Nobody told David he had autism

Sunni Bean, April 2022

Before a shoot, David Phelps, 34, has every angle, color, and pose mapped out in his mind.

For the photo shoot on Sunday, April 24th, 2022 - for the hip hop duo Ehrie - Phelps envisioned a four-part concept: starting with two shots in the daylight: with soft neutral colors matching the room’s color palette and rigid poses to emphasize structure and lines. Then, he would follow that with two more shots- in unnatural lighting, and with outlandish poses.

“With different colors everywhere filling the room, so it's almost like you're experiencing the same room but on acid,” Phelps said.

But on the day of the shoot, the make-up artist has a different vision - she wants bold, artificial make-up - and had a different understanding of the pecking order. She didn’t take directions.

Phelps, who has been a photographer for 14 years, said he “always leaves a little room in his brain” for the unexpected. But this cut straight to the core of his vision— and the frustration showed.

Phelps has autism, and that means that he likes order more than most. Rules, patterns, plans. Feeling bombarded by stimuli, and unable to filter out the extraneous elements, is at the core of autism, and the trusty solution is to control novelty and ensure predictability.

As a kid, Phelps often ate in a separate room because he was so bothered by his family’s chewing. As an adult, he keeps ear plugs attached to a carabiner on his belt loop. He takes the same train to work everyday, and eats a lot of fast food. 

“[Because] when you order a burger from McDonald’s, it’s going to be a burger from McDonald’s,” Phelps said. “There's not going to be a lot of variation on that. And there won’t be any surprise textures or anything like that. Because I have gotten to the point where if there’s a surprise texture I don’t expect in the food, I can’t eat anymore. Because it’s gross.”

But while he has difficulty processing the unexpected, and tuning out the background noise, Phelps, when he’s fascinated, manifests an extraordinary focus. Patterns and visuals often suck him in, and it can be hard to snap out.

In high school, when he discovered Lord of the Rings, he used flashcards to learn elvish, and could quote the movies word for word. Soon his friends were begging him to stop his hours-long talks about the series.

“My parents actually had to limit the amount of times that I could watch the movies in a week because I was just watching them over and over and over and over again,” Phelps said.

It was years later he stumbled across photography: when he knew that he had found his true love. He always found patterns of light fascinating; now he could harness them.

The discovery was by chance - he was in charge of posing the model when the photographer got sick on set - but his experience manipulating the camera transferred easily from in front of it, to behind it. Then he moved to New York, and his career took off. He was the creative director for Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, shooting their ad campaigns for Sephora, photographing over 200 of lip shade combinations and directing all of their visual content. He shot for RuPaul’s Drag Race, America’s Next Top Model, and a host of high-profile freelancing gigs. Now, he’s about to start a new job at a film production company. 

At the shoot on Sunday morning, Phelps’s frustration had as much to do with the bohemian chaotic clutter of the styling room as it did with the make-up artist’s unyielding whims. In his work in the industry, Phelps understands now that some of his work has been taken advantage of. He knows to be more careful when people overstep boundaries.

But also the shoot’s atmosphere was a clear trigger for sensory overload. The Crown Heights apartment stank of marijuana since Phelps arrived, and the bed was covered with fluffy hats and statement sunglasses, and more—a silver chain-link belt spelled out the word ‘pornstar’. Hip-hop blared from speakers beneath one of two flat-screen TV that were also on, playing cartoons and infomercials. The music alternated between mid-2000s hits and the identical twin’s original music- who were the subjects of afternoon’s shoot. Two rooms down, the studio homed tamagotchis, Rubix cubes and swatches of glittery fabrics lay spread across a clear, silicon table in the center, as newly lighted incense chased the pungent smell of weed out of the air. The identical twins that were the day’s models, each with a trim beard and a freshly shaven head, padded around in sheer hosiery and pajama shorts, squeezing in showers and additional spliffs. Phelps set up his gear. 

The boyfriend of one of the models picked up one of the large yellow hand-shaped pillows amongst the plush toys on the bed, and decided to reshape its foot-long fingers so they flicked off the room– then wrapped it around his shoulders. Every so often, he stopped his running monologue about Christian Dior, to give directions to the people who filtered in. Although he didn’t any clear role or title, people obeyed him anyways due to his charisma.

McClain Andre, Phelps’s roommate, ex, and that day’s costume designer, saw Phelp’s warning signs of overwhelm. McClain steered Phelps out of the apartment on an impromptu coffee run.  This kind of support, grounded in knowledge about his neurodivergence, is still pretty new to Phelps.  

—

Phelps grew up in a strict Pentecostal Christian family, frequently moving to new homes across the eastern seaboard. His mother died of cancer when he was a child, and his father was a minister who moved from church to church. As a teen, Phelps attended a Christian boarding school.

Phelps knew he was attracted to men since his first crush on a boy in second grade. But when his parents found out not long after he had graduated from boarding school, he ran away. He was 16. His brother called him to tell him they knew. He told Phelps to leave. “I packed up everything I could in trash bags and threw them in my car and drove South.”

He left with $81, and drove until he had no more money for gas.

“I ended up getting a job working at a bar called New Beginnings, ironically. It was a gay bar in Johnson City, Tennessee, working under the table.”

 He knew anything was better than home.  

“It was just like, well, I could kill myself or I could try out the world and then see what happens,” he said.

Independent life was hard for a young, broke, gay 17-year-old in the South. Not knowing about his neurodivergence only made it harder.

“I went through most of my life just feeling kind of like an alien,” he told me. “Like everybody else had a rulebook. And I didn’t have it.”

 In his years as a model and photographer, he often didn’t pick up on toxic cues; like when he was given accommodation in lieu of pay. He said alarm bells rang when one of his shots for a reality TV show blew up, and he never saw a dime. It was hard to account for his own behaviour sometimes too, which put a strain on relationships with friends and employers alike.

“I got into screaming matches with my boss over little things that just kind of set me off, and then I’m done. I’m very upset. And then I’m very emotional, and I’m crying and I’m screaming at them.”

He was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder: his special interests categorized as manic episodes, his burnout as depression. Phelps eventually checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for 10 days. He felt really good there– so much so that he got the room number tattooed behind his ear, and returned again later when he needed it. But it was later that he learned he thrived in that environment because of the structure. It was scheduled and precise, without the background noise.

He only learned that he had autism in 2020. That Spring, Phelps’s brother took the test for autism, after his girlfriend came across the condition in a psychology class and put the pieces together.

“But then he called me up and goes, ‘the whole time I was taking the test, I was like, this sounds more like David than it does me’,” Phelps recounted his brother saying.

A few days after he received his own diagnosis, his father reached out on Fathers Day with a half-apology for being a bad Dad, Phelps said. Phelps felt forgiving, and decided to tell them the revelatory news.

“I was just like, oh my gosh, it must have been really hard to be a parent of two kids with autism not even know it,” Phelps said. He was floored by their response.

“My stepmom was like, ‘Oh, is that like Asperger's?’ I was like, ‘Yes. We don't use that term, but yes.’ And she was, ‘Oh, yeah. No, they told us you have that when you were five.’ I was like, ‘What? Well, nobody told me.’”

He also learned that before he entered boarding school, they had informed the school, and the whole student body and faculty briefed on how to treat a student with disabilities, something he had never identified himself as.

But while his parents denied his autism, Phelps embraces it. 

He started learning concepts: information-dumping, masking, stimming. He didn’t know that there were words for these things before. 

“Masking is basically when we pick up on things in the ways that we act around other people that make them uncomfortable or get a negative response. And so people either deliberately or slowly learn how to fake being normal in order to make other people comfortable. And so some people are better than others, but I can convince people that I am totally normal and neurotypical for periods of time in order to keep everyone from being uncomfortable.” 

“A lot of times, especially as I'm going through this journey, I’m kind of figuring out that masking person that I thought I was isn't actually me,” said Phelps.

“He's very honest about everything that he learns about himself,” said his roommate McClain Andre, back in their shared apartment’s art room, with mannequins dressed in Andre’s latest dress designs. “And just the longer we live together, the more we can just put it all out there.”

Putting words to his own peculiar habits and behaviours has been liberating, Phelps told me. 

He knows to be more direct, and to ask others to be too. He notices when he’s information-dumping about his potted plants, and he hires a lawyer to enforce ADA laws at his last company. And he’s unmasking more, and letting himself find pleasure in unconventional postures.

–

As Andre led Phelps back from the bodega coffee break to the identical twin’s photo shoot, Phelps was spinning through the possibilities, and began to sort out a new plan. “I'm mentally prepared for a different concept,” he said. He said it a few more times, almost like it was a mantra. 

The makeup artist had gone with a “lava lamp” look, with fluorescent blobs of green, pink, and purple across the twin’s eyes and cheeks. But Phelps said he was prepared to work with it. He was mentally prepared for a new concept. He said he would base it on her, and throw out the natural look. 

When he started shooting, Phelps was calm. He found his flow. 

“Can you put this leg up, this one down?” He directed towards the twins. “ Not you, the other one! No, and the other leg!”

He moved with determination, concentration and confidence.

“Let me demonstrate, hold my camera,”

And then, he found the shot. He was in himself again.

“Gorgeous! I need you to lower your arm a little bit. Beautiful! Keep doing that! Just keep doing that!”

—-

David Phelps (left) and McClain Andre, taking a breather from the photoshoot. Sunni Bean, 2022

David Phelps on a walk near his house. He likes walking while talking. Sunni Bean. 2022.