The Real World: Homecoming is, you have to trust me here, must-see television. It’s a reunion of the original seven season-one strangers of MTV’s The Real World, now hovering around fifty and sent back to the iconic Soho loft where they redefined television drama twenty-nine years ago. And while it began as the pleasant diversion you would imagine it to be– a meditation on middle age, a nostalgic catch-up with long-lost friends you’ve never actually met–it has quickly become Culturally Important. Kevin’s words from 1992, his patient explanations of his lived experience which got him labeled an angry Black man, are now the accepted truth of the Black male experience, while Becky, with whom he sparred in season one, still refuses to acknowledge her own privilege. Meanwhile, innocent Julie has emerged as a kick-ass anti-racist, Heather is on-air all day long at SiriusXM, Andre is a cool dad in Echo Park, and Eric is a natural healer who has nevertheless contracted Covid-19 and has to attend the reunion via FaceTime from a nearby hotel. It is wild.
And then there’s Norman Korpi, the sweet queer artist who didn’t get much screen time in season one, despite being the first openly-gay-from-the-start television personality. In Homecoming, he gets mighty real: he addresses the homophobia that got him shunned by hometown friends after the show aired, the internalized homophobia that got him shunned by the gay community, and the financial calamity that faces an artist in a year when galleries are closed. Norman has emerged as a star, and a legitimate gay icon. In preparation for tonight’s season finale, I spoke to him about his Real World experiences then and now, his current life in small-town Michigan, and his invention: the A Stand adaptive laptop desk, currently sold out online. He’s real and polite, and he coins at least three brand-new expressions which I am going to steal immediately.
Esquire: Norman, congratulations on Homecoming. I’ve seen all but the final episode and I’m telling you, it’s outstanding television.
Norman: I know. I was telling people early on, when we were doing interviews: “Look, this is not a normal reunion show, this is an entirely new, evolved thing that’s occurring, and it’s probably more interesting if you interview us later on down the line.”
I don’t know if you can say, but where do things stand for all of you now? Have you all spoken since?
Yes, we’re all in communication. I’m really happy that Becky has reached back out to me because everything was so rocky. I mean, you go through the experience, and then you also go through the experience of what people are seeing on TV, which is still a limited part. But I’m really glad that she’s standing where she’s standing. She’s saying things like “I can see your point, and I can see everybody’s point.” I’m not sure if Kevin is watching everything, but I’m definitely in contact, and I’m super supportive of everything that’s going on. It’s a lot to take when you have your life being put back on the screen again. You’ve been quiet and dormant for so many years, then all of a sudden, you’re back. And now with social media and so many people having so much more access to us than ever before, it’s really kind of a trip.
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It’s got to be. I really wanted to talk about what you’ve discussed in the show, because it’s true, you really were the first from-the-jump openly queer person on TV.
Right? I have to thank the producers so much. There aren’t many times in history when you can actually go back and talk about something that had happened, especially with the people that brought you there in the first place. I always felt like a little bit of a Frankenstein back then. There wasn’t a lot of community, like maybe none. Today, you’d have so much more outreach and so many more ways to connect to people. It was really toxic back then. It was like a death sentence if you were openly gay in any capacity out there. If you had a gay character, I believe the movie rating would be an immediate R back in that year. It was like saying the word “fuck.” That’s how crazy it was.
So, trying to educate people who were interviewing me who weren’t gay, I would kind of give them the full history, like, I had sex with women in high school. As for who I was and what my identity was at that point, I definitely was gay, but trying to describe that was pretty hard at the beginning. When I was described as bisexual, because I had slept with women, that wasn’t my current identity.
It’s hard to describe that world to people today, when people are more comfortable with sexual and gender fluidity. I think by the time we got to Pedro, we had made such strides. So much changed in the world, the community got bigger, there were many more people to rely on than when I stepped out on stage.
Everyone’s evolution on whatever they decide to call themselves is different. It’s not unheard-of for a gay man to have a phase where he identifies as bisexual, you just happen to have had yours on camera.
Yeah.
After the show was over, did you feel support from the gay community?
No. I mean, going into this, I had been one of the first 20 members of ACT UP. That group had been generated from one of my professors, Douglas Crimp, who was one of the founders, with Larry Kramer. They would have meetings at the Cooper Union where I went to college, so my professor brought us all into it. We’d lost so many students, and we were a very small student body at Cooper Union.
I knew a lot of the people that became the founders of Out Magazine, people who became prominent in GLAAD, people who went on to do all these great things. And they knew me too, so when they heard “bisexual” being thrown out, they were just like, “well, we know Norm, he’s gay.” They were very upset, like they thought I wasn’t proud enough to be gay. I had a hard time with a lot of those people in those first years, because it was so important to find someone that says “I am gay.” And they were like, “He’s cowering. He’s not saying that he’s fully gay, he’s bisexual.” A lot of the people I really needed the most, who I really respected the most, turned their back on me.
I was hoping to help them. I was making a bridge to a wider audience. MTV was going to reach an audience that they couldn’t even touch, honestly. They didn’t have the capacity to reach 144 countries, and to reach out to straight allies who weren’t in an urban gay ghetto talking only to themselves. This was really going to create a bridge that was ultimately going to help them, so it was kind of saddening.
Then they belittle reality television, you know? A lot of people just belittled us, like you don’t have any talents. They tried to shrink and diminish our impact, yet they didn’t realize our impact was much bigger. When you have a disruptor come along, they don’t think you are as powerful as you are, and then all of a sudden you’re YouTube.
I look back at the series and I am just so proud of what has happened over these years. And I walked the streets, I traveled. We didn’t have money like the Kardashians, we didn’t launch a vodka line that’s worth a hundred million dollars or whatever. We were in the public, so we knew from engaging the public how the public was changing. I could see that firsthand, you know, and it was pretty impressive.
It feels to me still like the queer community is not great at supporting queer people. Straight allies we tend to give a lot of credit to, but up and coming young queer people, we’re still not great at supporting.
You do see other marginalized groups that rally around and recognize, like, “this person did something for the women’s cause,” or “she did something for people of color,” or whatever. It’s still kind of…quandary-like. It’s very odd. I don’t ever see myself on the list of a hundred great gay people, like some are. It’s hit or miss with me. I just know what I did to change a lot of straight people’s lives, to get them to accept their gay brothers and sisters, to start to address them as the people that are going to vote for us. That became even more important to me, that reaching out that occurred.
Season one aired when I was in college, and a moment that they’ve replayed a bunch of times in The Real World: Homecoming is you and Becky. She says, “I didn’t meet any cute boys tonight,” and you say, “I didn’t either.” That quick thing was so significant for a young gay kid because it wasn’t played for laughs. It was just like, Here are two people just being, and not having to explain themselves, and not being made the butt of the joke. It was small, but really significant.
I’m glad you pointed that out, because I was in Tower Records when they ran that as a promo clip. And it was almost like I watched a shockwave, like someone had said “fuck” on television. I just watched all these eyes just go big, like did you hear that? It’s so hard to describe that part of the world that’s no longer there. But that was the genius thing: it wasn’t coming out there with a trumpet. I could’ve come out there with my ACT UP stuff and I could have really just rammed it down people’s throats, but I just really felt we’ve been going so long, watching people die and trying to get people to support us.
The only thing that I could really think that was equivalent is Robert Mapplethorpe. I knew Robert Mapplethorpe, because I was very active in the community, and I’ve worked for a lot of big galleries. But that’s what America was getting: Jesse Helms up against Robert Mapplethorpe and his very explicit gay images. And his work is amazing, but that’s what was coming out. You know you’re going to get the tulips and you’re going to get a whip in somebody’s ass. So I was like, Someone’s going to counterbalance that. Someone’s going to come up with the Ozzie and Harriet for ‘90s America, so the rest of the world can say, “okay, there’s a lot of different people in this community.” There was a lot of risk, no one was really coming out. But I did feel safe in the gay community of New York and what was happening there. I figured whatever happens, I can always stay in the island of Manhattan, regardless of how the show comes out.
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Now you’re back in Michigan. How is being home different than it was before New York?
I came from a really special Italian, Sicilian family, very creative people, very loud and boisterous. My grandmother was the matriarch of the family, and I was the apple of her eye. We were thick as thieves. She ran a bar, all of 4’1” and she’d throw people out. But Michigan, it was difficult for me. I went through a really tough patch in middle school and high school, which led me to leave there. I went to a boarding school in Michigan called Interlochen Arts Academy, a big arts super high school, graduates like Alicia Keys and Jewel and Josh Groban and all of those characters. That really was very helpful for me to find my way into a creative resource growing up. You know, it’s kind of funny, we had a mock prom in 1983, two guys ran for king and queen, and they won. So it was very different to go from the public school into the boarding school. I got to see people like that and everyone usually went off to New York City afterwards, so I was like, “you know, there’s a place for me.”
How has the experience been with Homecoming? Are you happy with how it all came out?
I think I am, yeah. They’ve really done an incredible job. The original show was 22 minutes an episode, so I’m really surprised to see that it went to 40 minutes. I didn’t know they’d do that. So it seems like the storytelling is a lot more rounded, they’re giving you another bend in the curve. I could never quite tell in the first season, was my story too advanced, and that’s why I was in the background? I heard that a lot when the first season aired: he seems interesting, why’s he always in the background? It always seemed like the cameras would go wherever Eric was, but then as I got older I realized: they just didn’t have the money. They only had like one or two camera crews and they could barely afford their own food. When you’re older and you come back, you get to hear more of the producers’ story and what they were up against trying to get this thing on the air.
On our backs, they’ve been able to make so many shows and bring so many stories to light. There are probably over 200 people who have been on this Real World/Road Rules train. And they’ve brought so many stories, transgender stories, gay people in the military stories, I mean, it’s just outstanding what this show has been able to bring to the people. I think we really just get underlooked so much, people say that was scripted or they’re narcissistic. No, there was something more than narcissism that drew me to this experience.
Especially back then, if you were offered an opportunity like this, why wouldn’t you take it? You couldn’t possibly have known what it would be.
You know, I just knew that there were so many people that were dying and they didn’t have a voice. And I wasn’t like an Elton John or somebody who had entire teams telling them to stay in the closet or we will lose money. I do remember a conversation with the producers, about the liability section of the contract: I was worried that once they started telling my story, that if let’s say The Rolling Stones’ music was playing in the background, that I would be liable. Back then, if people saw something that was gay, they’d all laugh and smirk and say something awful and it could brand that artist’s music horribly and then I could be liable for it. So if you put some Dire Straits song and I’m in the scene and everyone’s like, “Oh my God, that Dire Straits song makes me think of a gay person,” and then Dire Straits gets upset, it falls on my lap. And I looked at that contract, I’m like, “You’ve got to change that around. I don’t have control of your edit.” That was the world we lived in.
God. Well, on a happier note, I see the A Stands are sold out.
What insanity that is. They’re still actually kind of stuck over in China. I have another 180 of them that are sitting in a warehouse there. I did an initial run of 5,000. They cost quite a penny just to do the initial run. And I own the molds and own all that stuff. But it’s been really hard to connect with this to the public, during a pandemic and the whole bit. But once people did connect with it, wham, they bought up everything that I had on Amazon, and then they started moving to the website, and then it was just popping off. I had like 80 of them in storage in California and I’m in Michigan, so I’m calling my partner, like, “Get up, go ship them to people.” He’s like “What?” And I’m like “They’re selling!”
So do you have any plans to come back to California?
Oh, absolutely. My business partner and I have everything operating out of his place in Rancho Mirage. I just need my COVID shots, and then I’ll fly in and discuss. We are on the books to do another iteration of the A Stand. Plus I have my paintings and my stuff scattered to at least 12 different people’s homes.
My plan for my future is I’m going to split my time between Michigan and the high desert, because I just love that whole arts community. I’ve done stuff with the arts project that’s out of the Bombay Beach. You know, I was in the first Burning Man, I knew all the people in the beginning of Burning Man. In California I drive people places that they have no idea about. I’m like, “You’ve never been to Deep Creek Hot Springs? We’re going.” I always invite people from San Francisco who poo on LA, and I’m like, “I’m just going to bring you to these three places that will have your mouth drop out of your mouth,” you know?
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