 Photograph by Chris Chapman for The Advocate |
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The tall, slender man locking his bicycle outside the resolutely unpretentious Toronto restaurant designated for our interview is wearing a fedora, tilted down over his eyes in a way that suggests a desire for great distance, as though a veil of inviolability has been drawn about him like an invisible cloak. On anyone else, the hat might seem like a bohemian affectation. Worn this late-fall afternoon by actor Gale Harold, for whom anonymity--or inviolability for that matter--has become a rare commodity in the almost two years since his character, Brian Kinney, the gay white shark of Showtime's Queer As Folk, seared himself into gay consciousness and pop culture, the tilted brim of the hat (tilted down, thank you) is as declarative as the visor on a steel helmet. If he could mark off more private territory--for instance, never do another celebrity profile, with the journalist's necessary excavation of his private life in order to satisfy the public's immense curiosity about the actor who breathed life into Brian Kinney--he wouldn't. Questions about what it's like to be a straight man playing gay, or what it feels like to make love to another man in the nude in front of cameras, or what it feels like to be so handsome, or what it feels like to be so famous, exasperate him beyond distraction, as well they might. In what other circumstances but Queer As Folk would a journalist be able to keep a straight face while asking a 32 year old man, a professional actor at that, what his Mom and Dad think about him engaging in male-on-male sex in front of millions of people every week? And if Queer As Folk had faded away into the elephant's graveyard of long-lost cable television shows, instead of exploding into a cultural supernova that even its detractors can quote, chapter and verse, Gale Harold might have faded away with it, and nobody would ask any of these impertinent questions. But it didn't. Inside the restaurant, the waiter has brought him a cup of tea, and we have ordered lunch. ~~*~~ "How could I not be ambivalent?" Harold says in response to a pointed query about his deeply equivocal relationship with his new fame (he'll very reluctantly, and with some humor, accede to semi junior league star). If being famous means that you get to work on great projects all the time, with great people, then I'm not all that ambivalent. My idea of fame may include that. But," he says with some distaste, "it doesn't necessarily include...fame." Harold reluctantly acknowledges that television culture, with its immediacy and spurious intimacy, is the reason why people think they know him, and want to know more. But he doesn't like it, or trust its motivation. "I'm grateful for the attention," he says, softening for a moment, "because it validates that I'm doing something." Even as he says this, Harold acknowledges that it sounds like something hundreds of overexposed celebrities have already said. "There
is a genuine human impulse to want to know more about people you're
interested in, for whatever reason. But that impulse has been manipulated
as an industry--a bad industry--to sustain itself. It can be tweaked
by publicists and studios. It didn't develop as a benevolent machine
to provide more pleasure to people. It developed as a tool to sustain
itself." "Gale has very strong opinions, and he's very political," says Queer As Folk executive producer Ron Cowen, with no small measure of pride. "Sometimes I think he's the smartest person I've ever met. I know a lot of smart, well-educated, well-read people. But there's something about Gale where it takes a leap, from education, or keen intelligence, to some other place. Genius is a cheap word, especially in Hollywood. But he's really smart." Gale Harold, it seems, has always been asking questions. He was born in Decatur, Georgia in 1969, to an engineer father and a mother who sold real estate. He is the third generation of his family to carry the name Gale Harold. His parents were devout Pentecostals, and his childhood was a classic southern mélange of church, school, and sports. There were so many little things about my childhood that were southern," he says, "and so many that were suburban American. There was a dairy farm behind my house at one point." Harold manifested an early affinity for soccer. As he moved towards adolescence, however, he began to question the carved in stone tenets of both all-American jock culture, and religion. "I burned out very rapidly on what you refer to as 'jocks'," he says. Harold dislikes the word, feeling it has negative connotations. "I couldn't really handle that state of mind. I don't know what it's like to be a girl in team sports, but definitely for a guy in the States, there are so many flag-waving impulses forced upon you. Excellence in sports is a good way to keep you moving in the direction of allegiance to your school and your country." ~~*~~ Although he didn't have the terminology available to him at the time, young Gale was able to observe the homophobia tightly woven into the shining fabric of his suburban world, both on the playing fields of Southwest Dekalb High School, and in his parents' church. He is careful not to dwell on the subject of religion out of respect for his mother, who is still Pentecostal (his father left the church several years ago.) "I started to lose all interest [in religion] at around fifteen, around the time I got my driver's license," Harold remembers. "I knew it was bullshit, you know? The choir director was gay. The assistant choir director was gay. Most of the men in the choir were gay. It was obvious. And these were people I talked to, and grew up knowing. These were my friends, and my parents' friends, and members of the church. And they're up there, singing and clapping their hands, then they sit down, and some ogre walks up and starts saying something that is basically potentially fatal under the right circumstances. And we know how fast those circumstances can shift and become dangerous. "I think [today] it's probably gotten easier and easier for people to deal with," he muses, "but it's still a monumental achievement for some people to say, 'You're gay, can we talk?' They're so scared, because they don't know what it means about them, about God. But that's happening more now than ever before." Harold suggests it might be generational. Even so, he says, "I wouldn't want to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, even now." Likewise on the playing field, where Harold was once forbidden to play soccer because his hair was too long. The explanation was that it made him look unmasculine. The same impulse that kept suspected faggots outside the golden perimeter of high school acceptance kept jocks in their place, with short hair. Furthermore, "because he took my side, our goalkeeper wasn't allowed to play either." Harold sighs. "When you're a kid, you instinctively know when someone's blowing smoke up your ass. You react to it, or you don't. Atlanta, even then, was a culturally mixed city. The best record stores were in gay neighborhoods, and Harold and his close friends would often find themselves rifling through the stacks in those establishments. "You look up and you realize, 'Oh, this is the deal,'" he shrugs, remembering his nascent awareness of a larger gay presence. Closer to home, he had friends he says he knew were gay. But it wasn't discussed. "Say I'm fifteen years old," he suggests, remembering. "And I know you're gay. And you know I know. We never actually talk about it because you never bring it up, and I don't feel like invading whatever that might be. We're not going to feel compelled to go there. I never had one of those moments when someone came out to me as a confidant," he says. "The acknowledgment was already strong enough. It wasn't like they needed me to tell them that I knew." ~~*~~ After high school, Harold won a soccer scholarship to American University, but dropped out after his first year and moved to San Francisco, attending the San Francisco Art Institute. "In high school I was attracted to plays as literature," he says. Years later, being a "totally different person than I was at sixteen," he isn't sure of the exact moment the seeds of his subsequent career were planted, but he developed an interest in acting during his early years in San Francisco. In addition to his studies, Harold worked a series of low-paying jobs that seemed tailor-made for a young man searching. "I was waiting tables, taking out the trash, painting houses. A bunch of menial shit," he says cheerfully. As time passed, though, his lack of concrete direction began to take its toll. "I wasn't looking [for a direction], and life had started getting beyond the point of enjoyment, you know?" With adulthood setting in, Harold began to think about where his talents and passions lay. When a friend asked him to appear in a movie (which, in the end, was never made), his interest was piqued. He'd been struggling in San Francisco--the city had grown expensive, and Harold was working in a job he disliked, debating whether or not to leave a relationship. When the building in which he was living was sold, and turned into a parking garage, he realized he was at a threshold of sorts. "I knew at some point I was going to have to do something, whether it was moving to Los Angeles, or whatever." Feeling in a rut, he left for L.A. in 1997. "I'd met a teacher there I was intrigued by, and I took a week-long workshop." The craft of acting struck Harold as somehow immediate and visceral, in a way that two-dimensional, or visual, mediums didn't. "I had some friends there who were really good to me, and helped me out with jobs and places to stay. They helped me get on my feet." Waiting tables, going to acting classes, he studied "to the exclusion of everything else, for a solid year and a half." He had been planning to move to New York when he acquired a manager, who'd seen him in a play and thought he had something special. For a year, Harold made the actor's boot camp round of auditions, but nothing clicked. At one point, he asked his manager to stop sending him out for television work, sure that there was nothing for him in that medium. Continued on PAGE TWO |