My First Gentleman Admirer
- OR - 
The 40-Year-Old Actor and the 16-Year-Old Crew Member

by Jim Becker

Based on my life story. For mature readers only. 18+

Twenty-three years until #MeToo.

When I was eleven years old, my parents didn’t know what to do with their theatrically dramatic and very fabulous son. So they let the woman who was the drama teacher, Polly “Cowboy” Crockett, at the high school in the town next door start driving me home at night. Home from Bury Ya Summer Theatre; the community theatre at the local college in the same town next door. This college had the reputation of turning out the next generations of Broadway professionals. On those rides Polly and I talked about all sorts of things; adult relationships, then how I could go live with her and her husband, big Judd, and, eventually - maybe, inevitably - what kind of ‘girls’ I liked and what kind of boys she liked.

The summer I was sixteen, I worked backstage on a production with carnivorous plants, puppets, a girl group, and a professional sadist with a medical license. Polly was the stage manager. I only mention the others because you, the reader, might view them as either spellbound, enablers, in-the-dark, or conspirators... you’d be correct. Ask yourself this, today: If a teenage boy under eighteen told you the men in the play wanted to take him out drinking, dancing, and partaking in debauchery, what would you say? Would you tell his parents? The Police?

Eighteen years until #MeToo.

The 50-year-old woman my family so blindly trusted to help ensure my safety - Polly Crockett; the head of the summer theatre youth programs, my acting teacher, and best friend (let that sink in) - had stationed me on deck crew for this summer’s season blockbuster. Technical week was difficult, considering the construction of the plant and how it had to eat (and then regurgitate) members of the cast. Tech week was difficult, for me, in a more personal way.

The man who was the flamboyant lead in the show, Kevin Joseph Kelly, took an interest in me. His flirtatious nature started small - though, by today’s standards, it would be on the evening news before we could tech Act II. He started telling me how much he liked my pants or the fact that I was a trained dancer. Soon enough the tactically secluded grooming became heavier.

I would sit by the fly rail reading a comic book and hear Kevin and the plant puppeteer whispering. “Looook at that shirt!” “Do you think it’s YMLA from International Male?” “Do you think his girlfriend picked it out?” “Oh, do you think she knows?”

Sextortion, before the term was coined by the FBI in the early 2000s, was simply coercion or blackmail back then. Quid pro quo. Do this for me, and I will or won’t do this for you. There’s a disgusting cost.

I would look up to see them shifting uncomfortably “Oh, Chad, we were just talking about you. Hey, do you want to come out to The Grid with us tonight? It’s okay you’re not 21, we won’t tell anyone. We’ll buy you drinks. Have you ever tried blow?” This rhetoric quickly morphed into “come out with us or we’ll share your secret. No one has to know about you.” Threatening to out a gay teen is a specific brand of malicious leverage, allowing Kevin to dictate the terms of compliance of my sexuality. In reality, a person’s own sexuality is for no one to expose or protect other than themselves.

Kevin’s calculated isolation continued, because he knew my track backstage. He ensured that if his character were to exit upstage left, he’d cross behind the upstage scrim to stage right where I was working to say hello to me. Most actors take the most direct route to their dressing room. Not Kevin. Kevin was very good at attempting to own my moments.

Kevin’s talent of locating me, a teenage crew member, throughout the day was an absolute genius innovation of engineering solitude by the predator. This was part of Kevin’s tactics of mapping out the physical and social landscape of the production including identifying “blind spots” (long before security cameras were the norm anywhere except parking lots), where his behavior might go unobserved. By waiting for the precise moments where Kevin knew I would be passing to my next cue, he created a controlled environment where a teenage victim might be socially disoriented and physically trapped in dark corners with long black velvet curtains hanging from the floor to the heavens. Kevin Kelly running into a teenage boy backstage wasn’t ‘by chance’ in this production where oral doctors get high on laughing gas; it was a premeditated breach of my own working environment, manipulated to ensure that the predator's actions remain unchallenged and the victim’s voice unheard.

Eight months after Matthew Shepard’s murder.*

During this summer run I celebrated my 17th birthday. I didn’t have a party in the greenroom nor was there social media in 1999 to tell anyone what day it was. Being gay still felt like a potential, possible, and - to my seventeen-year-old self - definitive death sentence. Being ‘different’ wasn’t just quirky or misunderstood, it was threatening. Even the girls from my hometown, that I danced with, called me ‘fairy’ and ‘faggot’ long before I came out. Thank God for my twin sister who let me know early on that no amount of homosexual fabulousness or outrageousness would ever let her think less of me. My twin sister always went to bat for me and all my lgbtq brothers and sisters, as a true ally.

I was mopping the stage as the cast was performing their vocal warmup when Kevin stopped the entire show. He had privately arranged for the entire cast to sing happy birthday to me in the middle of my trying to setup the stage. After the song, which I politely smiled through though it was quietly killing me inside, Kevin made an announcement: “Okay everyone line up to give Chad his birthday swats! Me FIIIRST!” There he went again, trying to own my moments. Years later I was in my 20s out at the ‘new’ The Grid (on St. Clair) and I found Kevin’s drunken hand on my ass. He didn’t go away.

Sixteen years until #MeToo. Three months before September 11th.

I was now teaching at Bury Ya Summer Theatre for the season (located within Bald Wynn Wall Ass College). I had secured myself a position as dance instructor and choreographer at the large, well-known, and revered arts college between my own freshman and sophomore year. I also volunteered to perform in the theatre’s evening show; a review of Irving Berlin’s music, The Melody Lingers On. Kevin wasn’t in this show. One matinee day, I arrived at my dressing table to find a gift bag and flowers with balloons. No one I knew was in the audience. I opened the card - it read “I’m in the audience, dance pretty for me. This is a gift that should match the necklace your parents gave you for your birthday. XOXO - Kevin.” Then I opened the gift where I found a silver bracelet that, indeed, matched the style of the chain I was wearing: a gift from my parents.

To the reader: please be advised that unless you are family, a business associate, loved one, lover or huge fan of a star, all backstage gifts should start and end with flowers, or maybe edible treats. However, as a personal trainer, I did used to appreciate taking clients of mine in NYC to see other clients in their respective Broadway shows where I always sent a dozen cookies backstage with a small workout gift of exercise equipment for my client.

Why is it wrong for a man in his 30s or 40s to attempt to romanticize a teenager? Today we know the term “grooming.” We know the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain responding to impulse control and long-term consequences) is not fully formed until men are well into their 20s. When a grown adult offers to take a 16-year-old boy out for a night of dancing, drinks and drugs, it’s an affront to the scientific development predisposing the victim to catastrophic neurological dysregulation and the cementing of maladaptive coping mechanisms. This is Neuroplasticity; at age 16, my brain was still creating its own wiring. By introducing drugs, alcohol, and predatory social dynamics, Kevin wasn’t just inviting me to a party - he was literally interfering with my brain’s biological hardware conception.

Fifteen years until #MeToo.

Like most Cleveland actors, Kevin couldn’t make his living on acting alone. There’s just not enough work for a professional; especially one like Kevin who never got his union card. Kevin wasn’t a paralegal, he couldn’t teach, nor was he even a waiter. No, no, no, Mr. ‘Spotlight’ Kelly was a middling karaoke host at local bars.

Some friends of mine wanted to go out in Lakecrest for a tipple after my adult jazz dance class. A few high school friends of mine (now all in college) decided to hit up a fun spot with karaoke not knowing who was the ‘host.’ Every other song, Kevin would either play a show tune or a Cher song, trying to coax me to the mic. It was then I began really hating how much attention he paid me. These friends from high school knew I was gay, as I’d come out the year prior, so the threat Kevin made earlier of outing me was moot. But still, I don’t want someone that creepy watching my mouth form the “Ooo’s” and “Ahhh’s” of a Cher or Sondheim song. Plus, I’m a professional, dahling, I get paid to sing. I don’t tip creepy men hosting karaoke at a Lakecrest bar for the privilege of hearing this gorgeous baritone.

I can sing you any Cher song from any album or deep cut. Anyone who knew me then knew that… and Polly told them. She’d get me to sing Cher songs for people. Other grown ups. The chair of the Theatre department at the host college.

Nine years until #MeToo.

Kevin’s attempt to own my moments wasn’t incidental. He would befriend industry colleagues of mine on social media after seeing photos of us. At one point I asked my roommate, a dance captain on Broadway, how they were connected. My roommate confessed Kevin contacted him as if Kevin was a friend of mine. Once I explained how Kevin and I were connected, my roommate blocked him and so did I.

Seven years until #MeToo.

This was the summer I saw a production of a musical at Bent Center in Lakecrest. It was research, as I was about to head out west to perform the same show at one of the largest theaters in the country (a true LORT A), and on a principal rider to boot. Big time stuff. I didn’t know Kevin was playing the Chrysler Building in the show. I took my mother. We tried getting out of the the lobby, but Kevin spotted me. “Hey, everyone, LOOK! Chad Decker! Come on over Chad, take a picture!” Unlike how professional theme park characters are trained, Kevin didn’t know how to keep both his hands visible in the picture. “Oh, come on, Chad. The big Broadway Decker doesn’t have time to take a picture?!?!” I stood next to him with my arms crossed just to shut him up so my mother and I could get the fuck out of the Brent Center’s lobby. I attempted my best effort to shield my mother from his performative impertinence. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. Gay men taking their mothers out for a night of theatre should be able to debut their mothers as a theatrical matriarch. It’s an opportunity for him to present his queen mother to his subjects and introduce his fabulous theatre friends to her... at least, that’s how it is in New York anyway. Oh, Cleveland.

Five years until #MeToo. This is getting monotonous.

I read on social media that Kevin J. Kelly was brought up on charges. Yes, the great Cleveland scene amateur actor was brought up on charges of rape, kidnapping and drugging boys under the age of eighteen. The charges stemmed from just two years prior to when I met him. Kevin, to his word, did to others what he promised to do to me. Why didn’t I come in from New York to testify against him? Why didn’t the prosecutor reach out to me? I certainly told my theatre friends what he was doing and how uncomfortable he made me. Why? Because of TPOG. I’m not sure what it stands for. Some said it meant ‘The Power of Good.’ I thought maybe ‘The Pedo Original Gangster.’ Then again, some might know it as an abbreviation for Third Point Offshore Investors Limited. Nonetheless, it became the logo all my so-called ‘friends’ had on their profile pictures. They were selling bumper stickers for the creep to help him cover the cost of his legal team. I saw those TPOG stickers all over the towns the next time I went home for a visit. The same ‘friends’ who were always trying to get me and Kevin together (yes, I had adult friends who actually thought it acceptable to pair an unwilling 16-year-old and a 40-year-old together simply because it’s the only two theatrical gay people in their orbits) had that fucking sticker proudly displayed on their Trackers and Neons. No one was in my corner.

There is a palpable sense of Midwestern irony when we consider a theatre filled with women - many the same who bought and sold TPOG bumper stickers - applauding a man who nightly performed the role of a “semi-sadist.” As the female lead croons about her broken arm and black eye, the audience laughs and cheers, safely tucked into the delusion the monster was strictly a theatrical caricature in a leather jacket.

The irony is suffocating: the community was being entertained by a scripted performance of domestic violence while the actor was executing unscripted grooming of a sixteen-year-old boy in the wings. Kevin didn’t need an alibi; the stage provided one for him.

Before the trial began, the Lakecrest police department - the city where the alleged drugging, kidnapping, and rape originated - had misplaced two written eyewitnesses statements from six years earlier. Then a Brady violation. Kevin got off. Fuck, Kevin got off (don’t think too much about that statement). Given the outpouring of support for Kevin, the child abuser, from the community; I was dissuaded from coming home to testify. I take solace knowing the ineptitudes of the Lakecrest Police Department and prosecutor ensured it didn’t matter.

A producer friend of mine informed me that one of Kevin’s accusers lost his job teaching voice at Bald Wynn Wall Ass; where Kevin and I met. Back then, there was more of a look-the-other-way mentality, especially in the midwest. Don’t cause a fuss, or get involved, right? Right??? Wrong! Not when it’s kids getting fucked. Too harsh? You really should have been there.

Back when I was a teen, in the mid-1990s, if a middle-aged man was ‘interested’ in you, some in society often framed it as a compliment to your maturity. Of course, it didn’t help that my 50-year old best friend and acting teacher, Polly, told her students how she met her husband, Judd. When Polly was in high school and Judd in his 30s, working at the car plant, they began dating, then became betrothed to the other before Polly’s high school graduation. Judd had a sweet story that he shared with me once: Polly hated his cigarette smoking, so Judd threw the pack out the car window and never smoked again. Magic! What a great story to resuscitate towards a teen’s orbit, perhaps helping to introduce an oral fixation; and, arguably, an illegal practice and substance for/to a teen. Polly was only in high school when this allegedly magical incident occurred. I only smoked cigarettes for 10 years from ages 19-28. Nowadays, many teachers understand how and why we shouldn’t share intimate details regarding private personal relationships and oral fixations with students. Back then, there was a ‘mind your business’ culture if you overheard such a violation. Social media has seemingly destroyed that misconception. The other adults on the crew either didn’t notice or didn’t feel it was their place to speak up. Maybe those other crew members felt a sense of professional precarity; fearing that speaking up would jeopardize their own standing or the success of the show. Of course, this could also be attributed to the culture of the community theatre players in and around the northeast Ohio area (at the time, maybe; not, as much, now) - always, in my opinion, pretending they’re professional actors (beyond their stations) when there is an overall lack of union rules and no one getting paid.

We must admit the cultural shift about to occur. In the 90s, it felt as though the burden of security was on the teen. Somehow it was my duty to bypass a man’s advances. Today, we ask different questions and expect much more from the adults in the room. Also, we needed more language in the mainstream to help. When I was growing up the word ‘gaslighting’ was the old Ingrid Bergman film, ‘love-bombing’ was what that one Sailor Moon character did, and ‘power dynamic’ was for Jim Lee comic heroes and villains. Back then, there was almost a certain sense of acquiescence when a new young hot performer showed up for the summer - like a rite of passage that will teach the kiddo how to be a grownup. With the stage managers and other crew members unable and unwilling to say “get away from him,” they were giving their tacit approval. Nevermind the fact that my theatre teacher, Polly, had been working at the high school as their drama teacher and she most obviously would have been a mandated reporter, given Ohio enacted ORC 2151.421 in 1963. Polly’s dereliction of duty continued through when she hired me. By keeping a tight-knit group of child predators at the same theater for decades, all the alleged conspirators created a space where predatory behavior was an open and untreated secret.

One year before #MeToo.

I made it my mission to be honest and accountable with all my students’ parents after having been in shows and situations in the business where I saw childcare succeed and when I saw it fail (including my own childhood). In fact, my line was “If your children want to go into showbiz, come talk to me; I’ll talk them out of it.” I always gave an unfiltered assessment of the realities of moving to NYC or LA to the families who were paying me to teach their child. In Cleveland, I was the only man with a certification from the most esteemed ballet company in the western hemisphere.

I had a private dance student who truly desired to become a musical theatre professional. Her parents had asked me what I knew about the local Far East Theatre in Cleveland. I confessed I didn’t know anyone at Far East Theater, save one stage manager whom I respected and had worked with multiple times. Confident in his ability to run a stage, as I’d seen him at work, I recommended the house as probably okay.

#MeToo.

The same greenroom as my Bury Ya Summer Theatre days belongs to the Bald Wynn Wall Ass College who also rents space out to local performing arts organizations. I found myself there the holiday season the Weinstein story broke. As I was getting my Mother Ginger makeup on and brushing the wig, and as the gentleman from NYC the production had hired to play the Cavalier was reapplying his eyeliner, the father of one of my dance students (also playing an attendee in the party scene) asked a simple question: “Hey, fellas, this whole stuff about predators in show biz isn’t true, is it?” The Cavalier and I looked at each other in the makeup mirror across the dressing stations with a silent look as if to say ‘do you want to take this or should I?’ We then both took turns going back and forth sharing stories about our own ‘#MeToo’ experiences; the time I had gone to a job interview and the manager asked me to turn around then asked the wait and bar staff to vote on my backside. Then there was the audition where the choreographer asked me to his hotel that night to ‘review the steps.’ I once worked for a Fortune 500 company, and when I asked for a promotion, the boss put his hand on my thigh and said “We didn’t think you’d be willing to ‘play ball.’”

This Broadway dancer and I played a ping-pong game of virtual impropriety as we watched this dad’s eyes grow larger and his jaw hit the floor. The Cavalier had to go back for his entrance. “You pick up your daughter sometimes after 8pm in a suit, I assume you come from work downtown?” I said. He confirmed. “You work with any women in that office? I bet they can fill you in.” It’s not often you see the lightbulb turn on so brightly but mean such darkness. I remember him sitting there attempting to quantify the life in store for his daughter once she reached adulthood. The types of predatory behavior we learned about from the movement weren’t just subjugated to show business, of course, it’s just that actors tend to talk. It was actors - female actors - who taught us what to watch out for.

Three to five years after #MeToo.

I was somewhat thriving. I had moved back from a fifteen year sabbatical in NYC to Cleveland and was able to successfully transport my personal training business. One of my clients and I decided to invest in a Broadway revival together. The producer who enticed our contribution was a true busybody of life and art. One night he and I got to talking and he filled me in on where the valueless child sex predator Kevin Kelly had been working. It turns out Kevin Joseph Kelly was employed at Far East Theater. The same place my students were performing.

I gave the executive director a call, after unsuccessfully attempting to setup a meeting through my contact; the stage manager. I thought I was informing the institution of the indictment and court proceedings as news, but it turns out he already knew. “Everyone deserves a second chance,” the executive director of Far East Theater told me. “He’s not in jail, that’s his second chance,” I said. “He doesn’t also get to work in a children’s theatre and abuse it as a staging ground to find child sex victims.” He told me it wasn’t a children’s theatre. I was on the Far East’s website at that moment looking at my private student’s photos on his donors’ page (the same student whose parents asked if that theatre was okay). I asked “then who are these people I’m seeing on your donors’ page, short adults?”

“Why don’t I send the link to his court proceedings to your entire donor list and board?” I asked. The conversation then devolved into shouting profanities and name-calling.

A threat was made, and followed through. I waited one week and the executive director hadn’t fired Kelly. So I followed through on the threat - I emailed my story of how Kevin treated me to his entire list of donors and his board of directors. In the email, I included a link to the court docket where the judge verbally warned about Kelly’s conman style charisma and how he used it for evil. The artistic director at Far East Theatre is a woman who loves Kevin Kelly more than anyone else. She proudly displays his old show photos on Far East’s website, as if Kevin was some sort of Olivier to the Cleveland scene. She writes about him in her own theatre bio with her non-Equity credits.

To my knowledge, the board at Far East did nothing.

Imagine sitting at a play with your students on a field trip, and one of the actors’ bios mentions the old man who asked you on dates as a 16-year-old. Imagine how that might make you feel. 

They’re trying to erase the narrative that Kevin Joseph Kelly was a monster to teenage boys. Their plan depends on no one clicking to the second page of search results or searching for “Kevin J Kelly rape charges, Cleveland.” Kevin’s friends at Far East and in the press (where Far East buys ad time), have all but white-washed Kevin’s predatory behavior. 

What kind of person displays photos of a known indicted child sex predator on her website? What kind of theatre does this? The  humorous hubris of it. Oh, the kind who casts herself in the leads. Got it.

I am acutely aware that sexual predators often treat their close social circles much differently than they treat their victims, by design. It is a giant constructed reality where the women surrounding Kevin Kelly wouldn’t believe a word against him. Similar to Joy Robson** who refused to see the monster in the room (next door) as her own son, Wade, was being rectally entered by the King of Pop. It’s betrayal blindness at its best. It’s a twisted symbiotic relationship like Capote’s ‘Swans.’*** Why can’t these TPOG women see it?

What about the threats Kevin made to out me, as gay, if I chose not to go clubbing with him when I was sixteen? He did it. My girlfriend, Marissa, and I were in the parking lot after seeing a matinee movie. This was after the show ended and the week prior to school starting - my senior year of high school and her sophomore year of college. Marissa played one of the ‘girl-group’ singers in the show. “You’re a good kisser,” she said. “Kevin told us all you were gay.”

Kevin Jospeh Kelly died on October 18, 2022. On his 65th Birthday. He died suddenly. If it was a massive heart attack, he probably went quickly. He was indicted on 15 charges including 1st degree felonies. He should have died an inmate.

Owning. My. Moments.


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*Matthew Shepard - Matthew is an American cultural icon for gay pride and safe equality. Shepard was a student at University of Wyoming in Laramie. He was a theatre kid himself. Mr. Shepard was murdered by two men who posed as gay to gain his trust then beat him into a coma and tied him to a fence where he lay for nearly a day. A runner came upon the 21-year old student thinking he was a scarecrow. Matthew Shepard died  six days later on Oct. 12, 1998. Matthew’s mother, Judy Shepard, along with her husband Dennis, continued advocating for equality after their son’s murder; including passage of The Matthew Shepard Act of 2009, which expanded the 1969 federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by someone’s perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

**Joy Robson - Joy is the mother of acclaimed dance instructor and choreographer Wade Robson. While I never worked with Mr. Robson directly, his name was certainly around my dance circles. I took class at Broadway Dance Center (the one above the old Hard Rock Cafe) in the room next door and I’d watch his class (through the window). Joy and Wade Robson were both subjects of the HBO Documentary Leaving Neverland.

*** Truman Capote and his “Swans” - Truman Capote was an out author in the 1960s and 70s who sold over 15 million books worldwide with multiple global translations. Capote authored such works as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (adapted into a film starring Audrey Hepburn winning 2 Oscars) and In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the late actor, won an Oscar for portraying Capote in the 2005 film Capote. Capote was a high-society pet to many women - known as his ‘Swans’ - in New York who shared, with him, their deepest insecurities and secrets. Capote used those secrets and stories to publish a thinly-veiled ‘fictional’ account that aired the women’s dirty laundry. The story was presented in the 2024 Ryan Murphy anthology series Feud: Capote vs.The Swans, winning one Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Period Costumes.

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Every word in this book was written by the author; AI was utilized strictly as a technical tool for historical research and grammatical refinement.

If you or someone you know is a victim of child predatory behavior please contact RAINN: 800-656-HOPE, online.rainn.org, rainn.org/es. RAINN is the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network providing support in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense.