The audience of his one-man show “Fox Chase Boy” is laughing, they’re shaking their heads.
Regaling them in the cadence of Northeast Philadelphia, he’s speaking their language — the Phillies, the Eagles, cheesesteaks.
Big, tight families, working-class childhoods, and funny stories. Argeros knows how to tell a funny story, f-bombs and all.
But he’s got another story, and it’s also what much of the audience has come to hear: “The last thing I want to talk to you about.”
About how, as a boy, he was sexually assaulted by a pedophile priest called “one of the Archdiocese’s most brutal abusers” in a 2005 grand jury report.
“I’m not trying to convince you of anything,” Argeros tells the crowd, “I’m telling you what happens to kids that get raped. They disappear.”
But Gerad Argeros ultimately did not let himself be disappeared.
And his story — of survival — that he has shared with audiences in Philadelphia and New York is about to be heard further, and in a big way.
The documentary
Fox Chase Boy, a film based on Argeros’ one-man performances, is set to be screened in three prestigious film festivals in Europe and the United States in the coming weeks.
Two of those festivals, the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic and DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, are both Academy Award-qualifier events. The third, Double Exposure held in Washington, D.C., is the United States’ only film festival dedicated to investigative reporting.
Fox Chase Boy is entered in the short film category. A longer version was shown last year at a showcase of the Independence Public Media Foundation in West Philadelphia.
A powerful 26 minutes, Fox Chase Boy combines footage from Argeros’ shows with conversations with his old friends and family, including Argeros’ oldest son, Ames.
When the film was being made, the boy was about the same age as Argeros was when the abuse started.
Philadelphia — its teams, its food, and Argeros’ deep affection for all of it — has a starring role.
“I’m honored that people want to experience this thing that we made,” Argeros said. “I am just sort of shocked. I was not convinced that this was going to get anywhere past YouTube.”
The film is about trauma, but co-producer and co-director Kaya Dillon said the humor in Fox Chase Boy approaches it in a more disarming way.
“We’re able to bring people into the conversation in a way where there’s less assumptions, less preconceived notions because it’s funny. It’s not only super heavy and sad,” said Dillon. “It’s odd to use comedy to talk about sexual abuse, but Gerad found this kind of tightrope.”
An altar boy in the 1980s
Argeros spent much of his life finding a way to talk about the unspeakable things he and so many other boys endured.
Argeros was an altar boy with St. Cecilia Church in Northeast Philadelphia when, at age 11, he was raped by priest James Brzyski. He lived a block from the church and, as a newspaper carrier, had to return to the priest’s residence every day. The abuse continued until he was 13.
Decades later, a Philadelphia grand jury said Brzyski abused as many as 100 children in the 1970s and 1980s. He was thrown out of the priesthood but eluded prosecution due to the statute of limitations. He died in a Texas motel room in 2017. It was a devastating chapter in a much larger Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.
Stolen Childhoods, a 2017 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, told the story of Brzyski, his crimes, and some of victims. Argeros spoke out publicly for the first time in that story, having struggled all his life with what was done to him. Some of Brzyski’s victims were dead by the time it appeared. James Cunningham, another Fox Chase boy, died by suicide that year. James Spoerl, also from the neighborhood, died in 2016 after years of drug use. John Delaney, another victim who appears in the film, died of a drug overdose in 2022.
Argeros is a survivor. Now 53, he lives with his wife and three children in Brooklyn. He works as a leader in a youth soccer organization, had a career in the restaurant business, and has been a performing artist for years.
But his survival has been hard-won. He’s been in therapy now much of his adult life. He recalled one PTSD attack as a young man. He was with friends. His temperature spiked.
“I was, like, on fire, I was screaming, ‘He got me! He got me!’” he said.
When it passed and he opened his eyes, a young woman who was in the room, herself a rape survivor, had tears in her eyes. “She said, ‘Tell us what happened.’”
His abuser’s death brought no closure. Quite the opposite.
“It was cold comfort. It was like now he’s elusive in a different way,” Argeros said. “I never get to confront this guy. I get to sit with the same thing I’ve been sitting with my whole life which is this insistent, invasive presence of this guy. But now he’s beyond the grave, laughing because he never got caught.”
The performer
But after Brzyski’s death, Argeros began to tell his own story. He claimed it. In 2019, he started doing his one-man shows.
“I was watching my friends die,” he said, “and I know a handful of other guys that have never come forward with their experience. I honestly thought, let me do something other than sit with this. Let me do the thing that I know how to do that might make a little bit of difference for me and a little bit of difference for somebody who else sees it.”
He stood before his audience naked — literally. He made cracks about his penis. He joked about people he knew in the audience and about himself. When he got dressed, he wore a red jacket and white and red sneakers — the colors of his Fox Chase soccer uniform and his altar boy vestments. He made his audience laugh plenty. And he told his story.
As a film, even more people will get to hear it.
“I made this for my neighborhood, really,” the Fox Chase boy said. “I made it for the families of these guys that passed away and the people that were affected by this in my community that had to put it somewhere and store it somewhere. And I made it for the people who say, ‘Even if it’s not appropriate, I want this conversation.’
“I made it for the people that need to have this conversation because I know I did.”
As he says in Fox Chase Boy: “Silence is how they win.”