Before the last gasp, there was the first breath.For everyone who came away from Robert Jerome Pagan’s award-winning Last Gasp film series wanting more Damion, THE WORK goes back to the beginning — to the year Damion became Damion.He is eighteen years old, newly accepted into a professional theater conservatory, and absolutely certain that the stage is where he belongs.Everything else is less certain.Away from home for the first time, Damion enters a world of actors, teachers, rehearsal rooms, backstage bodies, cheap apartments, late nights, applause, sex, pills, ambition, and people who seem to have already figured out how to become themselves.He wants all of it.He wants to be brilliant. He wants to be wanted. He wants men. He wants the work. He wants the strange freedom of discovering that there are gay lives beyond secrecy and shame. He wants the older actors who seem impossibly adult. He wants the teacher who tells him he is good. He wants the beautiful simplicity of desire without consequence.And at eighteen, Damion does not yet know that wanting something does not always make it safe.THE WORK: A Memory in Ghost Light is a raw, funny, sensual, and deeply intimate queer coming-of-age novella about gay identity, theater, first freedoms, blurred boundaries, sexual awakening, ambition, memory, and the dangerous exhilaration of finally being seen.This is not Damion looking backward with all the answers. This is Damion before he has them. Before the history. Before Last Gasp. Before he understands which moments will follow him for the rest of his life.The ghost light is already burning. Come see where Damion became Damion. Read more
