Brendan is a 32-year-old bipolar gay man who grew up in a trailer park near Jacksonville, FL. His strength and resolve are as potent as it gets. In this excerpt from the forthcoming book The Eccentrics, we hear about his travails as a teenage runaway in New York City.
It just may be the ultimate American horror story. Child abuse. Drugs. Drinking. Prostitution. Homelessness. Verbal abuse. Rape. A suicide pact. Fraud. Funerals. Estrangement. Everything that could’ve possibly gone wrong, went wrong.
But Brendan – a 32-year-old Florida native – is unbreakable. An old soul who has gone through hell and survived, Brendan has lived many more lives than a cat and willingly talks about it in meticulous detail.
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Brendan was fed up with his dysfunctional family. He believes his “adult life” started at age 14. He would run away, hitchhiking around Florida. And then it was off to New York City, where he was homeless for about a month.
“I took a Greyhound bus to New York, because that’s what I thought you do when you’re gay and nobody wants you,” Brendan remembers. “I got there and I was cold and homeless. And I realized that I was young, and I was tall and I was thin, and I looked like a boy. And I realized that was my only commodity.”
He started to sell his body on street corners around Times Square.
“That’s how I survived. Whether it be for an exchange of cash,” he continues. “Whether it be for an exchange to sleep at someone’s house for the night. What have you.”
