Kevin James Thornton: Be Yourself

Ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome Kevin James Thornton.

You guys. Wow!

Um, let's... begin.

Let's start like that.

Make it weird.

I got a text from a guy

that I dated 25 years ago,

when it was the '90s.

I'm going to do that a whole bunch.

I'm going to wear it out.

Yeah, I got a text from this guy.

I haven't really heard from him in, like, 25 years.

And the text said, "I miss you."

And then right after that, another text that said,

"Show me that ass."

He's imagining 1996 ass...

and what I currently possess is 2023 ass.

2023 ass looks like two hairy scallops.

White, uncooked...

has salmonella.

But then I thought, you know what?

I'm going to do it.

I'm going to send him a photograph.

A photograph is way too big of a word for what I'd sent.

I didn't go to Olan Mills.

For the young people in the room, um,

Olan Mills was like a family portrait place

in the '90s.

Side thought. Hear me out.

Olan Mills Genital Portraiture.

Do you remember you could get your picture taken

and then up in the corner would be, like,

a superimposed, dreamy...

Do you guys see where I'm going with this?

So you can have your picture, and then up in the corner,

whatever it is you'd like to feature.

Olan Mills Genital Portraiture.

We'll probably cut that part from the show.

That probably won't make it.

So I sent him a picture of my ass

and he responded with

maybe the most hurtful thing he could have.

His response was...

"That's not you."

He thought I chose to send a photo

of some other 50-year-old ass.

I'm not quite 50.

I'm 49. I turn 50 in a couple of months.

Okay.

I'm actually pretty cool with getting older.

Listen, I'm in the worst shape of my life

and I feel fine.

It's okay.

Everybody calm down.

When I was young, I was a homosexual gazelle of beauty.

Was.

And I'm totally fine now with the ever evolving landscape

of my physical form.

I'm fine with slowly transforming

into your Intro to Anthropology professor.

He wrote his dissertation on circumcision in the Amazon.

He dates students.

Professors can't do that anymore, but they could

in the '90s.

I feel pretty cool at this stage in my life.

I feel like I really know myself.

It's not always great.

Now, once a year, my doctor

puts her finger in my butt hole.

And every time she does it, I'm mildly embarrassed about

how easily she just slides it in there.

No resistance.

Not even a quiver.

And every time she does it,

I'm like, either she's really good at this,

or I'm really good at this.

My doctor does one thing that I do not like.

Every time during a prostate exam,

with her finger on my prostate, she says,

"Smooth."

I hate it.

Like I now understand that a healthy prostate feels smooth,

But at first I thought she was, like, congratulating herself.

"Smooth."

I grew up in a super fundamentalist Christian church.

- - Okay.

Some of you might relate with the super fundamentalist Christian church.

Yes. Okay, good.

That's what I wanted here tonight.

Religious trauma.

All around me.

In my super fundamentalist Christian Church youth group,

they used to dress us up like clowns.

Stay with me.

We put on like a sinful clown play

in the park.

And each clown represented a different sin.

So we had Premarital Sex clown.

Ah. There's some Premarital Sex clowns here tonight.

Yeah!

We had Abortion clown.

Don't get mad at me.

I'm just telling you what happens.

And we took the youth group on a mission trip

to New York City.

We took our sinful clown play

on the road.

They took us to a neighborhood in New York,

called Spanish Harlem

in the '90s.

So imagine 20 white suburban teenagers,

walking down the sidewalk of Spanish Harlem,

dressed like Abortion clown.

They were all staring at us and laughing in Spanish.

We did a lot of weird productions like that.

Every year for Halloween,

we put on this haunted house

that simulated you going to hell.

Stay with me.

Um, it started with your funeral.

A lovely way to spend a Friday evening.

And we had our haunted house set up where you had to crawl

under your coffin to get into hell.

I don't know how biblically accurate this is.

That's how we did it.

And then it was just

room after room of youth group kids screaming at you.

But it was similar in theme to the sinful clown play.

We had a room about premarital sex,

we had a room about abortion,

there was even a room about lust you just can't win.

It featured a man masturbating in the flames of hell.

It's the kind of wholesome entertainment we're missing today.

But growing up in that environment,

it did weird things to my forming mind,

especially around sexuality and my body.

The most popular guy in my school was named Stan.

And Stan came to school

and said he popped a girl's cherry.

I look over, there's like a Victorian mother with a scarf...

It's shocking, I know.

He said he popped a girl's cherry.

I'd never heard that before.

I didn't know what that meant.

It's unfortunate timing.

Because right around then I discovered

the dirty magazines in the woods.

If you're young, you don't know what I'm talking about.

The dirty magazines in the woods.

You kids don't know how easy you have it today.

All I had were the dirty magazines in the woods.

They were under a log.

They were damp from the environments.

But it was unfortunate timing,

because, um, the very first picture I saw...

I now understand what I was looking at,

but I didn't then.

It was a photograph of a naked woman,

and she had actual cherries and, like, cherry sauce,

spread around her area.

But I saw it and I thought, "She popped her cherry.

Is that what it looks like?

Does she need to go to the hospital?"

Stan and Tara started to go together.

They showed up at school one day

and said they were going to do it.

That's the progression.

You go together and then you do it.

And I went straight up to Tara and I said,

"Tara, you're making a terrible mistake."

And she said, "Why?"

And I said, "Tara, you're going to get herpes."

And Tara said, "Stan has herpes?"

And I said, "Oh, Tara, you're so naive.

"Don't you know that if you have premarital sex,

"herpes will just form?"

And Tara called it off right then.

And that is the origin story

of my seventh grade arch nemesis, Stan.

In those days, there was a channel on the television

that was like scrambled porn.

I'm going to have to explain a lot to the young people.

So imagine a giant, like, wooden cabinet television

with a dial on it that you had to turn

and there was one channel you could