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Meanwhile, across town, Daniel Lipman and Rob Cowen, the Emmy-award winning writers of the groundbreaking AIDS drama, An Early Frost and the long-running drama series Sisters, had acquired the American rights to the gay-themed British drama series, Queer As Folk. They had already cast actors Scott Lowell, Peter Paige, Hal Sparks, and Randy Harrison as a group of gay friends whose intertwined lives would form the basis for the American version of the story. The casting had been nightmarish for Lipman and Cowen due to the reluctance on the part of agents to send their clients in to read for the parts in the show. The part of Brian Kinney was particularly contentious.

"Here's a gay man, very sexual, very masculine, not the kind of gay character people are used to seeing," says Lipman. "If he were a straight male character, fucking every woman in sight, he'd be a hero. So this was not like the other roles, and that was part of the difficulty."

"It was an extremely distressing experience trying to cast Brian, because of what we discovered to be the massive amount of homophobia [in Hollywood]," says Cowen. There are still traces of the pain clearly evident in his voice. "We were so shocked, and so upset, because we went into this thinking that in the years since An Early Frost things had changed. And what we had discovered was that things hadn't changed one iota."

Late on a Friday afternoon, with a meeting the following Monday at 8:30 a.m. scheduled with the Showtime executives, ostensibly to introduce their cast, Lipman and Cowen still didn't have their Brian Kinney. There were two more actors to read for the part, and at the last minute one of them had dropped out.

"It was a test of faith, and by Friday at 5:00 p.m. faith was running out," Lipman says ruefully. At 5:45 p.m., their casting director called. "She said, 'Come on over right now, he's here!' We raced over to the office." The casting director ushered in one last actor. "In walks Gale Harold," Lipman remembers, "and we're looking at him, and he's reading the scene, and Ron and I are looking at each other, and it's like, 'Is he fucking fabulous?'"

"He fell out of the sky," Cowen breathes. "There's truly no other explanation."

~~*~~

Lipman asked Harold to be at the Showtime offices in Westwood at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. "He lit up a cigarette and, very Brian-esque, he said, 'I'm with this repertory company, and we have to strike a set on Sunday night, and I don't think I can make it.' And we're thinking, Is he for real? Who says that? We've been in Hollywood too long. What do you say to that?" Lipman laughs, shaking his head in disbelief. He pressed a copy of the script into Harold's arms, and asked him to read it and call them at home the next day.

"I was standing in the kitchen," Cowen remembers, "and the phone rang, and a voice said, 'Hi, this is Brian Kinney.'"

"What helped me recover," says Cowen, describing the aftermath of the casting disaster averted in the eleventh hour, an experience that clearly devastated him, both as a film maker and as a gay man, "was that Gale was brave enough to take the part. It was the same way with Aidan Quinn [who was one of the few actors willing to consider An Early Frost, in which he starred as a gay man with AIDS.] You need the one actor who is not afraid, and who is very politically committed to what he's doing. In a way, that was the emotional salvation."

"There was an attraction," Harold concedes, when asked if the chance to play a sexual hunter-gatherer like Brian Kinney--as far from the 'gay upstairs neighbor' as possible--appealed to him. "Another attraction was that it was an interesting story. It wasn't West Hollywood 90210, which I never would have been called in for. I'm not that 'type.'"

Harold's initial take was that the character would best be played as "a cross between Lou Reed and Oscar Wilde, with a gold tooth, and go completely over the top with it. Now we know that I can't do that," he says mischievously, "though I still think that's how it should be done. It would be a lot dirtier. But he's not allowed to be that." Nor does he buy into the notion that Brian is a pure predator. "You have to like your character, because if you don't, no one else will either. And if the point of the show is to create a character that nobody likes and everybody hates, that would be the way to go. Make him a predator. But I liked Stuart [the character upon whom Brian is based]! I liked the guy."

~~*~~

The thought that he might be 'typecast' playing a gay man never occurred to him when he considered whether or not to take the role. He had asked an actor friend, a gay man, whether he should accept the part or not, not because of Brian's sexual orientation, but because of the show's merit. His friend urged him to do it. If you want to be an actor, his friend told him, then act. On the heels of that, Harold realized that he had come to a critical watershed in his life on the threshold of turning thirty.

"There was the creative impulse and the chance to do something," he says honestly, "but there was also $1,400 worth of parking tickets and back registration on my truck." Owing money to friends, and back rent to landlords, the pragmatist in Harold realized that it was time to grow up. "I'd been through the 'hangdog barely making it' thing over and over again. Your options run out." Looking back today, he says, he realizes "the only difference between me now and me then, aside from the experience I've gained working on the show, is that I have money. That I'm able to support myself and pay off my student loans. And the ability to make things right with people over time. That becomes a really important thing as you turn thirty."

The biggest challenge to face Gale Harold since Queer As Folk, it seems, has been speculation and perception. Not, as one might suspect, speculations about his sexual orientation, and the effect it might have on his future. He dismisses those out of hand.

"If someone doesn't want to work with me because I'm playing a gay character, I don't want to work with them," he says cooly. "They can fuck off."

"Gale is totally cool, and secure enough not to be threatened by anything," adds Ron Cowen. "He knows who he is. That makes him more than an actor; it makes him a very fine human being."

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