[otona1987]

Пишет  juliamay:

29.09.2016 в 17:23

Бля я сначала подумала че за пидор?!!!!

INTV_Gale Harold from Out Of The Box on Vimeo.

папо мачизму кепкой и бородой перед тетками нагоняет. как я ванговала

URL комментария

@темы: Гейл Харольд, Gale Harold

Comments

[juliamay]

ya_solnechnaja, увы, что мы и наблюдаем, не хочет человек парится) и его это устраивает
koricayu, Рэндика интересно послушать, остальные на любителя

[ya_solnechnaja]

juliamay, не хочет. но опять же - это не преступление
хотя преступление конечно - такую фактуру в песок закопать(

[koricayu]

От Кинвад букоаки
Thank you for doing this. Thanks for a lot of things. The premise of this film is that the medium of television is stronger than most people ever understand, either when they’re watching it or when they’re in it. When I started this film years ago, it was to see the world through the eyes of people who are playing parts, I always thought that playing a gay part particularly for a non-gay actor was going to teach you something, you were going to learn something that you couldn’t know possibly know any other way until you inhabited that. There are a lot of parts like that, you play a murderer, you play a doctor, you learn something. So that’s how this all started.

I’d like to start with where you started. You started growing up in Atlanta? Am I right?

Yeah.

First fifteen years of your life you lived in a very constrained environment. It was defined by religion. Is that a fair statement?

To a certain degree.

Remember that I’m cut out of this so anything that I say, please say in a way that gives it context.

Yeah.

But tell me about growing up.

Uh, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia in the suburbs, the surrounding areas—southwest Dekalb County, born in Atlanta downtown but raised in Decatur and Stone Mountain and south Dekalb. And at a certain point in my life, my family became really, seriously involved with the church—Pentecostal, southern Pentecostal born-again—um, quite a large organization and um, maybe from the age of six or so I kind of got injected into that world and then there were services five times a week—Wednesdays, Monday nights, and uh, two services on Sunday. That’s five, isn’t it, maybe?

And there was a big youth organization. “Christian rock” (he used air quotes) was a Monday night thing but then the Sunday thing was somewhat unique, fairly integrated for the time in terms of the church body and excellent music. Sometimes we’d have two drummers on stage at the same time so it would be sort of gospel, blues and southern rock, and people speaking in tongues and falling down. (makes a face) All that.

Were you an active participant or were you sort of watching it?

Primarily watching. I mean I was in and out a little bit when I was younger but I never really synthesized with that world. I watched it a lot. The music was a compelling part of it, but other than that, it was more Bible stories and trying to stay out of trouble like any other place, you know.

Were you good at staying out of trouble?

I was fairly good. Um, I could keep my head down, you know. I had friends that would get whacked and I would kind of be slightly behind.

Siblings?

Older sister, younger brother.

What’s the age difference?

Six years younger than my sister and almost eight older than my brother. I can’t really talk about my brother. Just so you know.

You don’t have to. That’s fine. What I’m getting though (I’m an only child) is that in a way, with that age gap, you were sort of on your own. There wasn’t a close age between—

Yeah, the age difference between my sister and my brother was kind of that perfect thread and being in that position, in the middle, it was kind of easy to be invisible, you know? And to my delight, actually, it was cool.

You were a part of that til you were a teenager.

Until I was about...I rapidly extracted myself about the time I got my driver’s license and then I left completely from that world when I was 17 so I haven’t been back there to that church world.

What was it— You said that what you did like about it, the music was compelling and your family was somewhat integrated. What didn’t you like?

Um, I didn’t like having to be inside the church building so much during the week. That was a bit irritating. I was a kind I wanted to be outside like any other kid. I was never really so gung ho about it that I could preoccupy myself with what I felt about religion or God or Jesus or whatever. My mind was sort of in other places, and I just didn’t like the rigor of it, you know, because I didn’t feel like— It wasn’t like I was getting something immediately out of it. I loved reading the Bible. I loved hearing about the Old Testament, a lot of those stories, but uh, it wasn’t really for me, you know?

Did you read Leviticus?

I read most of it. I was remembering recently one of the most bizarre ones that I could really remember hearing for the first time and being kind of rocked by was David’s oldest son was or was it his older brother was trying to escape riding through the forest and got his hair stuck in a tree and was hung by the hair. It snapped his neck. Anyway, who knows how accurate that story is, but that’s the kind of thing that was interesting to me, besides the music was decent. The Book of Revelations, that’s a great one-Job, those kinds of things.

But your values as a person...it’s got to be kind of hard because you’re doing this five days a week. You’re in a setting that’s pretty exacting and Pentecostal is pretty specific, like speaking in tongues. It’s very separate from the secular world. That’s my perception. Tell me if that’s wrong.

Well, yeah, the Pentecostal Church in the late seventies early eighties was pretty tribalistic. Um, the Holy Spirit coming into your body and coming out of your mouth in a language only you and God could understand. There’s a bit of Willy Wonka in there. There’s a bit of Clockwork Orange in there. There’s all kinds of stuff going on, you know? And yet, it was pretty isolated in its own world, but it’s like any other place, you know, full of pretenders and full of double-dealers and charlatans all the way up and down the line. And I’m sorry to say that but any organized group of people with a hierarchy, that’s just the way it works. We all know this. It’s human nature.

We do. What was the point at which when you left? Were you leaving that or going to something?

Kind of double, both sides. I was leaving that because I had kind of hit that wall of doubt but more just bullshit calling, you know? I called that card and there’s no explanation. There’s nothing that’s coming through. I’ve never seen a flaming sword, not unless it was on some nightclub stage somewhere, at some point. Yeah, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t buy it. I loved the stories I loved the myth. I loved the poetry. I loved the intensity. I loved the music. But the day-to-day of it was pretty clearly preposterous, you know?

How of the world could you be before you left that? In other words, what kind of household— I mean, did you have television, could you watch tv?

Yeah, to some degree. Not a lot, not a lot of the time. There was a bit of cable at some point so I did some films on television. I remember the two biggest things on television was once on Sunday afternoon, a movie I saw a part of Lawrence of Arabia. That really blew me away and I saw, um, Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne in the John Schlesinger— What’s the name of it? The Arthurian film?

Hmm...Helen Mirren and Gabriel Byrne. Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it. But you saw films on tv. Did you watch, in this period of time, were you watching television?

Sometimes. When I was a kid, watching television was sort of— I played a lot of soccer so I was gone in the afternoons until the early evening and then I was in my room listening to records. I remember things like All in the Family. I remember Dukes of Hazzard. I remember Sesame St. That was one of the things I watched probably the most of. I remember the Gong Show. I remember my mom watched a lot of daytime soap operas. I remember when I was a smaller kid seeing that stuff. And I used to watch a show on public television in Atlanta called Soccer Made in Germany which was German football matches that were then overdubbed with an English announcer, cause I played a lot when I was a kid so that was really like one long shot from somewhere off in the stands. Um, Loveboat.

Yes. Because who wouldn’t want to be on that boat?

Right.

You mentioned All in the Family. Obviously, All in the Family was a fairly controversial show. Again, did that raise hackles? Was there anything you weren’t allowed to watch that you had to sneak to watch?

I wasn’t allowed to watch a series about Marco Polo because it was being sponsored by Arm & Hammer I think, and Arm and Hammer on the back of their— One of their logos was the sickle and the stars, the moon and the stars and somehow that was interpreted by the church I was in as being borderline satanic or possibly a symbol of the oncoming apocalypse so I was not allowed to watch that. All in the Family was too smart for my family, right? They would have never picked up on the subtext at all. And it was very exotic, you know? Northeast, southeast. We moved about that fast and the Irish-American world was, that could have been.... I was maybe Dutch and Scotch somewhere but heavy family influence, you know, in terms of the tribe.

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[juliamay]

Did you read Leviticus?

охереть я вон Эмиля из Леннеберги читала и Мумей Тролей, какой нах Левит

[juliamay]

koricayu, Спасибо Корику и Кинвад)

[juliamay]

Вот почему они вспомнили Левит)20:13. Если кто ляжет с мужчиною, как с женщиною, то
оба они сделали мерзость: да будут преданы
смерти, кровь их на них.

[koricayu]

2 читать дальше

somewhere but heavy family influence, you know, in terms of the tribe.

Do you remember seeing some of those images on tv that we’re talking about here because it was the first time people saw anything that was out of the nuclear family andAll in the Family was really a big part of breaking that barrier down. There were gay people. Do you remember any of that?

I don’t as a kid. I remember more how the Jefferson Family kind of came through. Um, I think if I remember correctly, and I could be totally wrong but is it the intro, the titles to the Jeffersons? Is that when they shoot into the painting that’s in the Marvin Gaye record have everyone dancing in the nightclub, this beautiful painting...I don’t know if I’m thinking of another show that was used as part of the images in the introduction. But it was sort of a juke joint, and there were all these beautiful people dancing and sweating in different positions and um, I remember Marvin Gaye used it inside the album cover. And I remember, somehow I’m associating their theme song at the very end, the camera’s kind of panning across, and I didn’t know that until much later. That was more kind of compelling or interesting to me because the church that I went to and the part of the city I grew up in—

(David asks someone off camera about the show but the person gives the answer to the film Gale was speaking about earlier)

The film was Excalibur, yes, and Gabriel Byrne played Lancelot and Helen Mirren played Morgaine. It blew me away. Um, for an eight year old to see Helen Mirren without her clothes on was just, it was too much. It was just...

It’s still too much. She’s so amazing. Dame Helen Mirren and we’ll get to the Dame you worked with in a while. So one thing I keep hearing from listening is music is a beat in your head. There’s music in your head all the time.

I think so.

Marvin Gaye and from the church forward. David Bowie. So at that point, as you said, you’ve called bullshit on where that was. Where did you think you wanted to go?

Um, I didn’t know. I mean I called bullshit, my own choice of words and my own interpretation of that. I just wanted to blast off, you know? I just wanted to go and I really wanted to go to school after high school far away, and I ended up in D.C. for half a semester and dropped out and came back to Atlanta for a bit, went to Tucson for a while, knocked around there, came back to Atlanta, saved up, and then moved to San Francisco to study photography and print making at the San Francisco Arts Institute. So my escape was a little bit interrupted, fell back, and took off, fell back and took off. But when I eventually got to San Francisco that was the last, that was my last time in Atlanta for any substantial time and I’ve been gone since.

So when you get to San Francisco, how old were you?

Nineteen.

Nineteen. So you’re there at a time— When you arrived in San Francisco, was that the first time you were in the City?

Yeah. I had been to California when I was a kid. I was in Bakersfield and San Diego on a soccer tour playing but we didn’t get to see too much, and I had never been to northern California, never been to San Francisco. I had only read about it.

So if I’m doing my math right, we’re in the late eighties.

’89.

’89. Yeah. And what’s your impression of San Francisco? It’s another world from where you were?

I got to San Francisco, I landed I think around 3:00 in the afternoon. My friend, who I was going to school with, who I met in D.C., we both decided to leave D.C. and try to get to San Francisco somehow. He was raised near Palos Verde, a California guy, a dirt biker, kind of an archetypal seventies, eighties SoCal (southern California) kid. But he had friends who lived in San Francisco I had spent some time there and we were both sort of demystified by Washington D.C. and wanted to go someplace else. And I had already applied to go to school there so he said if I were you that’s where I’d go. Then he called me later and said he was going to move there and transfer to San Francisco State (college) so he picked me up from the airport at three in the afternoon and we drove straight to Golden Gate Park and worked our way back from the upper Haight down to the Mission which at that point was still pretty much razorblades and hypodermic needles and lots of fun. That was kind of that, you know.

I had been there ten years before and it was that then but the Haight, this is twenty some odd years after the summer of love, the Haight was becoming gay actually at this point.

I didn’t experience any of that until— Those first couple of weeks was just exploring, you know? The thing I’ll always remember about it and that always stuck in my mind was I had heard so much about San Francisco, and I had seen some of it on film, but I really felt like I was just getting to a party. I was coming in the front door and most of the people were just leaving from the other side of the room. It was just kind of closing down. It changed a lot in those first two years I was there. But compared to today, it’s pretty exotic, and I’m really happy that I was there when I was.

Did you know Tales of the City?

I didn’t really know that actually when I got there. I knew it by name, but I learned more about that years after I was there, you know? I learned about it historically from some people I knew who had grown up there and the political history of the city and just friends that I picked up and became really close with by living there who had fled to San Francisco because they wanted to be free from wherever they were from because they were musicians or artists so the interplay of people that I came to know brought me up to speed on the history.

Is this the first place you saw lots of gay people?

No, the first place I saw lots of gay people was Atlanta. Absolutely. And in my church, to be honest when it wasn’t officially recognized but there were some people, I think. It’s sort of, it’s that old—and that’s why it’s so preposterous. They use the phrase, Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know? It’s sort of this on-running gag. Okay, we’re not gonna talk about it. It’s not happening. Right. I know why that man is more like my mom than my dad but I guess we’re just not gonna talk about it.

But what they did talk about was that it was a sin, right?

Oh, yeah! Yeah. I don’t remember specifically hearing that being preached from the pulpit either because I wasn’t listening or I didn’t hear it. I don’t remember. It’s been too long. But you gotta remember it was the South, too, whether you’re Baptist or Episcopal or whatever or even if you’re not religious. I mean these are some very old American ways of behaving—what you are and are not allowed to do in public and the assumptions about just body language and inflection of voice and all those things. It’s a breeding ground for pretty a-list boys for a lot of different reasons but it was not looked upon well.

For you looking upon it, first as a teenager and then as a young man, first D.C. and then San Francisco, did you form a view? You arrived in San Francisco at the end of the decade that’s been devastating for gay men. How conscious of that were you?

I think that my understanding of what Aids meant, what that word meant, what it was to me was almost purely understood from watching the news. At the point when I moved to San Francisco, I didn’t know anyone who had verbally spoken to me about that either they knew someone or that they were scared or that they were worried. I had heard sort of public service announcements in terms of safe sex or needle exchange or use of drugs. I wasn’t a drug user and I wasn’t in that world so I didn’t have a direct sort of awareness of it.

It wasn’t until I got to San Francisco and started— And for the first time saw someone who was ill and was made aware of what that illness looked like by people who could explain it to me, and then the people that I worked with and hung out with and went to school with and then there was a lot of conversation about it—be careful, be careful, be careful. And I was going to school with painters and sculptors and photographers and performance artists. Of course, that’s when Piss Christ was a huge piece and Blood and Flagg and Jessie Helms and so it was a constant topic of conversation whether it was about that specifically or just the world that was falling apart around us, you know?

Loved hearing Jessie Helms and Mapplethorpe in the same sentence. That’s very helpful. You talked about having seen it on the news. Do you remember a few years earlier than that, Rock Hudson? Do you remember that on tv?

I remember, I think I remember about Rock Hudson some gasp or something as a result of my mom seeing something on television and sort of being a third party to that and not really knowing or hearing rumblings. I really didn’t learn the specifics of that story until much later. Yeah, that was a bit before me.

And even a bit before that, it’s still old enough to have some consciousness I’m not sure how much permeates when you’re a kid. I remember Crosby’s line, “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” I remember the sixties and do you remember the end of the seventies with Anita Bryant?

Oh, yeah! Anita Bryant was I believe either she was a highly regarded diplomat/comrade in my church or she came and spoke there on a Sunday afternoon. I think. I could be laying memories together that don’t exist. But yeah, I spent a lot of time in Florida when I was a kid. A lot of my family lives down there. So anything that has to do with oranges or orange juice is sort of burned in the back of my brain as well. So she’s sort of, on the one hand she was always doing these specials or these promotional pieces for the orange industry right? And then on the other hand she’s sort of making this very grim reaper declaration about how a lot of people need to be removed and that’s how it should be and that’s why it’s happening.
.

[juliamay]

Six years younger than my sister and almost eight older than my brother. I can’t really talk about my brother. Just so you know.

[koricayu]

3 читать дальше

But you were young. And share a name if you can. Do you have an impression of Anita Bryant in that memory?

I remember her having her bouffant hair. I remember her wearing her white dresses. I think I remember commercials seeing her walking through orange groves with cameras on cranes, great shots swooping on her and whatever she’s saying about the Florida industry, I think. You know? Either that or it’s a John Waters movie.

The thing is you remember that. Do you remember hearing people talking about what she was saying?

That’s sort of my point. That’s the overlay. I understood her as this woman who was a celebrity/personality/singer but under her breath and then very directly was attacking the world of homosexuals and sort of decrying that their suffering and the thing that had befallen them was somehow coming from above and their deserved right. And I think when we go back to what I was talking about before, my instinct about the church and the bullshit, that’s part of it. And that’s just my intuition as a kid. You can’t say that. There are laboratories. There’s science. There’s medicine. You can’t start saying that there are any winged horses. There aren’t unicorns. Narnia is a great setting for a book but it’s not really true, you know? Jesus didn’t walk on the water He just didn’t. He just didn’t. So Aids is not some sort of— That’s not a damnation from God and for you to say that is asinine.

It’s worse than that. It caused a lot of people to die. Speaking of someone who did, ten or twelve years before you got to San Francisco, Harvey Milk. Do you remember any of that?

Well, going back to talking about Tales of the City, I learned more about that writing after I learned about Harvey Milk and after I learned about the history of the city, and I would blast from Height and Ashbury and cut through, down through Castro and go to the theatre or cut down to sixteenth to get to the Mission and there he’s an icon. There’s his pictures, mementoes left to him so I sort of ingested a lot of that in passing. But the longer I lived there and spent time in the library or getting to know people who were born and raised there, that’s sort of where I learned that firsthand. I didn’t research it. I got it very organically, you know?

I’m kind of glad you did. I met him when I was a kid. I was still closeted when he gave that speech that he became famous for giving where he would say I’m doing this for that fourteen year old in Altoona Pennsylvania who doesn’t know there’s anyone else like him in the world. I was 21 when I heard him give that and I didn’t know if there was anyone else like me.

So you take it fast forward. You get to San Francisco. You’re studying. You’re in a crowd of people, some gay, some straight. I’m guessing you’re hit on. It’s gonna happen. People react to that differently and in different periods of time where it used to be something you’d recoil in shock. Do you remember that experience for you?

Well, in San Francisco, I was somewhat accustomed to it already. Like I said, I grew up in Atlanta and I began working in restaurants pretty young. I had a lot of friends in Decatur so Piedmont, Virginia Highlands, North Avenue. Ansley Park, I think is the neighborhood. It was a long established gay neighborhood, and that’s where I learned why all of the best architecture, a lot of the best restaurants, they’re always in certain neighborhoods, right? And I worked in some of the good restaurants and I worked with clearly with a lot of gay men and women because they’re always the best at serving the food and talking about the wine and hypnotizing you into buying more than what you really need. But that’s the magic of it so I was sort of prepared for it when I got to San Francisco. And when I got there I went much farther that just focusing on my work and a lot of that was studio time, you know. It was all about going to see bands and take photographs and paying the bills and I didn’t have a lot of gallivanting, you know?

So studio time and seeing music, where were you going in the nineties to see music?

We used to go to the Nghtbreak, to the Covered Wagon. We used to go to the I-Beam. I worked at the Warfield Theatre so I worked for Bill Graham’s company so I saw a lot of music at work and then because of all the relationships you make, there’s that sort of gypsy tribe mentality, “Can you get me into this show?” “Can you get me into that show?” I backed into a lot of good stuff without having to pay for it which was good and I worked at a club called the Trocadero which had a retractable roof. But you know, we had every night of the week there were different dee-jays there. Sometimes we’d have bands there.

What were you doing there in your jobs?

Um, at Trocadero I was working the door. As you can tell, I’m a total ass-kisser so I definitely should have been doing that. But most of my work in restaurants was either serving or clearing tables. At the Warfield they served food. I think that’s how they were able to have every show all ages because there was some food to counter the alcohol.

It’s a great venue.

Yeah, yeah.

They had some great shows there. But it’s funny that you should say the I-Beam because going back, that was the place in the seventies. That’s where I met Harvey, at the I-Beam. It’s kind of funny, The I-Beam was Babylon.

Right. Yeah, the I-Beam was a very popular gay club I think before I got there, and then it turned back into a rock club and the shows, like I saw Hole there. I saw the Flaming Lips there. I saw the Butthole Surfers there. There was maybe a three thousand, seat, maybe 2500 people maybe when it was packed, wall-to-wall. You go up the stairs and there’s a long hallway and there’s bars on one side and live rooms on the other side. I saw some very cool things there.

Hole and the Butthole Surfers.

I mean I can’t even remember now. There were so many great shows there.

[juliamay]

Well, yeah, the Pentecostal Church in the late seventies early eighties was pretty tribalistic. Um, the Holy Spirit coming into your body and coming out of your mouth in a language only you and God could understand. There’s a bit of Willy Wonka in there. There’s a bit of Clockwork Orange in there

таки они практиковали глоссалалии, как тру пятидесятники - жуткий пиздец

[koricayu]

4 читать дальше

Um, so like I say, I hear a lot of music threading it’s way through your life. It’s important to you, yet that’s not what you were doing. When did you know acting was what you were absolutely doing?

Well, I came into acting in kind of a strange angle. I was studying, um, trying to work enough to make enough money to buy film so I could shoot and process and somewhere I just ran out of the ability to keep up and I never really made it back to school. But one of my good friends from school was living with me at my shop in East Oakland and he met someone at a gallery showing of a friend of his paintings and then I met her and she was working at Zoetrope and just sort of become friends with some new people. And I came into it kind of backwards. I was introduced to a theatre director who talked a lot about stage work and that was her life and I only really understood plays as literature. I read plays but I never had seen a play. So that’s how I was introduced to it.

Was that Martin Landau’s daughter?

Yes. Susie Landau. That was my dear friend. That’s the reason I came to Los Angeles. And she introduced me to a woman named Joan Scheckel who’s an excellent theatre actor and director and I started to study with her. But I really would never have— I don’t think I ever would have followed through with that if I hadn’t lost the building I was living in San Francisco. My building was owned by the archdiocese and it was supposed to be protected by a city supervisor’s ruling for live-work spaces. But somehow the archdiocese sold the building and it turned into a parking garage and I had to leave and I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco any more so I moved to Los Angeles.

They paved paradise.

Yeah, they did. They paved it right down.

Aside from everything else. I’m a huge Martin Landau. What a great actor! Phenomenal actor. Um, so you came down to Los Angeles. You’d seen it playing soccer but you hadn’t really seen it. Los Angeles as we’re sitting here is a world entirely different than San Francisco. When did you arrive?

’97.

Um, so now it seems like you almost didn’t stay. You were down to like five dollars.
When I was hired for my first actual professional job as an actor, yeah I had about five bucks. And there was just that moment, you know?

Even then, it didn’t go very far.

Um, no. It didn’t go any farther than the fact that I ran out of gas in my truck and took the bus to my house to get the five bucks to take the bus back to get the gas to drive the truck back to my house to park it so it could be there out of gas.

[koricayu]

5 читать дальше

the truck back to my house to park it so it could be there out of gas.

You know we pay a $1.00 for these interviews. I feel like we could help.

I appreciate it.

Any time. Here’s the thing. Now, it’s the nineties. And something else has happened. Television is starting to change in a very real way with respect to gay people. And I don’t know, are you watching any television during this period?

I wasn’t watching any television. I was living very minimally and I didn’t see it. The only thing I would ever see on a television screen was if I went to watch a European match at a sports bar somewhere. I was watching films from time to time on VHS or something but I wasn’t really up to speed.

So you weren’t watching things like, for example, Ellen, when she came out?

No I was absolutely out of the loop for all that.

Did it enter your consciousness—we asked Rachel Maddow this—she said she didn’t own a television for ten years, two years of which she was on tv, but she remembers seeing Ellen’s coming out on the cover of a magazine.

I remember that. I remember there being an announcement of some sort.

Can you say what the announcement was?

Yeah, I do remember some announcement of some sort about Ellen coming out but I didn’t have a fast track about what her world was and how that affected her world. I remember in the aftermath of that, hearing about the show itself being cancelled or something being pulled and that was the show and the reason for that was the fact that she had made this statement and the kid made it in character, which was the fascinating part to me, you know? And I didn’t really clock on that in the moment it happened because it was all flying past me at light speed. But to later hear that when I began to more specifically think about telling the story of someone who was homosexual on television, all those things came back, research and just conversation.

Which is the appropriate segue. You had, you became aware and at this point did you have an agent?

No. Well, I had a manager, a wonderful manager.

You had a manager and you get a sсript for Queer As Folk. Was that the norm? Were you getting a lot of scripts?

No, no, no. The details are very simple. I had a manager who saw me do a play and she’d been sending me out for things, and I wasn’t doing very well. And I really didn’t enjoy it and I really liked studying and working with actors and directors but the terrifying thing of going in and trying to bang a cup and get a job as a result of it was kind of grinding me down. And I had made the decision that I was gonna move to either New York or Chicago.

I was gonna flip a coin and make a decision and just dive in further to working as a stage actor and learning more and going to the promised land so to speak when I was sent this sсript for the pilot episode of QAF and um I read it and to be absolutely honest and to give credit where credit is due, if I had not seen Aiden Gillen performing in the British version as Stuart—and the chance of me seeing that was absolutely synchronistic because my girlfriend at the time was making sort of tape collages, kind of random access of thing after thing and then she would build them into some strange, surrealist storyline, and I was watching one of her gatherings of the day and I saw that scene and she goes what about that? And I said what is that? She said some British show called Queer as Folk. And I said that’s crazy. That’s crazy. Those guys are really good. I’ve never seen anything like that. How do they— Oh, it’s BBC or Channel 4 or something. Because we can’t have that here, right? And then maybe a month later I got the sсript and I looked at it and I realized that’s what I saw. I saw some scenes from this. And it was very interesting and compelling, but I didn’t think anything was going to happen, you know?

[koricayu]

6 читать дальше

Do you remember the scene she put in that collage, in that montage?

It was sort of um, they were in a club, then they were running down the streets of Manchester. There was a couple of grabs, a couple of snippets and the scene, the sex scene in the pilot where the two characters meet and the older brings the younger back home and baptizes him. That, I saw at least a bit of it cause I remember we were looking at each other—Wow, that’s television right? This isn’t some sort of— No, it’s television. Just because the context and the extremity of the scene, the extreme nature of the scene. So I read the sсript, and I called my manager. And I had already told her that I wasn’t going to go on any more television auditions. She told me it was a movie for Showtime. She was careful about how she described it and I think maybe because it was so terrifying and it was so um, unlikely that it would ever happen and because I had seen the performance of the character that I would be reading for in the US version of that, it fired me up, and I decided to just throw my hat in. And I did. And just thinking really like, this will be my farewell song to Los Angeles.

You threw a lot more than your hat and that you say was terrifying. What was terrifying about it?

Um, for me at that point in my life, and it still is one of the things terrifying to me every day, is to do good work, and I’m highly and repeatedly blocked by my own state of mind. It’s very hard for me to loosen up sometimes and just do the work. So of course I double, triple overanalyze everything, and I think what was terrifying was can I go in there and can I even— The first scene that I read for Dan and Ron and Linda Lowry was a pretty long scene. It was kind of a speech, you know? And I don’t have any direct personal understanding of what it is to be a gay man. I don’t know the world this character lived in, operated in. I don’t have any notches in my belt in that regard. But that was the character. He was basically peacocking all over the page and trying to hypnotize this kid, right? So I didn’t know how I could do that.

You read with Randy?

No, initially I just read with the casting director. I didn’t meet Randy until later on, testing, you know? But I didn’t meet him until it came down to the wire.

But the speech that you say you’re peacocking. Did it wind up in...was it something that was in the sсript?

Um, it’s sort of, it’s like um, are you coming or are you going; or are you coming and then going. It’s sort of a preamble fact. It’s sort of a preamble fact. He’s establishing you’re in my world now. You can leave or you can stay. But these are all the reasons my world is my world. And here we are. And do you got the balls?

Um, so this happens. You don’t know at this point, you now know retrospectively—it’s funny, I had this conversation with Gore Vidal in which he talked about how we only think we remember but most of the time we’re remembering the memories of our memories. That’s why his memoirs are called Palimpest.

You’ve told this story or thought about it and looked back on it. It’s been a number of years now. It’s sixteen years on. Do you remember how you felt when they told you got the part?

I remember being told that I had been cast. I had been cast as this character Brian Kinney in the show. I remember as odd as it sounds, I remember everything kind of going silent, you know? Just sort of um, what are you going to do now? What are you gonna do about it? You know? And it’s...this is the memory. This isn’t a version of the memory. This isn’t an overlay. This is exactly what happened. You’ve got it and you have to leave in two days if you take it and what do you think? And I said on the one hand I have seventy cents. On the other hand, I have seventy cents. I really, I kinda I just went in, you know? I knew that if I had been able to get to this place where they wanted me to work with them, then I’d accomplished something that up until that point in my life, I’d never been there before. This is a very, another level of my life, and I grew up in Atlanta like we’ve said a million times. I already had gay friends as a kid that I knew were gay, and I knew people that were gay in my church and I knew people that were gay who were just friends of friends. I also knew about Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet and I knew about Tennessee Williams as literary figures more so, especially with Williams because I’d never seen any of his plays.

But I knew that a lot of the things that I loved in terms of art, in terms of things that compelled me, that made me really step back and say that’s the kind of work that I would like to be able to do at some point or I would like to be those people or I would like to be in those worlds. I felt a real slight tinge that I’d been included in this team now, right? I had slightly been pulled into a new world and I felt inspired by that. I felt like I really wanted to do a good job. But I was terrified cause I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t how to—other than say the lines and play the physical actions and feel the feelings of what the character was feeling, there was a whole part of that world that— I mean that gun was loaded, you know? I didn’t have the bullets for that part.

Well you didn’t fire blanks. But I’m hearing something that I hadn’t thought about before. I’d read it but it didn’t dawn on me. You’re thirty years old and you never really had a steady acting gig. Anything that was going to put you through—didn’t matter what the part was, gay or straight.

I had done a really low-budget film with some great guys who became my first onset family, outside of theatre, you know? And what it takes to make a film.

And how long did it last?

Oh, that was maybe all of four weeks, you know? Maybe? So yeah, I was still extremely, extremely green, you know? It’s fascinating to me that I could even hit my fucking mark, you know? Because it looks very different when you’re on a set as opposed to being on the floor of some stage with people sitting on chairs in front of you.

So you get on a plane and go to Toronto. You ever been to Toronto before?

Nope.

Okay. What happens now. There’s a car waiting to meet you at the airport?

Went to the airport, left the airport, took the car, went into town, went to the production office, and was immediately told that because there was some glitch with my passport or my work permit, I had to go to Buffalo to go back across the border. So I got in the car, drove to Buffalo, went back across the border. Then I was actually in Canada. I was in a province of Ontario to do work in the city of Toronto and I had an American passport and I was legal to work and I could do that. So that’s kind of where it started.

And then I went and had fittings and met Sheila Hockin. Dan and Ron, I’d met them already. Went to the Sutton Place hotel and got my information that the first day of shooting would be about eight hours of sex, shooting sex scenes, and then I think the next thing I did, I went and bought a bottle of Jameson (Scotch whiskey) and went in my room with my headphones and listened to um, the first Stooges record about thirty times until I couldn’t stay awake. Slept all through the weekend and walked off blank.

Um, so that first scene, that first eight hours, that was with Randy. Did you meet him on set that first time?

No, no. I met him when we read together for the network. We played a couple of scenes in the room together and then we had a bit of dialogue you know. We saw each briefly before we got to the set that first day but it was pretty much um, zero to 100.

I’m gonna ask a personal question. Did you know he was gay and did he know you were straight on that first day?

I don’t know if he knew if I was gay or straight, and I didn’t know if he was gay or straight. I don’t know if I ever actually had that conversation with him. I don’t know if I ever had that conversation with anyone. I didn’t feel that was relevant and I want to say I didn’t feel it was much my business to know. I think I was aware fairly soon who was who and how they were the way they were and why.

Well, the only thing that might be useful is that you said you had no notches on your belt. He’s young but at least it’s a world that’s not entirely alien to him. Does that help?

I think that’s one of those— This question was the world we were shooting that first day, was it completely foreign to him? He is a gay man. I’m not. I think for the sake of this conversation and what actually happened in memory, it didn’t matter if I was gay or straight or he was gay or straight because what was happening was that human being and this human being had all their clothes on the floor, and we were surrounded by two cameras. One was on a dolly and one locked. And we were simulating sex from breakfast to dinner, right? And we had to make it believable, of course, because we were telling the story inside of the sex. I was the driver. He was not. But we had to interact with each other that made sense given the circumstances, where he was coming from, where I was coming from, what I knew, and what I felt about it all. Both of us just rapidly, we kind of sketched out the numbers and then used whatever we could technically to try to be there and then try to find some feeling inside of that to fill it with.

Much later I’m told from Dan and Ron, they tried to approach it differently than they did at the beginning which was to think of it like dance, think of it like choreography, rather than just take your clothes off and have at it. Was that your sense, too, that there was an evolution of how you were able to do that so that it was more thought through?

[koricayu]

7 читать дальше

Absolutely. And part of it is just getting up to speed. I mean doing a fight scene or doing a dance scene, it’s always choreographed, a lot of times primarily for safety but ultimately so that it’s a beautiful fluid thing that we’re doing. But it’s hard to— It was difficult for me initially to start making demands on the people I was working with, whether they were the actors, or the producers or the directors to kind of acknowledge that this is not a fight scene. We should block it and rehearse it like a fight scene. But it’s not a fight scene. So I can get all the way up to the first ten seconds of the fight or the dance. That’s all wonderful. But there’s something else inside of this, right? And that always takes precedence over the technical aspect. So you have to kind of force the technical part of it on top if it. The result is that if you know what you’re doing and you know why you’re doing it and you know the time that it’s gonna take to get it done, then you can relax because otherwise it feels like I’m on stage, I don’t have any clothes and I’m gonna be here till the end of time. How many times do I have to do it? How many shots? Let’s count it out and that way we can get in there and give everything we’ve got and then we can move on to the next scene and get more work done, you know?

Turns out that you understood the part of hitting your mark almost intuitively because a lot of it is being able to go on to the next thing. You said that you were very lucky that it was Randy.

Yep.

I want you, I’d like you to use my words, say that sentence and say why.

I was very lucky that my partner that I played primarily with on QAF was Randy Harrison. It was fortunate for me for several reasons. First of all, because he’s extremely talented and he and I, by the grace of god, share the same appetites for film, for literature, and for music and we got along partly because we had some of the same tastes, partly because we were both from Atlanta (we felt like comrades) and starting off on that note was a gift because we could have gone into that world and may have not bonded. We really did bond. We became friends, you know? We weren’t just working partners, we were friends. We could have a conversation about many things at any time. We would see each other outside of work to watch films or whatever and it was kind of necessary. It wasn’t necessary but it was very welcomed that we could connect. Otherwise, we probably would have killed each other.

And you know that doesn’t always happen that way.

Right.

Um, one of the things I’ve seen you say and that’s Sharon Gless—who chose this part, it didn’t choose her. She chose it—became sort of a mother figure to your character. Talk about Sharon and then I want to get more specific.

We’re talking about Sharon Gless, the fantastic actor who played Debbie Novotny. Sharon Gless amongst other things is and I do not use this phrase lightly, she is a badass in the best of sense. She’s strong, she’s funny, she’s full of passion and heart and she brought that times a thousand, a hundred thousand to the character of Debbie who was sort of this fearless defender of her son and her son’s friends and her son’s sexuality and his chosen path, even though he couldn’t commit to it sometimes. A lot of that came out from her relationship to her brother Jack, but Sharon really, she was sort of the atomic heart of that show. Not for just the characters but for the actors, you know? And I feel that of all the work we did and the work that I was able to be a part of and the scenes that I was involved in, the scene of all thoses scenes that really catches me the most is the scene that I did with her where Sharon as Debbie kind of calls me out, calls my character out on a lot of fear and bullshit and self-abuse. But then we smoke a joint and it all comes home again and that’s where I think you can see those two characters bonding or revealing their bond in a way that my character, Brian, you know, he’s sort of an A-type over-achieving gay man who is a gay man to everyone. He’s not holding back which underneath all that, it exhausted, and it drew a lot from him but he had nothing at home to rely on. He had a dad who wanted to break his neck and a mom who was borderline psycho-pathological and a sister that was.... And so Sharon’s character, Debbie, was really the rock and even as a kid, I had no idea who she really was in my life. And Sharon, she’s like a rock. I was so able to look at her as Sharon as Debbie as Sharon as Debbie as Sharon as Debbie and feel all those things that made sense for that scene. And we just dropped in to the green fields of home, you know.

You talked about just now that Brian was someone who because he was completely in himself as a gay man, it was exhausting to do that all the time and have to be that. Yet every now and again, there was a vulnerability that made it even more compelling because he didn’t let people in easily. You saw Sharon as Sharon/Debbie, Debbie/Sharon. How much of Brian/Gale, Gale/Brian did that become for you?

I think that the character of Brian and the way that I played that character, besides the fact that I look like the character because I’m the person playing him, I don’t know how much of myself is in him. I’m not driven like that. I’m not as fearless in circumstances like that. I’m not as overtly confrontational, not as self-aware, you know. His self-awareness was very specific and I think that he, the way I felt it coming through me, he had an idea of himself and he foisted that on people sometimes or he threw that down as a gauntlet. And then he said that’s just the way it is and if you don’t like it, fuck off. And he really used that as kind of a mantra and I don’t share that with him, you know?

I don’t have a reason to. He had a crusade. He had his version of his own crusade that he had chosen to fight, you know? And he was completely justified in doing that and that was his survival mechanism as well as to have a lot of fun with people because he really liked to fuck with people, you know? There’s a slight Mach tone to him, you know? And I think that’s very evident in his work, the way he interacts with people that either he’s asking for money or who are accusing him of short-changing him or who aren’t executing the project he’s pitched for them. So those are aspects that are purely on the page and I was just saying those words you know?

After a number of years, the writers write to—and we see this in almost any character that runs for more than five minutes—they write to how you play it. Did you ever have a sense that you were informing the growth of character of Brian, that how he evolved came from where you were taking him?

I don’t know if I could identify something that I remember about where Brian went to during the five years as the character and if there was anything in that writing that was the result of Dan and Ron observing what I did or how I played him. I don’t know.

I want to ask you some specifics because they’re going to be important to how we cut this. One of the things for all of us who watched the show that was the most difficult to watch and yet unforgettable to experience was when Brian, who is not someone who is who is going to do something out of his way that isn’t in his own self-interest, decides to go to Justin’s prom. And we know how that ended. I watched it again the other day. It’s still almost impossible to watch. Have you seen it since it aired?

I’ve seen that scene maybe three years ago. Like every actor, there’s a bit of watching yourself and watching time, um, watching the irrefutable evidence that my scene partner is about 100 times a better dancer than I am. But we worked it out with editing and camera moves. But the aspect of that scene, that story line, even then, even now, still on some levels, it’s above my experience of life.

I’ve never gone through anything like that. Thank God. No one that I know that I’ve been so intensely connected to has gone through anything like that. I think in terms of the writing and the way it was structured, making this grand gesture, part of it is fulfilling some aspect of his own philosophy of freedom and truth and honesty, but a lot of it is a spectacle, a lot of it is a pissing contest, and to me, that’s one of the things inside of that part of the whole story that’s interesting because you have these two men who are sort of falling in love, maybe? Or maybe not, but one of them is really getting under the other one’s skin. And you would think that the one that was really getting under the other one’s skin would be the one that would be in control, but in this circumstance, the one who’s in control is the younger one, and I think that there was a bit of showing off. I’m going to take you to your dance and I’m gonna show everybody and that’s gonna be it, right? And if anybody has any problems, they can talk to me later about it, right? Well, the reality of the circumstances come screaming home in a way that is so far beyond any expectation that Brian could have. I mean it’s like hell on earth, you know? And it’s the guilt and it’s the operative word of control there. I’m controlling my life and I’m gonna make a statement and it all just gets yanked.

And you didn’t know all this was gonna happen until you got the sсript, right?

I didn’t know that...Honestly I don’t remember when I was made aware of how all this was gonna play through.

Generally, they don’t give you a lot of advance warning.

[juliamay]

Пока все канонический текст от Левита смотреть на папку гораздо интереснее

[koricayu]

8 читать дальше

Generally, they don’t give you a lot of advance warning.

Not a lot of advance warning. Not a lot. I mean, I knew we were gonna go to the dance because we were choreographing but not a lot in terms of the— And then when it happened, it’s just and that’s why back to what we were talking about before and why it was a blessing and why I was very lucky to have been cast along side Randy Harrison to play that because if I hadn’t really, really liked him as a person and really trusted him and really wanted to work with him and really respected him because I know how talented he is—I mean sometime we’d fight over ideas and sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s full of shit but we can keep that ball rolling. If I hadn’t felt that way about him, I wouldn’t have been able to dive so deep into my response to what happened with him because he was my friend, you know? He’s my character’s lover but he was my personal friend and someone who was very and still is very dear to me, you know?

And that’s what I mean about going back and looking at it. I mean, yeah, you see it as an actor looking at a piece of work but there’s got to be a part of you that feels it viscerally.

Yeah.

I would think.

Yeah. I go back and watch the dance and I watch the attack and I watch the hospital and there’s all some of that burned into my memory. It’s pretty close to the surface and it always will be because it was a big deal for me, for all of us, I think.

Were you aware that it was a big deal for the people who were watching it?

No

[juliamay]

I also knew about Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet and I knew about Tennessee Williams as literary figures more so, especially with Williams because I’d never seen any of his plays.

ура снова Жан Жене

[juliamay]

Um, so that first scene, that first eight hours, that was with Randy. Did you meet him on set that first time?

No, no. I met him when we read together for the network. We played a couple of scenes in the room together and then we had a bit of dialogue you know. We saw each briefly before we got to the set that first day but it was pretty much um, zero to 100.

I’m gonna ask a personal question. Did you know he was gay and did he know you were straight on that first day?

I don’t know if he knew if I was gay or straight, and I didn’t know if he was gay or straight. I don’t know if I ever actually had that conversation with him. I don’t know if I ever had that conversation with anyone. I didn’t feel that was relevant and I want to say I didn’t feel it was much my business to know. I think I was aware fairly soon who was who and how they were the way they were and why.

Well, the only thing that might be useful is that you said you had no notches on your belt. He’s young but at least it’s a world that’s not entirely alien to him. Does that help?

I think that’s one of those— This question was the world we were shooting that first day, was it completely foreign to him? He is a gay man. I’m not. I think for the sake of this conversation and what actually happened in memory, it didn’t matter if I was gay or straight or he was gay or straight because what was happening was that human being and this human being had all their clothes on the floor, and we were surrounded by two cameras. One was on a dolly and one locked. And we were simulating sex from breakfast to dinner, right? And we had to make it believable, of course, because we were telling the story inside of the sex. I was the driver. He was not. But we had to interact with each other that made sense given the circumstances, where he was coming from, where I was coming from, what I knew, and what I felt about it all. Both of us just rapidly, we kind of sketched out the numbers and then used whatever we could technically to try to be there and then try to find some feeling inside of that to fill it with.

романтика

[koricayu]

И это не фсе,если я все правильно помню)))

[juliamay]

koricayu, я чета не нашла об его отношении к Брайану только... может потом как раз будет

[juliamay]

Not a lot of advance warning. Not a lot. I mean, I knew we were gonna go to the dance because we were choreographing but not a lot in terms of the— And then when it happened, it’s just and that’s why back to what we were talking about before and why it was a blessing and why I was very lucky to have been cast along side Randy Harrison to play that because if I hadn’t really, really liked him as a person and really trusted him and really wanted to work with him and really respected him because I know how talented he is—I mean sometime we’d fight over ideas and sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s full of shit but we can keep that ball rolling. If I hadn’t felt that way about him, I wouldn’t have been able to dive so deep into my response to what happened with him because he was my friend, you know? He’s my character’s lover but he was my personal friend and someone who was very and still is very dear to me, you know?

но не любовник

[juliamay]

Честно нудьга, лучше папка с безуминкой чем этот гомосеминар имени Бондарчука, наверно Ленин в Октябре веселее снимался

[juliamay]

Папо женится на Рэндике

[otona1987]

juliamay, Джулик, твои комментарии просто забойные. Уверена, что интереснее самого текста. А что за национальность в клипе про свадьбу? там только пара заморенных голодом чуваков, остальных наверное гости съели.

[juliamay]

otona1987, Это же латыши цыгане невесте 19 лет кстате, моложе Рэндика в два раза...

[otona1987]

koricayu, Спасибо Корику и Кинвад

Присоединяюсь

[juliamay]

А чо Харольд не рассказал о своем любимом фотографеWilhelm von Gloeden

[Kysachaya]

juliamay,

А чо Харольд не рассказал о своем любимом фотографе

Правда что ли любимый? Фон Глёден охуенен=) И мальчишки у него зачётные.

[juliamay]

Kysachaya, а то даже курочкам советовал (у меня все ходы записаны), правда что то более нейтральное без хуев, а то совсем бы рехнулись

[otona1987]

Он всю свою биографию рассказал, как на приёме в КГБ.