This gay man's riveting memoir explores addiction, drug smuggling, and Studio 54

Louie Mandrapilias’s memoir Flew Too High is a harrowing and compulsive read. It tells the story of a young gay man from Shreveport, Louisiana, who falls in with drug dealers and users in New York City and becomes a drug courier in India and South America, facing extreme dangers along the way.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

It takes readers from the high life of Studio 54 in the late 1970s to a spiritual center in India to attempts to evade police, and it offers a frank portrait of addiction. It also tells the story of Mandrapilias’s difficulties and eventual reconciliation with his traditional Greek-American family.

It’s full of memorable characters, including Mandrapilias’s father, “Nick the Greek,” a businessman with some shady side hustles; Govind, “a Tom of Finland drawing come to life,” with whom the author shares sex and drugs; Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a charismatic and controversial guru; Shakti, a warm and sympathetic woman Mandrapilias encounters in India; and many more.

Mandrapilias, who lives in Los Angeles, was inspired to revisit his past partly by an acting class he took. Eight years ago, at age 60, he decided to try acting; he has spent much of his life as a graphic designer, including stints as an art director withThe Advocate’s former parent company, with contributions to The Advocate, Out, HIV Plus, and Alyson Books.

“In that first acting class, my instructor wanted me to put together a three-minute monologue, and he said you can pull something from an old film or a play or whatever, but it’s better if you write something original,” he says. “And I came up with this conversation that’s in the book still, between me and my father, my father explaining to me why he couldn’t be there for me as a child, why I felt rejected and all of that. And once I wrote that, it was like, Oh, wait, maybe I can write.”

Flew Too High: A gay drug smuggler's transcendent odyssey in the heyday of Studio 54Courtesy BookBaby

He started writing Flew Too High in earnest in March 2020, when the world went into lockdown because of COVID-19. “I’ve got this story that I’ve buried inside of me for 40-plus years, and so I started putting down pen to paper and then the keyboard and all of a sudden this coming-of-age memoir just poured out of me,” he says.

Writing the book became his job for a year. “I’m so grateful that that period of time,” he says. “I know the whole world shut down and it was not pleasant, but I happened to make best use of it.”

Not that it was always easy. “I really had to look at some of my past behaviors when I was high on heroin and other substances, and I had so little regard for myself and for other people,” says Mandrapilias, who now has been sober for decades. “And so as I was writing, I would often have to push away from the keyboard because it’s like, I don’t know that I can put this down on paper. I’m exposing myself too much.”

He did about 100 revisions of the book. “I’d never written anything before, and I worked with a handful of editors because initially it was like, OK, this is good, but I know it’s not polished enough. I know we haven’t uncovered everything. And I would have this friend read it or this writing coach read it, and everyone would give me notes.”

“And so the story is basically exactly what I started with,” he says. “But there’s so many little sidebars and paths that we followed and that I incorporated into the story that I feel like it’s so much more complete. I really immersed the reader into the world at that time and, including news clippings, what was happening politically to the gay community. It’s not just my tunnel vision of ‘I’m here in New York and I get on a plane.’ It’s much broader than that.”

He's developing a screenplay based on Flew Too High, and he’s working on a sequel, which will also deal with what was happening in the gay community — the emergence of a rare cancer in gay men in 1981. “It’s all about my continuing battle with addiction and how did I deal with getting sober at the time when people were just starting to die from AIDS and I knew I was next,” says Mandrapilias, who is a long-term survivor of HIV. He has the book about half written.

He has two other books outlined as well. One is about his father being a guerrilla fighter in the mountains of Greece during World War II, and the other is a multigenerational saga of the women in his family.

Flew Too High has been well received by critics and readers. Writing his first book, Mandrapilias was afraid of being seen as an amateur, but that didn’t happen. “What means more to me more to me than anything is that I have gotten this amazing feedback that ‘this is a beautiful story,’ and ‘you’re a beautiful storyteller,’” he says.

He has also gotten positive feedback from his family. His parents are deceased, but his sisters and his conservative women cousins have read the book and approved of it. They were able to understand him “on a whole new level,” he says.

“That’s what we have to do sometimes, is teach people that this is what it’s like to live as a gay man, as a trans person, as whatever, a marginalized person,” he says. “And we’re human beings, and you can have empathy for me. You can understand my struggle, and maybe you don’t have to be so afraid of me because we’re all just human beings trying to coexist, right?”

Flew Too High is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Baby, and all independent book retailers. Find out more at FlewTooHigh.com.