WATCH: Did you know the founder of Barry’s Bootcamp directed a very gay horror movie?

Barry Jay Minkow, the founder of popular boutique gym Barry’s Bootcamp, is a modern-day Renaissance man.

In addition to creating the nationwide fitness brand, he’s also spent time working as a pastor, a fraud investigator, and he even started a successful carpet cleaning company while he was still in high school.

Oh, also, he was convicted of racketeering, money laundering, embezzlement, and fraud (and more) for said successful carpet company, spending years in prison before he was released early in 1995—we almost forgot to mention!

Needless to say, Barry Jay has lived many lives, and has quite a few stories to tell, which is why it’s not at all surprising to hear that, more recently, he’s taken on a new hobby: Filmmaking.

His latest is twisty horror feature, The Way Out, which just so happens to be very, very gay.

After the death of his abusive father, a young man named Alex (Katy Keene’s Johnny Beauchamp) finds himself drawn to a charismatic stranger, Shane (Days Of Our Lives‘ Mike Manning), who becomes his roommate. The mysterious newcomer says he sees a lot of himself in Alex, and takes him under his wing as a mentee, teaching him important lessons about “life, sex, and fighting back.”

Of course, this is billed as a horror-thriller so you know it’s not quite that simple. As Alex and Shane grow closer, the tension between them becomes downright psychosexual—Alex becomes more and more attracted to his new roommate just as he’s starting to suspect he might be leading a double life.

Jay, who is gay, says that the story is a very personal one for him, which he admits was difficult to write, but that he “wanted to tell an honest story of overcoming trauma like mine.”

The Way Out—which co-stars Riverdale’s Ashleigh Murray and the iconic Sherri Shepherd—premiered last year at the Burbank international Film Festival, where it won both an audience award and the Best Feature Film honor in the LGBTQ+ category, the latter of which Jay says he is especially proud of:

“When I started having feelings of being different, I couldn’t tell anyone,” he shares in a press brief about the film. “In my small town, nothing like that was ever talked about. I became isolated, I had a secret, I was depressed and thought something was wrong with me. So, to win these awards is [something] I could have never seen coming. Today, I have a supportive husband, I work with people who are unabashedly themselves, and I am hopeful that this story will help people.”

Barry Jay sure has a lot more stories to tell, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for what he does next.

The Way Out is now streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi, and is available on digital/VOD via AppleTV. You can watch the trailer below: