious suicide attempt. I was at yet another boarding school—I must have cycled through a dozen schools in as many semesters—and was ever more miserable. I had a debilitating stutter. I had no friends. I was incredibly lonely and depressed. I just wanted to end it all.

In my dorm room at Milford Academy I took far too many pills, then lay down to die with a sense of peaceful resignation.

Then, much to my frustration, I woke up the next morning.
This wasn’t supposed to happen
was my first thought when I opened my eyes on a new day.

I hear that people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge report thinking on the way down that they want to live after all. When they survive, they feel so grateful. But I didn’t have that feeling. I was disappointed that I’d failed.

Now, of course, I’m glad the pills didn’t work.

I learned how to cope. I matured so much. When I got beyond my stutter at the age of nineteen, it reminded me of how
I felt about the world when I was given glasses at the age of twelve. Everything changed. I hadn’t known that you could see individual leaves on trees, or that you could read road signs from a car window. Similarly, when I could speak clearly, my world opened up. I could actually be comfortable talking to people. It was like being more fully whole. I realized I had been living only a partial existence.

Going through all that helped me be a better person and a better teacher. I feel so much compassion for what young people go through. It is very hard to grow up, especially when you’re sensitive. You’re so vulnerable at that age. I worry about my friends’ children, and I try to be a good uncle.

The Megan Meier case, in which a teenager hanged herself after being tormented online by her friend’s mother posing as a teenage boy, is an example of the worst kind of inhumanity. That case made me want to unplug the Internet.

Of course, you can’t do that. You have to let young people live their lives. But you also have to do everything you can to show them that their teenage years are going to end and that there’s a world of possibility out there. We all need to do anything we can do to help children realize that they have value and gifts to give the world.

Sometimes people ask me when I figured out that I was gay. Well, for a very long time, I didn’t know
what
I was. I knew what I wasn’t: I wasn’t interested in boys, but I
really
wasn’t interested in girls. A lot of it was denial, but it was also that I didn’t feel unsatisfied. I’ve always loved working and have made that my priority. For many years, I described myself as asexual, and that’s probably still closest to the truth.

I do believe in a spectrum of sexuality. Some people are completely straight and some are completely gay, and plenty of
people are somewhere in between. I think it’s crazy how hung up Americans, especially American men, are on this subject. I identify as gay, but there are women to whom I’m attracted. It’s not like I want to go to bed with them—but I can appreciate when someone’s radiating sexiness.

Things have changed so much in the past thirty years; it’s almost hard for young people today to imagine what it was like to be gay back then. Let me tell you: It was the opposite of fun. You used to feel so alone with it all. If you were even thinking about homosexuality, you assumed it was only a matter of time before someone put you in a straitjacket. In my parents’ home, the term wasn’t even in our vocabulary. I used to think if I shared any of my thoughts, they would lock me up. If I tried to talk about anything even remotely related, my parents would say, “We’ve never heard of this!” But I think they knew that “this” was what I was, and that that’s part of why they sent me to shrinks constantly.

To this day, my mother has never acknowledged that I’m gay. I’m
out
in public. I mean, I’ve been on the cover of
The Advocate
. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she finally stopped talking about women she wants to set me up with. When she met the man I was with for a decade, I introduced him as a dear friend I wanted her to meet. She didn’t ask any questions then, and she never asked me what happened to him when he dropped off the face of the earth. I always half expect her to say, “Gay? I just thought you were
happy
!”

In fact, if there were ever a moment when my mother and I would have talked about my being gay, it would have been one night when we went out to dinner in the Village. It was the second and last time she visited me. In twenty-six years, she’s been here only twice. I think my move to New York from Washington,
D.C., was always hard for her. She found New York intimidating and always joked that she needed to lose a dress size and get a new wardrobe before she could visit.

I took her to Chez Ma Tante on West Tenth Street. We were sitting there waiting to order. She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Why would you take me to a restaurant where there are only men? Are they all
homosexual
?”

This stopped me cold.

“You don’t know that everyone in here is gay,” I said, trying to psych myself up for the conversation. “And furthermore, it’s New York, in the Village, at the end of the twentieth century. For men to be together is normal and acceptable …”

There was a tense moment, and I thought I saw an awareness dawning on her. Then two women walked through the door, and my mother said, “Oh, never mind, there are some women!” And she went back to looking at the menu as if nothing were amiss. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Today’s young people have Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga and the Internet, where they can find a support system.

That doesn’t mean being a teenager (much less a gay teenager) is ever easy. The physical changes are enough to traumatize a person. I feel such sympathy for teenage boys who have that wisp of a mustache. They’re too young to shave, but they’re starting to look werewolf-y. If you’re gay on top of it, it can be very scary if you live in a place that isn’t supportive.

The Harvey Milk High School in New York City serves gay teenagers who don’t feel safe at other schools. When I moved from the West Village to the Upper West Side, I gave the school my grand piano, which had been a gift from my grandmother. I thought,
Those kids need it more than I do.
When you don’t fit
in, something like a piano, or a flair for design—whatever tools or talents you discover at that age—can show you a whole new world. One truly nice person or one thing that you learn to do well can save your life.

Back when I was a suicidal, seventeen-year-old, misfit boarding-school student, I never thought I would be where I am now. I never imagined that I’d have a beautiful apartment, or a job I loved, or witty friends. I think about that when fans on the street call out, “We love you, Tim!”

I want to respond, “I love you, too!” I mean it. I am so grateful for my wonderful fans’ support. I hope in my honor they will think about the children in their lives who may be struggling and share that love with them.

H
OW
I
BECAME INVOLVED
in
Project Runway
is a funny thing. The producers were looking for a consultant because they knew little about the fashion industry. They had produced
Project Greenlight,
about the film business, so this was a new world for them. A few people had given them my name, so they called me at Parsons.

I will tell you that I had my snob hat on as I was talking to them on the phone.
Fashion reality?
I thought.
That sounds disgusting. Who’s telling them to call me—my enemies?

I was reluctant to meet with them, but I agreed to go. Truth be told, I was a little curious. The meeting went very well. I was instantly more interested when they said they wanted to work with real fashion designers. I thought,
At least there’s some integrity operating here.

Then they asked me the question that, upon reflection, I realized they were using to vet people. “How would you feel if we told you we wanted the designers to design and create a wedding dress in two days?”

“Well,” I said, very matter-of-factly, “they’d have to design and create a wedding dress in two days.”

They looked at each other meaningfully.

“Did I give you the wrong answer?” I asked.

“No,” they said. “You’re just the first person who said it could be done.”

“Why?” I asked. “What have you been hearing?”

“Everyone says it would take days, a minimum of a week, that they’d need help, that the process is so complicated …”

“Look,” I said, “in two days you’re not going to get an Oscar de la Renta wedding gown. You’ll probably get a basic column without sleeves, but it will be a wedding dress.”

They looked at each other again, and I thought I saw them smile.

I left the meeting feeling really excited about the project and hoping they’d pick me.

Then I waited and waited. I was feeling disappointed when they hadn’t called a week later. But then a couple of days after that they did call, and they said they wanted to work with me. I was thrilled.

We worked together for six months, and there were just two major points of disagreement. During their fashion-industry interviews, they had become convinced that the designers shouldn’t make their own clothes. In this scenario, there would be a sample room full of seamstresses and pattern drafters who would do the actual fabrication.

“Unless the audience sees the designers getting real and metaphorical blood on their hands, why would it care about them?” I asked. “Also, whom does Heidi send home? If there’s any problem with the garment, the designer can just blame it on the seamstress.”

We know I won that. The other point of disagreement had
to do with the workroom. Originally, it was going to be in the Atlas apartments, where the designers would live. The belief was that they should have twenty-four-hour access to it. I said that would make the show a stamina test beyond the stamina test it already is. I insisted they be forced to go home at a specific time and then return the next morning.

Not only was it marginally better for them mentally and physically, it would give them some fresh perspective on their work, a break from what I call the monkey house.

I won that, too. (Essentially, the Bravo show
Launch My Line
is all the things I didn’t want for
Project Runway.
)

In the end, they didn’t have the budget to outfit Atlas with a loftlike workroom, so they were scrambling for an alternate space.

“Do you want to look at Parsons?” I asked.

Once the show was a success, people started speculating about how Parsons scored such a huge coup. Well, now it can be told!

I called downtown to Parsons headquarters and said we wanted the uptown design building for filming over the summer. I asked what the feeling would be and how, if it was indeed okay, we would facilitate it. The auditorium space where the judging happens had been used by outside people conducting seminars, and, ahem, sample sales. A staff person, Margo, was in charge of it. We talked to her about it, and
Project Runway
made a deal to pay the fee plus the cost of extra security and all the other expenses associated with keeping the building open after hours. Everyone was happy, or so I thought.