Paul Jacek
Performer, stand-up comedian, and author Paul Jacek shares a remarkable life shaped by humor, loss, survival, and reinvention. After enduring childhood bullying and a painful outing that initially brought rejection from his family, Paul found strength in performance while also confronting alcoholism, achieving lasting sobriety in 1982. His life changed profoundly with the loss of his longtime partner, Jim, to AIDS, followed by Paul’s own HIV diagnosis and a life-threatening illness. Given only weeks to live, he turned his experience into the autobiographical one-man show Secrets of a Beverly Hills Shampoo Boy and defied the prognosis. His path has since taken him from aviation to the film industry and back to the stage, carrying forward a message of resilience, authenticity, and finding humor even through life’s darkest chapters.