There were things in the first draft of his memoir, says David Pevsner, that his editor thought were “maybe TMI, maybe a bridge too far”. I can’t begin to imagine what was deemed unacceptable, because there is TMI – sample line: “I have always been a copious ejaculator” – on just about every page of Damn Shame, an entertaining, touching and absolutely filthy book. My goodness, the filth! “There is that,” he says with a laugh. Pevsner describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as “a minor player in the entertainment biz”; he’s had small roles in big TV dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and Modern Family, and bigger roles in small ones. He has been on Broadway, touring productions and off-Broadway hits. He’s not a well-known face, though if you’re a subscriber to his OnlyFans account, where he shares erotic photos and videos of himself, you will be very familiar with his body; Pevsner is, I believe, the only person I’ve interviewed whose erection I have seen. Along the way, to supplement his theatre salary, he has been an escort and a “naked maid”, which had things in common with sex work while also including vacuuming (not a euphemism). He appears, smiling and charming (and dressed), over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. The online porn has lost Pevsner two acting agents, although it is presumably fairly lucrative in itself. Now 62, he had been posing for nude photographs since his early 30s. It was partly about exploring his own sexuality, he says. “It made me curious to see how far I can take it, how far I could explore what’s really going on inside. I would watch porn and be like: ‘I wish I had the guts to do that.’” His own explicit photos and videos are also partly political. At his age, it’s about broadening the idea of older people and sex. “It is important because we’re so used to the idea that you get to a certain age and go: ‘I’m done, nobody’s going to want me any more.’ I don’t want people to feel that way. I want them to know that it’s never too late. I’m 62, I’m still desirable. I want people to not shut down, and there’s a lot of shutdown when it comes to age.” The overarching theme of Pevsner’s book is overcoming shame and it’s pretty fair to say, from his exploits, he appears to have largely succeeded. “One of the reasons there’s so many stories of [my childhood in the book] is that you get to know me, my insecurities,” he says. “When we get to the more explicit stuff, people may find some of it a little shocking, but they’ll understand why it’s there.” Pevsner grew up in a Jewish family in Skokie, a suburb of Chicago, where his father was a jeweller. He was an awkward, shame-ridden child and teenager, loathing his body and confused by his developing sexuality. “I couldn’t say: ‘I’m gay,’ until college,” he says. He had girlfriends at school in an attempt to stop the homophobic bullying, though it didn’t always work. “It was demoralising.” He pauses: “There were nights I cried myself to sleep, thinking: ‘I am abnormal.’ I wish I could go back and say: ‘You are so normal. You’re normal but crazy, and crazy in a good way.’ I was a sweet, funny, smart kid. But I had that angst running through me, and I couldn’t talk to anybody about it.” As a child, he discovered his parents’ recordings of Broadway musicals and loved singing along to radio jingles in the car. He would put on little plays at school, although this often attracted more bullying, “so I stopped doing it”. It was going to college, Carnegie Mellon University, to do performing arts, where, he says, “I was finally among other weirdo artists like me. It was helpful to find my tribe, because I didn’t have confidence and had a lot of shame.” It was there that he came out. After graduating, Pevsner moved to New York in 1982 and got theatre work fairly steadily, often working away on touring musicals, then coming back to the city to pick up jobs as a waiter. He talks lovingly of New York in the 80s; how exciting it was, but also frightening. The Aids epidemic hit the city hard. Pevsner would run into friends he hadn’t seen for a while, and realise they were ill. He appeared in a Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof and “we had a couple of losses there. We just lost so much – personally, professionally.” For Pevsner, who had only recently started exploring his sexuality, the risk of contracting HIV “put the fear of God into me about sex, and that closed me up a little bit. But I also felt we were all in it together. There was a brotherhood there. We could all kind of put our arms around each other and say: ‘We’ve got to get through this.’” He was scrupulous about safer sex “so I came out OK – but damaged, as many of us did”. The stigma around HIV, and the political inaction, made him furious – and still does, his voice rising at the memories. “They couldn’t get funding early on because Ronald Reagan and [then New York mayor] Ed Koch couldn’t even say ‘Aids’. It was ‘somebody else’s problem’. That created a lot of anger in us.” He writes that living through the crisis – “used as a way to slut-shame gay men” – was probably a reason he later embraced sex so enthusiastically. By the mid-90s, Pevsner’s theatre work was drying up. He’d had success off-Broadway, but it didn’t pay much. His agent had told him he would never get “straight” roles. So he took a job as a “naked maid”, cleaning houses while nude, a role that could take a sexual turn depending on the person who hired him. After that, escort work was not a huge leap. It wasn’t just about money. Pevsner calls his couple of years working as an escort “the best job I ever had outside of showbiz. I met lots of great people who were happy that I was there. I’m a caretaker guy; there were times when they would be like: ‘My mom just died, and I just needed to feel something.’ So I would go and we would talk. It wasn’t all just about, you know, plugging each other up. I just found it was something I took to.” Did he ever feel exploited? “Absolutely, when it was just: ‘Do your job and leave.’ But I enjoyed that as well – as long as I was the one in control. It just tapped into so much about my libido, my sexual ability, my caretaking. There was a lot of psychology involved with it, a lot of role-playing. It was all the things I was good at!” There are some alarming scenes in his book (one involves toenails) but he insists that escorting wasn’t a bad experience: “I can’t say that that’s how it is for everybody.” Still, he stopped in his 40s, and started a decluttering business. Alongside, Pevsner wrote songs – putting his filthy poetry to music – for the revue show Naked Boys Singing!, and performed two of his own one-man shows. It has not been, of course, to everyone’s taste. Does he mind criticism? “I used to,” he says. He remembers sending a CD of his songs to a friend, a successful Broadway musical director, who was scathing. “He was just like: ‘I hate this. Why do you think this dirty stuff is funny?’ I thought [my songs were] funny, clever and sexy. Some people are offended by it. Some people did not want to hear a song about anal warts, for instance.” He smiles, mischievous. “But to me, it’s one of the funniest songs I’ve ever written. It’s where I learned, after really heavy criticism, you’re not going to please everybody. You’ve got to write with your heart, put it out there. And somebody will respond.” It is what he wants to do with his book. “A lot of it is a fish-out-of-water story,” and many people can relate to that, he says. “The elements of shame, ageism, the fear of sexuality and nudity – there’s a lot to identify with.” Does it all – the filthy songs, the online porn, the eye-popping memoir – make him feel very exposed? “I guess I do,” he says, after a pause. “But I am gobsmacked and thrilled that I had the guts to do it.” Damn Shame: A Memoir of Desire, Defiance, and Show Tunes by David Pevsner is published by Penguin Random House.