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Shut Up, I'm Talking!: Coming Out in Hollywood and Making It to the Middle
Shut Up, I'm Talking! chronicles the life and career of actor and comedian Jason Stuart. It's the funny, poignant story of a gay Jewish boy whose life changed after seeing Funny Girl at a second-run movie theatre in Hollywood. "I thought to myself, I'm in love with Omar Sharif - who am I left to be but Barbra Streisand! And I'm a guy... Oy!" It's about surviving a crazy family who survived the Holocaust and clearing up the wreckage of one's past while learning how to become a man.
Jason has appeared in over 200 films and TV shows and has had a long and varied career, from his coming out in 1993 on the Geraldo Rivera Show to having a major supporting role in the historical drama The Birth of a Nation playing "Joseph Randall" a white, heterosexual, Christian, slave owner in 1891 while being a gay liberal Jew!
As a comedian he has headlined at all the major comedy clubs, appeared twice at prestigious Just for Laughs comedy festivals and did stand-up on Broadway with Joan Rivers and Sandra Bernhard. He was featured in Comedy Central's groundbreaking special Out There, and his own stand-up comedy special Making It to the Middle.
Jason has acted with George Clooney, Faye Dunaway, Angelina Jolie, Angela Lansbury, John Lithgow, Laurie Metcalf, Alexandra Paul, Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marisa Tomei, Jon Voight, Damon Wayans and they are all in the book! His movies include Kindergarten Cop, Lost & Found, Vegas Vacation, Love Is Strange, Tangerine and on some of the most popular TV shows, Love, Sleepy Hollow, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Will & Grace, The Closer, George Lopez, House, Charmed, My Wife & Kids, The Drew Carey Show and Murder, She Wrote. Jason lives alone in Hollywood, takes care of his mom and is still looking for Mr. Right.
He wrote the book with Dan Duffy, a filmmaker and author of The Half Book.
About the Authors:
When you think of one of the most prolific character actors, who's also an outrageously openly gay stand-up comedian, one name comes to mind: Jason Stuart. He has a major role in The Birth of a Nation by filmmaker Nate Parker. Jason has also appeared in the award winning films Hank, Immortal, Tangerine, Love is Strange, Gia, with Kindergarten Cop and Vegas Vacation among his fan favorites. He has wowed TV audiences with guest roles on such shows as Swedish Dicks, Love, Sleepy Hollow, Real Rob, Entourage, The Closer, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, House, Everybody Hates Chris, George Lopez, Will & Grace, Charmed, and as the wildly popular "Dr. Thomas" on My Wife & Kids. As a stand-up comic, you have laughed with him on Gotham Comedy Life, Red Eye with Tom Shillue, One Night Stand Up, Wisecrack, Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, Out There In Hollywood and his own comedy special Making It to the Middle. He currently resides in California... alone again.
Dan Duffy has been working in film, television, and radio for over twenty-five years. In 2002, Dan was diagnosed with stage-three testicular cancer. He wanted to change the way people looked at a cancer diagnosis, so he has blogged extensively for Huffington Post and Medium, and wrote The Half Book: He's Taking His Ball and Going Home.
175 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 12, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 15, 2022
Meandering, incomplete, at times hard to follow, and ultimately unsatisfying memoir of a gay actor and comedian. I had never heard of Jason Stuart before and after checking his IMDB don't think I've ever seen him in anything. He has a very healthy ego and brags quite a bit in the book about his fame and how well he has done, but as you read through the quick summaries of his roles he is essentially a bit player and minor standup comic who doesn't know how to tell a story on paper.
The problems start early when he complains about his family and then claims that he can recall an incident when he is less than 9 months old when his brother hit him with a snowball while he was outside in a stroller. No only does the scene make no sense but it's pretty impossible to recall something from that age. So I took the rest of the book with a grain of salt.
For example very late in the book he suddenly states that at around age 40 he discovered he was dyslexic. Huh? He had been writing jokes and his own comedy special, never mentioned anything about trouble in school years earlier, yet when he got a sitcom script he couldn't make sense of it. The story needed more details and we're left wondering if what he is saying is true.
There are numerous errors in the book. For example he calls the TV show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir "The Ghost and Mrs. Miller." He makes some false claims he failed to look up, such as Geraldo was beating Oprah in the ratings, which are just not true. Some basic online searches from Stuart or his co-author would have helped.
As an actor he's not that great--I looked at his reel and he took a long time to become someone worth watching. He was amazing in Birth of a Nation, didn't look or act like himself at all. So it's ironic that the only major success he's had on screen is playing a straight conservative WASP instead of a gay liberal Jew.
But the worst part is that there are so few real stories in the book beyond his constant complaining about his family. He throws his brother and sister way under the bus in what appears to be an attempt for sympathy but ends up revealing his own jealous nature.
There is almost nothing about working with George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other big names, while many of the biggest stars he acted with don't even get mentioned except on the back cover. It's odd that he thinks we're interested in his adult Orthodox Jewish sister being supposedly so mean to him that he never meets her children, but he says almost nothing about the actual jobs or shows he has done with famous people.
At the same time he mentions a lot of mostly unknown folks in this book for little reason and it appears he may be trying to stick names in simply to get them to buy his book. He thanks any minor person who helped him out or gave him a job, and even goes overboard on his "mentors," who are people he has never met but has seen on screen such as Barbra Streisand. There's a whole chapter on people he liked watching in movies that he considers his "mentors." Who cares?
When he does tell a story in the middle of it he gets distracted and goes off on a tangent or skips back and forth in timelines. Then in the middle of something else he'll say the he had an eating disorder, without any other explanation or details, or that he went to AA meetings, without saying whether he was an alcoholic. It's pretty strange.
The gay aspect of the book is also disappointing. Stuart comes across as the typical stereotyped queen who bitches a lot and criticizes many. He has no problem slamming people he doesn't like, and even outs a couple dead people. He "dated" the handsome Flying Nun star Alejandro Rey, who was very closeted and no one knew about it until Stuart made it public after Rey's death. There are a few other secretly gay celebrities alluded to in this book that he doesn't out, though he tells a strange story about Tom Cruise's manager that is tied to a secret that can't be revealed.
Meanwhile, he blames all of his problems on gay-hating family members or those that mistreat him because he perceives they don't like his out sexuality, when in truth if he looked carefully at his life he is to blame for many of the ways people treated him. It's another case of a gay man refusing to be held accountable for his own intolerance and meanness, then blaming his lack of career on others not liking his very pushy way of forcing his sexuality on others.
So it's an unsatisfying book, too short and lacking a lot of details. Almost nothing about his private life beyond a few slams of men who dropped him, and Stuart is still single today. Maybe he needs to read his own book to see that all the obnoxious talking he has done in the past isn't working and he needs to make some changes, like listening to others instead of telling them to shut up.
The problems start early when he complains about his family and then claims that he can recall an incident when he is less than 9 months old when his brother hit him with a snowball while he was outside in a stroller. No only does the scene make no sense but it's pretty impossible to recall something from that age. So I took the rest of the book with a grain of salt.
For example very late in the book he suddenly states that at around age 40 he discovered he was dyslexic. Huh? He had been writing jokes and his own comedy special, never mentioned anything about trouble in school years earlier, yet when he got a sitcom script he couldn't make sense of it. The story needed more details and we're left wondering if what he is saying is true.
There are numerous errors in the book. For example he calls the TV show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir "The Ghost and Mrs. Miller." He makes some false claims he failed to look up, such as Geraldo was beating Oprah in the ratings, which are just not true. Some basic online searches from Stuart or his co-author would have helped.
As an actor he's not that great--I looked at his reel and he took a long time to become someone worth watching. He was amazing in Birth of a Nation, didn't look or act like himself at all. So it's ironic that the only major success he's had on screen is playing a straight conservative WASP instead of a gay liberal Jew.
But the worst part is that there are so few real stories in the book beyond his constant complaining about his family. He throws his brother and sister way under the bus in what appears to be an attempt for sympathy but ends up revealing his own jealous nature.
There is almost nothing about working with George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other big names, while many of the biggest stars he acted with don't even get mentioned except on the back cover. It's odd that he thinks we're interested in his adult Orthodox Jewish sister being supposedly so mean to him that he never meets her children, but he says almost nothing about the actual jobs or shows he has done with famous people.
At the same time he mentions a lot of mostly unknown folks in this book for little reason and it appears he may be trying to stick names in simply to get them to buy his book. He thanks any minor person who helped him out or gave him a job, and even goes overboard on his "mentors," who are people he has never met but has seen on screen such as Barbra Streisand. There's a whole chapter on people he liked watching in movies that he considers his "mentors." Who cares?
When he does tell a story in the middle of it he gets distracted and goes off on a tangent or skips back and forth in timelines. Then in the middle of something else he'll say the he had an eating disorder, without any other explanation or details, or that he went to AA meetings, without saying whether he was an alcoholic. It's pretty strange.
The gay aspect of the book is also disappointing. Stuart comes across as the typical stereotyped queen who bitches a lot and criticizes many. He has no problem slamming people he doesn't like, and even outs a couple dead people. He "dated" the handsome Flying Nun star Alejandro Rey, who was very closeted and no one knew about it until Stuart made it public after Rey's death. There are a few other secretly gay celebrities alluded to in this book that he doesn't out, though he tells a strange story about Tom Cruise's manager that is tied to a secret that can't be revealed.
Meanwhile, he blames all of his problems on gay-hating family members or those that mistreat him because he perceives they don't like his out sexuality, when in truth if he looked carefully at his life he is to blame for many of the ways people treated him. It's another case of a gay man refusing to be held accountable for his own intolerance and meanness, then blaming his lack of career on others not liking his very pushy way of forcing his sexuality on others.
So it's an unsatisfying book, too short and lacking a lot of details. Almost nothing about his private life beyond a few slams of men who dropped him, and Stuart is still single today. Maybe he needs to read his own book to see that all the obnoxious talking he has done in the past isn't working and he needs to make some changes, like listening to others instead of telling them to shut up.
February 18, 2026
After seeing Jason at a comedy event. I bought the book from him. I enjoyed reading it and now feel I know him personally, which I suppose is the purpose of a memoir.
September 20, 2020
A fun read
This is a fun read from someone who has worked steadily and really hard to have a successful career in Hollywood. He’s charming and clever and gets the tone just right. I read it in one sitting, because it was written in his own voice. You can almost hear him pacing you through the set you before landing the jokes
This is a fun read from someone who has worked steadily and really hard to have a successful career in Hollywood. He’s charming and clever and gets the tone just right. I read it in one sitting, because it was written in his own voice. You can almost hear him pacing you through the set you before landing the jokes
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews