User:Eyesofbabylon/Jeff Key

Jeff Key (born October 15, 1965) is an American playwright, actor, philanthropist, peace activist, and queer civil rights activist. He is also a former Marine and Iraq veteran. His one-man performance piece, The Eyes of Babylon, is based on journal entries he wrote while on tour as a Marine in Iraq, and he has won the Los Angeles' Ticketholder Award for Best Solo Performance (2004) and is an Ovation Award nominee (2004). Since the play's debut in Los Angeles, Key has performed it in theaters across the U.S. including in San Francisco, Denver, Birmingham, Boston, Salt Lake City, and various locations in Kentucky—as well as internationally, including Dublin. A Showtime feature-length documentary, Semper Fi: One Marine's Journey detailing a U.S. Marine’s journey through his childhood in Alabama, military life, and the war in Iraq as a gay man as portrayed in "The Eyes of Babylon" aired first in 2007, and was the Audience Award Winner for Best Documentary at San Francisco's International Film Festival. In 2011, the play was selected to premiere with the NY theater company, 59E59 Theater in their festival, Americas Off-Broadway, featuring the best of American regional theater. Key has two new plays in development.

Key serves on the Board of Directors for Iraq Veterans Against the War, and is the founder of The Mehadi Foundation, a non-profit organization designed to help gay Iraq veterans and Iraq veterans who attempt to self-medicate PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) with drugs and alcohol. This foundation, named for a young Iraqi boy Key met while in Iraq, provides support not only for returning veterans, but also for philanthropic projects that help civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan with concrete supplies such as water. The foundation helps returning veterans to heal through various means, including retreats. Key announced this foundation's creation during a nationally-televised appearance on CNN"s Paula Zahn Now on March 31, 2004, in which he spoke out about his opposition to the occupation of Iraq and publicly shared that he had been discharged from service after revealing his homosexuality in accord with the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Although his ideas about violence, including state-sponsored violence, as an effective tool for conflict resolution have changed, Lance Corporal Jeff Key is still deeply committed to defending defenseless people and supporting his fellow troops.

Biography
Born in Walker County, Alabama, Jeff Key attended public school in the first generation of desegregated classes there. Profoundly affected by racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia still evident in everyday life, Key's writing, activism, and philanthropic activity aspires to promote self-acceptance and takes a stand against all forms of prejudice. As a queer boy, adolescent, and man, he struggled with his internalization of society's homophobia and definition of masculinity. He was raised by deeply religious parents, and his mother, a social science teacher, helped him understand the conflict surrounding the Vietnam War and taught him about the negative effects of racism. His father worked at a coal-burning plant. Key grew up with a lot of poverty surrounding him, and determined as a child that money would not be a problem for him later on. As a high school student, he was in a program for gifted youth, and felt happiest working on creative projects. His uncle, a dentist, was the richest person he knew, and Key sought to emulate him: as a college student, he majored in pre-med and joined a fraternity. During college, Key struggled with addictions, primarily drinking, as he tried to reconcile his queerness (in all its shades) and creative impulse with his wish for social acceptance and material success. He tried majoring in advertising, hoping this would solve the issue of his need for a creative outlet connected to a financially stable career. His addictions, however, eventually forced him out of college. When Key surmounted years of inner conflict and severe depression, he affirmed that his happiness lay in liberating his creative drive. He stopped drinking, and enrolled as a theater student at the University of Alabama and got his bachelor's degree in 1997. The depth of his descent into chaos and turmoil in his twenties instilled in him a staunch conviction to take life on life's terms, without drugs or alcohol.

As a child, California was a magical place for Key when he visited his grandparents who lived there. With high hopes, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. Auditioning and landing small roles in commercials and community theater, he faced ongoing financial difficulty, and craved something more fulfilling. This, in addition to his yearning for "brotherhood," led him to respond to an ad pitched to enlist in the Marines. In 2000, at the age of thirty-four, he joined the Marines and went to boot camp. Though the rules were bent slightly to accommodate his age, Key was forced to keep his homosexuality a secret because of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, his unit made preparations for activation and in March, 2003, deployed to Eastern Iraq. Two months later, Key was flown back to the United States for surgery, and because of his concerns about the things he had observed and his growing convictions that the war's motives and the coalition's tactics were ineffective in thwarting terrorism he decided to leave the military.

On March 31, 2004, he went on CNN as Paula Zahn's guest to announce that not only was he publicly owning his homosexuality and therefore being duly discharged because of the ban on gays in the military, he was also speaking out about his opposition to the occupation of Iraq. His straight buddies in the Marines had always known that he was gay but said nothing because his commitment to them and to the country was never in question. He became active in the anti-war movement, and was Cindy Sheehan's bodyguard during her vigil outside Bush's ranch in Texas.

Jeff often speaks at high schools, businesses, colleges and universities, peace groups, and churches about effective non-violent conflict resolution and continues to perform The Eyes of Babylon, a play he wrote about his war experiences in Iraq, on national and international stages. He has more stories to tell about his journey, and is developing another one-man performance piece and a play with several characters, and journals daily. He married Adam Nelson on August 4, 2007, and they live in Salt Lake City, Utah with their two Labradors, Sydney and Willie.

The Eyes of Babylon
When Key would be asked informally to describe his war experiences, he'd read aloud excerpts from journal entries that he had written while in Iraq, rather than debate the war. When Key and Yuval Hadadi met for the first time in New York at a Crunch gym, neither man knew anything about the other, and as their conversation continued, Key ended up reading to him from his journal. Hadadi, an Israeli director, was spellbound and, as a gay man and himself a veteran of the war in Lebanon, related to much of what Key read. Their meeting turned out to be fortuitous; Hadadi had the idea that Key should develop his journal into a play, and worked with him to develop the award-winning and critically-acclaimed monologue, The Eyes of Babylon.

Key performs the play against a backdrop of video and photos he took while he was in Iraq. The play is Key's way of speaking out about a war that he has come to believe is immoral and illegal. It also echoes a sentiment repeated countless times by war vets and in works such as Hell and Back Again, a documentary about an Afghanistan veteran, and Black Watch, a play by Gregory Burke for the National Theatre of Scotland—that a soldier's not fighting for their country, they're fighting for the guy next to them. Critics from the L.A. Times declared The Eyes of Babylon a "critics' choice" and "a poetic depiction worthy of Ginsberg." When award-winning producer, Eda Godel Hallinan, saw the play performed in Los Angeles, she decided it deserved greater exposure and arranged to produce it as a Showtime documentary. Vince DiPersio directed Semper Fi: One Marine's Journey and it aired on the network for the first time in 2007. Key's mission through this play is to motivate people to take action, to accept themselves and realize that their imagined liabilities can be assets—to draw strength from their oddities, as he has learned to draw from his intense sensitivity.

Works
The Eyes of Babylon, 2004