Gay 'Piano Man' Finds Peace

BASEL, SWITZERLAND -- Two years ago, police found a young man walking the streets of Sheerness, a town on the south coast of England. He was soaking wet, wearing a black suit with the labels cut out - nobody knew who he was or where he came from, and he didn't speak a word.

The staff at a local hospital gave him a pen and paper, hoping he would write his name, but instead he drew a sketch of a piano. When they brought him a piano, he played for hours at a time. Media caught up on the story, and for months he was known around the world only as "the Piano Man".

Finally, in the last week of August, the man started talking and admitted to being Andreas Grassl, 22, a farmer's son from the small village of Prosdorf, in eastern Bavaria, Germany.

Grassl's friends say the catalyst for his strange journey to Britain, was a shattered gay love affair. He got his heart broken by a man in the small French fishing village of Pornic.

"He met someone in France," says a friend. "It was a love affair. And it all went wrong and he cracked up. That's it. I guess that's why he doesn't like to talk about it."

Now, nearly two years after the breakdown, The Scotsman reports that Grassl has escaped from the Bavarian village he hated, and has found new freedom as a university student in the city of Basel, Switzerland's third largest city.

Here he lives his life as he wants to, going to gay clubs, meeting friends, and enjoying the literature of French masters like Voltaire, Guy de Maupassant and Molière.