As an actor he’s been the public face of AT&T, Crest, McDonald’s and other family-friendly corporations in America. In his time, he has performed alongside Will Smith, Russell Crowe and Michael Caine. So all appears innocent and above board as we chat over our coffee.
But anyone tuning into the conversation would be in for a jolt. Listen closely and you’ll hear the talk turn to fetishes, sex addiction, prostitution and male rape. We’re discussing the time Sterry was made to dress in the clothes of a woman’s dead son and was paid to have sex with her.
In his book Chicken, published by Edinburgh’s Canongate, and his one-man show of the same name, running for three weeks at the Assembly Rooms, he tells the story of how, as a naive 17-year-old, he became a prostitute catering to rich women in Hollywood.
Chicken is the slang word for a teenager who engages in indiscriminate sexual practices for money: the book is subtitled “The twisted adventures of a Hollywood toy boy”. Against the teenage hormonal thrill of being paid to sleep with wealthy and willing women, he sets the bleak truth of social dysfunction, exploitation and looming violence that is the true cost of the sex industry.
It would take 20 years, a collapsed marriage and more than one scrape with death before Sterry could say he had recovered. In respect of the man who raped him when he needed a bed in Los Angeles, he says his show is a nightly form of retribution. “Going up on stage and portraying that guy is the ultimate revenge,” he says. “It’s so incredibly gratifying.”
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In the early 1970s, Sterry found himself homeless as a new student at Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart College. Having just left boarding school, it didn’t occur to him that his new place of education would not have dorms. He arrived, registered, then realised he had nowhere to stay.
His parents had recently split up and were now more concerned with their new partners than with their son’s sudden predicament. Uncertain what to do, he wandered into town. That was where he was befriended by the man who cooked him a steak, gave him a bed for the night and raped him.
After making his escape, bleeding, frightened and robbed of what little cash he had, Sterry met another man. Though not the same physical threat, this one was to cause an even more profound injury. He was the pimp who would introduce the teenager to life as a prostitute, serving the lonely rich women of LA.
“A smile slides across my face, and I’m the star of my own sex movie,” Sterry writes about his first sexual encounter for cash. The rot had set in. When he was in his thirties, it would take him three years of hypnotherapy to undo the damage.
He tells me he developed his own form of treatment. Once a week he would drive to a multiplex in LA, spend the whole day watching movies and weep and weep.
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“It was emptying all this stored up anger, rage, pain and hurt inside of me,” he says. Writing the book was further therapy still, and he is bright enough to realise that in some ways he has turned from, as he puts it, “whore to media whore”.
“I used to work in a strip joint called Chippendales in New York City surrounded by naked flesh,” he says. “But what was interesting is, as these men were taking off their clothes, they revealed very little. Their bodies were tanned, plucked and worked out so they were made for display: whereas the inner workings of the psyche are not necessarily made for display.”
His book and performance might delve into the darkest areas of human experience, but in person there is only one word for him: happy. He giggles his way through his memories. Has he always been this way? “No,” he says without hesitation. “If you met me five years ago, I was not like this. I had a cheery nature, but it was tempered by a terrible rage. I would get in very dark and foul moods that lasted for long periods. Then I realised how lucky I am to be alive.
“It’s a great blessing because I should be dead many times over. If I hadn’t been agile, I could have ended up chopped up in some guy’s freezer. I’m leading such a charmed life at this point. If you go through trauma and come out the other side and heal yourself, you have an appreciation for life.”
His blissful demeanour only emphasises that, when it comes to sex, you cannot judge by appearances. The many people Sterry has met through promoting his book, performing his show or working for a homeless youth project in San Francisco have confirmed how much this is true. “In our culture, we expect our sexual predators to be pock-marked and have oily hair and greasy raincoats,” he says. “That’s not who they are. They’re the nicest people in the world, some of them.”
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He seems well adjusted today, can it really be that Sterry has got the past out of his system? In the book, he writes about Jade, a fellow “industrial sex technician” with whom he was infatuated until a heroin overdose killed her. Sterry was never into heroin himself (“I never shot anything into my body”), but he did become a cocaine addict while working as an Mc at Chippendales and he has been labelled as a “problematic hyper-sexualist” — a sex addict to you and me.
His first wife left him because of his pathological infidelity. “I was always having a secret life,” he says with candour. “I was unfaithful to her and sometimes I would tell her about it, but it was so hard for her to hear those things that I just stopped telling her. I couldn’t stop myself. I was so enmeshed in this self- destructive behaviour.”
His second wife, he says, is “more saint than human”. But can he really be sure that his sex addiction is behind him? “I still get urges and impulses to have sex that is self-destructive, but now I have a way of coping with it so I don’t succumb to them. It took a long time for me to get to a point when I could be sexually intimate with somebody I liked.
“I had to have a persona to do that sex work. I had to be a lover-stud-guy, like a porn actor in my own mind. In my civilian life, I’d hear that voice coming back into my head. It made it a performance, not an intimacy. It’s still a challenge. It took me years to fully disintegrate those two different parts of my sexual nature.”
Next in line from Sterry is a book about his Chippendales years, then, if the lawyers allow, he will complete the trilogy with an expose of sexual malpractice inside the Hollywood studios. “I think this world is in a lot of sexual pain,” he says. As we leave the cafe, it’s hard to look at our fellow customers with the same degree of innocence. Who knows what secrets lie beneath their genteel exterior?
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Chicken — The True Story of a Teenage Gigolo, Assembly Rooms, August 1-25, 0131 226 0000. David Henry Sterry also appears with Peter Hill at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Charlotte Square, August 23, Book Festival 0131 624 5050