This Is Worcester 192: Nick Zwirblia

This Is Worcester is a program hosted and produced by community activist, Bill Coleman. Bill interviews Nick Zwirblia, author of "The Boy in the Closet, a Memoir, Volume I: How I Stole a Million Dollars' Worth of Art & Survived Priests, a Hitman, Stockholm Syndrome & AIDS". When he was drugged and raped by an art teacher—after being molested in early childhood by not one but two priests—Nick Zwirblia made himself a promise: if he was going to be sexually targeted, he was going to make it profitable. And he did. A lover of the finer things who grew up in part in public housing, he also swore he would fill his life with antiques and art. And he did, stealing more than a million dollars-worth before he was thirty. And by the age of thirty-three, he was back in Worcester—and where he'd sworn he'd never be again—in public housing. Nick's life story is a complicated, upsetting, and inspiring look at what it was like to come out as a gay man, in the 1970s.