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Home / Entertainment

Lactating man's story turned into star-studded movie

Daily Mail
7 Oct, 2016 10:24 PM3 mins to read

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Source: Momentum Pictures.

Imagine hitting puberty in your late 20s.

The Daily Mail reports that this is exactly what happened to E! News reporter Ken Baker - whose memoir is the subject of a new movie starring Jane Lynch and JK Simmons: The Late Bloomer.

Baker, now 46, experienced an almost unheard-of hormonal transition due to a benign brain tumor pressing on his pituitary gland.

The tumor caused a hormone imbalance in his body called hyperprolactinemia, which over-produced the female hormone prolactin, stunting his natural development.

It meant he lactated milk from the nipples, 10 times more than a breastfeeding mother. His body was soft and lacking muscle. And he had absolutely no sex drive.

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Writing in his best-selling autobiography Man Made in 2001, Baker explained that he lost his virginity at 17, but he could only get a feeble erection, and didn't enjoy the experience.

Finally, at the age of 27, his girlfriend of one year convinced him to seek medical advice.

A doctor took MRI scans and confirmed a brain tumor had delayed puberty.

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He would have to remove the tumor then start taking hormonal medications, at which point the whole process would begin - and his life would transform.

"All of a sudden, especially after the operation, I turned into a horny teenager who saw sex everywhere," Baker writes in an account of his ordeal for the New York Post.

"I lived in Santa Monica and Rollerbladed along the beach. 'How did I not notice that so many women are wearing bikinis?' I thought."

The Late Bloomer is based on the true stroy of a man who didn't hit puberty until his late 20s
The Late Bloomer is based on the true stroy of a man who didn't hit puberty until his late 20s

His sex drive forced him to reluctantly break up with the girlfriend that had told him to get checked out.

"After splitting with Robin, I hooked up with about six women over the course of several months, around twice the number of women I'd tried to bed over the last decade. In the space of one day, I had some form of sex with three girls."

It wasn't long - a few months - before he met his future wife, now mother of his teenage son and daughter, Brooke.

Now he continues to take hormone supplements, and is comfortable sharing his experience.

And now his story is going to movie theaters in what is tipped to become a Hollywood blockbuster. JK Simmons plays his bemused father, Jane Lynch his boss.

Though the movie makes a joke out of his entire teenage years and early adulthood, Baker told the Post he doesn't mind.

'Laughter is the best form of medicine,' he said.

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