Mr. (Naked) Clean

Soon, Kevin Stea's crotch could have its own end credit. Maybe demand more money. Heck, it might even go on strike.
"It could get its own head-shots," Stea quips from his Los Angeles digs, jokingly adding that fan sites are already popping up, like http://TheAdventuresOfMyPenis.com. Today, he's dazed and crackly, he says, recouping from a DVD-release party for "Naked Boys Singing." He's not nude at the moment, by the way.
Is that detail really necessary? Why, yes. This is former Michigander Kevin Stea: a 37-year-old dancer who shook his nearly-bare tush in "Showgirls," recently stood in as a crotch-double in an upcoming Adam Sandler comedy and is promoting his latest ballsy stint in the off-Broadway film version of "Naked Boys Singing."
Yep, the one where penises do the teeter-totter like a bass tugging at a fishing pole. The one where Stea pretends – for about four minutes – that he actually adores cleaning. Naked.
"I absolutely, absolutely hate cleaning," he insists. "Luckily, my boyfriend is very anal retentive and obsessively clean, and he takes care of all that."
Stea's a bubbly, charismatic character, but in frenzied social atmospheres, he's the sorta guy who follows around the hors d'oeuvres server, he says. You wouldn't know that after seeing him playfully zip, bounce and jiggle around in nothing but long rubber gloves while singing lines like, "Nudity is fun to me, attention is like sex to me, cleaning is good therapy. So until my bills are paid, I really sorta love my job, I'm a naked maid."
Then again, at the end, his flamboyant character reveals an ironic clincher: His place is actually a dump. Stea's would be – if it weren't for his boyfriend of eight years, whom he brought onto the set as a production assistant just to erase any traces of jealousy. Not that he had anything to worry about: Being on stage with 10 schlongs went stale fast, and "by the time you were on stage it was like, 'I've seen it, an-n-nd thank you.'"
Stea was too focused on juggling props, trying to remember which mop, broom or towel he was supposed to use and when. "In my head, (I thought), 'What's next?' This goes there, and then I have to pull this from there and grab this from there, toss it over this, dip this, pull this, kick that."
Gee, it's enough to give even Gumby a backache – but not Stea. This do-it-all dancer, with stints on Madonna's Blond Ambition World Tour in 1990, in Old Navy commercials alongside Megan Mullally and in a slew of iconic pop stars' music videos (including those of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Celine Dion), has done it all.
Now, he can check off "Dancing in the Buff." You see, he was thisclose to accomplishing that feat in 1995, when he flashed his G-string-donned bum in "Showgirls."
"I got over my shame and sense of decency doing 'Showgirls,' really. If I can paint a picture for you – this is the moment in which I realized, 'This is it; it doesn't really get worse than this,'" he laughs.
Picture this: In ass-floss and chaps, he pushes his buttocks out on stage eight feet above the audience. No one could say that was his or her proudest moment. Stea sure won't. This was critically-torched "Showgirls," after all. Still, being a gay character in what was touted as a hetero-male boob-fest, Stea's elated the film portrayed queer culture ("Who knew there were catty, gay boys backstage?")
Stea's been busting ass. Quite literally. Now his rump is taking a breather so his crotch can steal the spotlight, at least for a few seconds in summer-release "You Don't Mess with the Zohan," starring Adam Sandler. Stea is a stunt double who scratches records with his junk. With all these private-part roles, what's his former tiny town of Marlette, Mich., think?
"Oh my gosh, I hadn't even thought about that. I was too young to get a sense of like how conservative or liberal anybody was," he says of living in "The Heart of the Thumb." "My family probably would've been a little shocked."
After seeing him in a Chicago showing of "Naked Boys Singing," his aunt surprisingly dug it. Or at least, that's the conclusion he drew when she said: "I didn't know you had a tattoo there (on his lower back)!" Several of his fondest memories were framed at his family farm, where he lived from age 4 to 6 and then returned every summer until he was 12. Some relatives still live there; others have passed on. Those who have transcended earth – namely his great aunts – are the ones he credits for teaching him self-expression and finding beauty in the world.
"I kept all that with me, everywhere I go," he says.
He'll return to Marlette in July. With other kin, they'll finally post his grandmother's headstone in the family cemetery on her birthday. She died three years ago, but Stea couldn't bear to visit the burial site.
"Hopefully I'll be able to find some closure around that and get to see the farm again and kind of revisit my home, 'cause that really was our family home," he says.
He won't be moving back, though. His career would stall, he'd be too cold ("It gets under 60 degrees and I'm like: Blanket! Hot cocoa!") and he wouldn't leave the house. "I would be such a recluse," he laughs. "I mean, I'm already kind of a homebody hermit – in a city where there's all this stuff going on."