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The nudity and the sex with other men is a question that comes up constantly. The question people never seem to manage to ask, though they want to, is how on earth do you manage it? The man who likely rocked straight middle America off the Richter scale in the first episode of Queer As Folk, when his character coldly instructed Randy Harrison's character to rim him, is matter of fact about the mechanics of onscreen sex.

"We have a really good crew," he says casually. "Between the actors, and the cooperation of the producers, we've been able to establish a protocol for the show, where every sex scene has a 'sex meeting.' The director has a shot list of what he wants. It not only demystifies it, but it's like a rehearsal for scenes that aren't rehearsed. If you know what you're going to do, and why, when you're actually there doing it, you can. You're not thinking, 'What the fuck is going on? Where's the camera? Why are we rolling again? Why am I doing this again?' You don't have to deal with it. You understand the scene."

Harold is amused by the response his involvement in the show elicits in some straight viewers. "I've had middle-aged men come up to me, on a shoot-the-breeze level, and bring up the show. The responses range from 'My wife loves the show!' to 'I loved the show, it's funny as hell!'" Women beg him to tell them that he's straight. Gay men love or loathe Brian Kinney, and Harold is the occasional recipient of the runoff. At a Toronto Film Festival party recently, he passed a group of men he didn't know, and quite naturally didn't stop to speak to them. As he passed, he heard an expletive fired his way.

"But you can't even acknowledge that as a negative response, really," Harold says philosophically. Friends fax him items pulled off the net, comments that he allegedly made in interviews, "basically putting me in line with other heterosexual actors and their comments."

~~*~~

His family, for their part, seem to have taken their son's nascent fame, and newfound profile, in remarkably sanguine stride.

"Some of them were shocked," Harold muses, "just by the fact that I had a job. I just let the information come out [bit by bit], so that by the time they actually realized I was on a television show with a budget, and that I was getting paid, and flying first-class in airplanes, they were, like, 'Jesus, that's beyond anything we've ever considered.'"

The key to understanding what Gale Harold will allow us to understand about him is likely not going to be found in this interview, or in any of the other interviews he's sat for since he became Brian-on-Queer-As-Folk. It might instead be found by examining where he went while on summer haitus, before the new season began shooting.

Instead of heading off to L.A. to capitalize on his Brian Kinney status, Gale Harold packed up and headed off-Broadway to a tiny SoHo playhouse on Vandamm and Sixth, in New York, to appear with George Morfogen in a low-budget production of Austin Pendleton's AIDS drama, Uncle Bob. The stage was his first love, and he had arranged a summer tryst.

His personal publicity from Queer As Folk followed him to New York, like a wasp in a car on a long road trip, as he tried to prepare for his stage role.

"I haven't, no," he says when I ask him if he's ever woken up and asked himself what in the world he thought he was doing, taking on a role as potentially defining as Brian Kinney. "I've woken up after seeing this," he says, brandishing a page from a high fashion magazine featuring him sulking elegantly for the camera, "and asked myself what I thought I was doing. Or seeing my cover for Metrosource, which was such a cheese dish, and said 'What the fuck am I doing? I'm supposed to be working on a play!'"

To his credit, Harold acknowledges Brian Kinney helped open the door for him there, too.

"To be honest," he says, "the profile of [Queer As Folk] was one of the reasons I had an introduction to the project." And yet, he admits, "It was very distracting. It was a blessing and a curse. I wish it had just been the director and I."

A publicist knocks on the door to see how the interview is going thus far. Gale Harold smiles with brilliant courtesy, and at that moment, my heart goes out to him. I'm very sure there's one place he wants to be, and that is back at work on the set. Acting, and being with other actors. Working. He's right, interviews can be an enormous cheese dish.

"If anyone can crack the publicity nut, and figure out how to not come across hammy and contrived," he sighs, with honest reluctant resignation, "I'd love to talk to them."

Copyright 2002 by Michael Rowe

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