Wes Modes:  

Life I was born in the heart of La Habana, Cuba. My mother gave birth to me at the "Hospital del Sagrado Corazon" (Hospital of the Sacred Heart) located in the Vedado district of the city of Havana. Ethnically, I'm mostly Catalan and Spanish Galician. Having been born in Castro's Cuba of the 1970's, I never saw the bustling and prosperous Havana of my parents and grandparents. Instead, I was born in a land where rationing of food and other essentials was grudgingly accepted by a vast majority of the people as a common fact of daily life. This was a land that had once been fairly wealthy, but was now poor and mismanaged. Still I was luckier than most. The brief period of time I spent in Cuba I lived in a great home, located in the "Luyanó" district of Havana, with a wonderful and loving family. My family and I left Cuba in 1980, because of Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution. We left during what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. More than 100,000 people left the island of Cuba during this exodus. Conditions in Cuba had deteriorated so much by 1980 that my parents figured it was better to leave, by whatever means possible, than to stay. And so we left. What awaited us here in the United States was completely unknown to us. School My school days were full of hard-livin', hard-lovin' and, of course, hard drinking. But life in my Gulf Coast town was not exactly hard; like much of the town's population, my father worked at the Texaco refinery and we resided comfortably. I had a happy childhood, but my entrée into manhood was less than graceful. As a teenager, I tended to gain weight, my soft child-blond hair turned brown and unruly, and I developed acne that would scar as well as shape my looks and personality. I became an unwilling member of an elite club of misfits, a man who avoided mirrors because of pitted reflections, knowing that the scars underneath caused by the ones on the surface are the most painfully inflicted. Rejected and made fun of by most of my peers, I sought and found solace in the works of other outcasts -- writers, musicians, artists. When your society rejects you, you do the obvious: You reject it. I felt like an ugly duckling because I didn't fit anyone's notion of beauty. Port Arthur was a one-high-school town, and to be rejected by the school was to be rejected by the town. A culture that puts a premium on marketable masculine beauty has no use for the Wes Modes of the world, and why should it? My kind of beauty can only be captured in its natural state -- candidly or in performance. In front of an audience, I came alive, transforming into a vibrant and seductive entertainer who channeled every honker and shouter I ever heard on the Texas r...Expand for more