The fashion photographer who was homeless for six years

hen I graduated from the University of Charleston, I didn’t foresee myself living homeless for a large period of my adult life. To begin with, it started out as wanderlust. After I graduated, I decided to backpack around Europe. I’d always wondered if I could become a model, but it wasn’t until I headed to Brussels that I got signed. So began a four-year stint modelling around Europe. This was 1984. I walked for Versace, Moschino, Missoni, designers like that. I did French Vogue, too. I was OK, but I wasn’t the cat’s miaow. But it instilled in me a new sort of lifestyle, living hand to mouth, absorbing different cultures. I moved back to New York via San Francisco when I heard my father was dying. I was 29, and I had been modelling on/off for four years. I got signed to a few low-key agencies in New York and juggled this with some waitering. I also started an acting course. I had a bit of money and some savings from my modelling and moved into an single-room occupancy – a small room without running water and a communal bathroom. It looked like an Edward Hopper building from the outside, but not so much inside. Still, it was very affordable – $200 a month – and in West Chelsea before it was trendy. I was pretty happy. From 1996 onwards I got sporadic work as an actor. I went to an extras audition for a Woody Allen film and played an art gallery owner in Celebrity. My next break was in Sex and the City as Carlo, the “fabulously wealthy billionaire boyfriend with a tiny penis”. I had a run of luck with that. Mark Reay returns to his former rooftop home in this clip from Homme Less. In 2000, my father died, so my need to stay in New York wasn’t mandatory. That’s when the wanderlust sprung up again, so I did the proverbial second run as a model, except this time I was in my 40s. Now I was older, with salt-and-pepper hair, but much more marketable. I moved around Europe again, and started taking photographs, to see how that went. I knew the fashion world, so I’d go to the shows and hang around backstage taking pictures. People knew me from my modelling and I got a few decent shots. I figured I might have an eye for it and maybe I could make some money from it. I was shot for Arena, did some TV work, stuff like that. It sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? But I never got the campaigns. That’s where the money is. I foolishly believed I would make a decent income as a model – I was signed to Ford and Wilhelmina in New York; they’re both big agencies – but it’s very hard to make a living from modelling. No one really talks about it. By this point, I was back to living on savings. I got money through work as a waiter, and I made a few bucks when I sold a photostory to a website, but I was still subletting tiny rooms in New York. I had a couple of photography projects in mind, so I went back to that. One project involved going to the south of France, where the super-wealthy hung out, and working as a photographer-for-hire. I thought it was a great idea, so I set off to stay with a friend who lived in Juan-les-Pins with just my camera and my laptop. Like a lot of my ideas, it was a good one that produced no results. After a few weeks, worried that I’d overstayed my welcome, I left for St Tropez with just my belongings and wound up sleeping in the hills. It wasn’t so bad to start. I would store my laptop and cameras in a duffel bag in a garbage bag and hide it in the bushes. I had a small bedroll with me so I could sleep. I would get up at 6am, go to the park and head to the restaurants that had those outdoor sinks. I’d wash myself down, wash my t-shirt or shirt so it could dry in the sun and slick back my hair with water and go sit in a cafe. Because I had a certain look, no one really questioned it. I just looked like a well-off man in shorts and a T-shirt. I had the confidence to just sit there, and I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.