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Outside Magazine November 2003
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Beastmaster (cont.)

THE NIPPLE CRISIS

What creative licenses do you take while filming?
My last show, with Disney, was called Going Wild with Jeff Corwin. Disney executives would actually say, "Pretend to be hurt! Fall down a cliff! Be more this! Be more that!" I'm very lucky now—I don't get that from Animal Planet.

I understand the Experience has a significant gay following.
Yes, there's a gay magazine called Instinct, and recently I made its "men we'd love to convert" list. I have no problems with it. I think it's great. It would be terrific if we could get the Queer Eye guys to come on the show and do a Jeff Corwin makeover.

You have a signature shirt that, if I may say so, is rather tight.
Not anymore. It's true, I used to wear a shirt on the show that was this sheer, skin-tight wicking thing. It was awesome. The problem was there was too much criticism about my nipples. Apparently, they were sticking out through the shirt. We had a little market-testing meeting with the Animal Planet executives. They were doing it as a PowerPoint presentation, and the title of one slide was "Is it cold in here, or is it just me?" They said, "Jeff, we're getting some provocative inquiries about your nipples. Some people find it distracting." Whoa! How did you handle it?
I pretended to be really, really hurt. I went, "OK, um, I'll work on that. It's just that I suffer from this medical condition called gynecomastia. I've had this surgery to reduce my man-breasts." It was dead silence in the room. I think one of the executives actually started to cry. Finally I laughed and said, "All right, let's switch to a different shirt!"

So there's been an official Jeff Corwin uniform upgrade?
The tight little number is out, and I now wear an Ex Officio button-down shirt. I look like the colonel in Bridge on the River Kwai.

You have a special snake stick you always carry around with you. Will that change, too?
No, that will never change. It's nothing special, really. It's just a modified golf club, a 9-iron, but it's a very useful tool. It tells everybody who I am and what I do. Everybody recognizes me when I carry my stick.

Do you have a name for it—like B. B. King has his Lucille?
No, but I did have a favorite one that I lost in Belize, tragically. I was standing on a cliff and I accidentally kicked it into a water-filled cavern, thousands of feet deep. Someday an archaeological diver will be studying the flooded Mayan ruins and he'll say, "Look at this—they were so advanced! They played golf!"
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