Journalists are trained to maintain an emotional distance from an interview subject, but when pasts collide between interviewer and interviewee, true objectivity can be a very tricky thing indeed.
Last year, in the weeks leading to Martin Moran’s off-Broadway opening of “The Tricky Part,” I got to know and admire the Denver native through several intense and deeply personal interviews. I was impressed by his eloquence and bravery, honored to be the first journalist with whom he would share the complicated and explosive details of a sexual relationship he willingly maintained for nearly four years with a then 29-year-old male camp counselor. Moran calls it a love affair, but it began with a criminal act of trespass, for he was only 12.
A sixth-grader.
Moran talked about meeting “Bob” in 1970 at Camp St. Malo, a majestic Catholic retreat at the base of Mount Meeker. He talked about how Bob first “shot him up with secret sex.” He talked about the double-life he led at Christ the King – as “the altar boy and the slut.” He talked about how the suffocating Catholic ideologies he had once so fully embraced led to his first suicide attempt after leaving Regis High School, and how discovering Nancy Priest’s drama program at George Washington High later saved his life.
I had not known Moran, but I would later attend the same camp and same Regis High School. I had met GW’s legendary Priest. I had sponsored two godsons at Christ the King, and when Moran’s play opened to loving reviews, I recognized every street name, knew nearly every neighbor he mentioned.
So when a story hits that close to home, you mumble something about the grace of God, and then you get angry – even though Moran is not.
I still cannnot understand how strangely protective Moran remains toward Bob. Moran refuses to print his real name, he said, because he doesn’t want to cause him pain. But because the man is a convicted sex offender, I told Moran I would – Robert C. Kosanke. That deeply troubled him, as did several disturbing legal facts I discovered about Kosanke that Moran does not even acknowledge 14 months later in this week’s publication of his wrenchingly expanded memoirs.
“The Tricky Part” is a mesmerizing, harrowing confessional that defies every preconceived belief about pedophilia and the twisted long-term relationships that can grow like unchecked weeds within the dark context of a shared secret.
The play is an exhilarating theatrical experience, partly because it leaves many unsettling details to the imagination. The book offers the reader no such passes. It offers numbingly recurrent accounts of Moran’s regular sexual liaisons with “Bob,” and details the two destructive decades of sexually compulsive behavior that followed.
Reading it all anew is devastating in its graphic inevitability, and I grieved again for the boy of 12 while remaining keenly worried for the man of 44. What happened to Moran in 1972 unmistakably dictates every aspect of his life in 2005. Moran will relive his story nightly on stages across America well into next year. This week’s publication of his book, after another year immersed in it, makes one wonder if he ever will truly move on.
Most troubling is his continued reluctance to despise or even blame his molester. Moran admits in the book he never once considered what was done to him as trespass until he was 35. Instead, there is a much stronger sense of Moran’s own perceived complicity in the affair. He repeatedly states he was never coerced into doing anything he didn’t want to do.
And he never really connects his childhood sexual patterns to his later sexual addiction. Moran stole away with “Bob” every three or four months, and, as an adult, Moran sneaked off to a park or public bathroom every three or four months for anonymous sex, even after entering into a lifelong relationship with Henry Stram, son of legendary NFL coach Hank Stram. The roots of that behavior seem obvious to the reader.
The most uplifting add to the memoir are details of Moran and Stram’s life together. But as Moran’s best friend so astutely says on the penultimate page, “Marty, you are forever letting that man off the hook, distancing yourself from the breach of it. The truth of what he did.”
That statement is every reader’s conundrum. No matter how much you admire Moran and empathize with his suffering, there are only two people who may ever truly understand the hold one unrepentant pedophile can have over a gay 12-year-old boy who was dying to discover who he really was.
But there is no finish line to all this. As Moran discovered, “If you start digging into this, you’ll never get to the bottom.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
The Tricky Part
By Martin Moran
Beacon Press, 285 pages, $23.95, hardback
