Mike Jones still talking Haggard

One-man show takes expose to stage

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Polimedia Entertainment

Mike Jones winds up in the spotlight again in his one-man show Naked Before God.

Mike Jones found the spotlight unexpected and a bit too bright in 2006 when he brought down evangelical leader Ted Haggard.

Now he seems to have become accustomed to that spotlight. He'll stand alone under it next week when he premieres his one-man show, Naked Before God: Exposing the Hypocrisy of Ted Haggard.

"What's interesting about this play and this story and my life - it's not over yet," says Jones. "The Haggard story isn't complete. With Matthew Murray (the gunman at New Life Church in Colorado Springs), they found my book in his car. Recently Ted Haggard has cut off all ties to the church, and he's going to start talking again."

How does Jones know Haggard will talk?

"I just know. I've learned so much in a year and a half. I've been going with my gut feeling on everything, and I've been right on everything."

Jones, now 50, was working as an unlicensed masseur and escort when he made the decision to expose Haggard as a client who paid for sex. He made his decision, he says, to show Haggard's hypocrisy as leader of a massive religious movement who preached the damnation of gays while engaging in gay sex on the side (and illegally).

Last summer, Jones retold the story, which made national news, in his book, I Had To Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard's Fall, currently No. 196,652 in Amazon sales.

"I spent three years with him," Jones says of Haggard. "He was very nice. I don't hate Ted Haggard, but what he did was so wrong, and he put me in a very difficult position. When I'm outing Ted Haggard, I'm outing myself."

Jones was approached about creating the show by PoliMedia Entertainment, a company in Palm Springs, Calif., that provided a writer to adapt the book and a director to put together the 75-minute show.

So how much stage experience does Jones have?

"Basically about zero. I did a piece this last summer at the Boulder Fringe Festival, Porridge. The guy came to my book-signing, and he was so overwhelmed with my story that he actually wrote some monologues into this play and asked me if I could do it."

He found that being onstage wasn't particularly intimidating, and the one-man play - which PoliMedia hopes to tour around the West - gave him another opportunity to tell his story.

"It gives me a chance for people who don't want to spend a lot of time reading the book," Jones says. "It's much bigger than just the headline people saw in the papers."

So what makes it theater and not just a speech? Because there's acting involved, Jones says.

"I'm up there actually doing a performance. I actually go through and act out some of the sequences of what I was going through. I just don't stand there and just talk."

The show also provides some income for a man who saw his livelihood disappear. Jones maintains that he was out of the sex business even when seeing Haggard.

"He begged me to keep him on, and I did," Jones says. "I was doing personal training, I was modeling at different art schools around town, and I was also doing massage."

These days, he's out of a job.

"That's why I'm doing this play. I made a little bit on the book, not a whole lot. I'm barely making ends meet, to be honest with you."

When Jones stepped forward, he won a lot of good will for his bravery. Is he worried that he may be squandering that with people who will think he's just milking minor celebrity?

"I understand why people may think that, but I just want to say one thing: This is the Mike Jones story. I have a story to tell, and a lot of people really don't understand what went on."

And for each stranger who approved, there was a friend who didn't.

"There are some people who will never talk to me again as a result of this," he says. "They hated the fact that, yes, there was the sex-worker part, they hated the fact that, yes, there were some drugs involved. Some of them just strictly don't like anybody outing anybody.

"And another part that happened was, there was a bit of jealousy that Mike Jones was getting this attention. What I wish I could tell everybody is, maybe I have been on all the news programs, but it isn't a glamorous lifestyle by any means. I don't make money by doing those news appearances."

He's hoping he will with the play. Otherwise, his career opportunities are, to put it nicely, undefined.

"I don't even know if I'm going to stay in Colorado. This is going to take me around, I'm gonna meet a lot of people, and I'm hoping there might be a possibility of a door opening for me somewhere along the line.

"I'm almost 51. It's not that easy just to say, 'Oh, I think I'll go to college.' I'm not really sure. I'm a fourth-generation Coloradan, and it's going to be tough if I do leave here. I just may need a whole new start as a result of this."

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

Naked Before God Exposing the Hypocrisy of Ted Haggard

* When and where: Opens Thursday, then 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays (through March 22), Bug Theater, 3654 Navajo St.

* Cost: $25

* Information: 1-888-768- 7469

• March 8, 2008

  12:37 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  lilymatha writes:

  As we know, many countries are forbidding the same-sex marriage. However, I think it's really great. I have a friend getting married with the same sex uder the help of the site BiLoves. And they live happily and wonderfully.

• March 10, 2008

  10:31 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Spencer writes:

  You couldn't pay me $25 to watch this thing