The Todd Glass Situation

Book excerpt: A “triumphant” (The New York Times) memoir from beloved comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man, and the support from his illustrious collection of comedy pals. As Todd Glass tells it, growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convinced him that it was finally time to come out to the world. Welcome to The Todd Glass Situation, your front-row seat to more than thirty years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance. This is “a humorous, lively, and humane memoir” (Kirkus Reviews).