Ep.65-Dealer to Healer: Choosing Love over Shame with Sean Hemeon

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele.

We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Sean Hemeon is an award-winning actor, writer, an abstract, expressionist painter. He has appeared in 9 1 1 Criminal Minds, true blood, which I loved in cws husbands.

Sean began his career as an art gallery director in Santa Monica before transitioning to a full-time artist. His work has been exhibited in galleries across Los Angeles as a writer. Sean’s forthcoming book, the Good Little Drug, Lord, is an Ode to Redemption Recovery and the Mother Son Bond. Ultimately uplifting memoir about a gay Mormon drug dealing informant for the federal government.

That [00:01:00] sounds really interesting. Originally from Northern Virginia, Sean now resides in Los Angeles with his husband and their two Boston Terriers, Ludo and Gusgus. He’s the recipient of WBCs Lgbtqiaa Plus Writers Fellowship and has published works in Beyond Queer Words after a decades long absence.

He recently completed his BA in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, and this year marks 20 years of Sean’s sobriety. Please join me in welcoming Sean. Hi, Sean. Yay. Yay. So excited to chat with you, by the way. I love True Bloods. Such a good show. Let’s do It was fun to work on was such. Yes, it’s It’s awesome.

Awesome show. I was wondering if you could just tell the audience a little bit about how you got to writing the good Little Drug, Lord.

Sean: How did I get to writing it? Well, you know, well, okay. [00:02:00] There is a very clear response to that. Okay. For me that I will share.

But I got there creatively. Just, you know, by the last 20 years, just continuing to write. I’ve always been a person who’s journaled. I’ve journaled since my teen years, so journaling and writing has always been a part of my life. And I’ve been writing all kinds of different things. One man shows screenplays, other writing things.

So I’ve always been writing. And then it was, it was the push at UVA working with my professors who are all published authors that sort of just kind of ushered me into this next phase. But, but why now and why, you know, 20 years later the story is so, I mean, gay Mormon drug dealing narc for the federal government.

I mean, so I, it seems like,

Gissele: where do you start? Why don’t we start with the Mormonism? So you were raised Mormon.

Sean: I was raised Mormon. Not in Utah though. I am from Northern [00:03:00] Virginia. There are big Mormon wards lots of, you know wonderful Mormons.

And that’s where I was raised. And with, I have six other siblings. I’m the middle child of seven. Wow. The thing that’s slightly different about my family is my father never was, nor never will be. Well, he’s passed on, but it was never Mormon. we were raised by him, but also by the other fathers of the church wards

Doing like the Boy Scouts, all that kind of stuff. Still, I’m sure it’s more acceptable now, but like having a non-Mormon father was low key, like shameful, like ugh, that that poor Hemeon family, how, you know? So we felt that, but it didn’t matter. I was devoted to my mother.

My mother was my person and she very much made me her person. You know, little, little gay boys we’re emotional. and my father wasn’t giving my mom much. Poor guy was exhausted trying to, raise a family of seven. So you could imagine how that’s a big family.

Gissele: Yeah.

Sean: I

Gissele: mean mm-hmm.

Sean: I have two kids

Gissele: and