Darryl Stephens Played Noah On "Noah's Arc," The First Black Femme Guy Who Wasn't a Sassy Joke. Now He's a Parent. And VERY Political.
He was the lead on the mid-2000s gay Black male version of "Girlfriends," "SATC" and "The Golden Girls." But he's soured on an industry he feels exacts a price for candid political talk.
Happy mid-April, Caftaners! I hope you had a good weekend. I took advantage of the good weather and headed out Saturday to Chelsea with my friend Ravi to see a talk attached to the showing of the late gay artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform”). Yes, that’s what it is—a go-go platform with old-school Times Square porno-shop type lights around the perimeter. We actually went because my actual go-go friend Angel was going to be dancing on the box…
…but he got up on the box earlier than planned and so we missed him and only had the rather boring talk, which wasn’t really even about Felix but about “performativity” (snooze). So we slipped out and got some food and walked along the Hudson on a gorgeous day, then repaired to the venerable Village gay bar Julius’ and had a very dirty martini with our friend Doug, whom we bumped into.
Oh, and on Friday, I also saw Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which is the legendary Broadway Cats done in the context of a gay uptown ball as depicted in the iconic documentary Paris is Burning and the TV show Pose. It was amazing!
Try to see it if you can. It actually takes something dumb like “Cats” (even though I will admit much of the score is really great in that cheesy Andrew Lloyd Weber way) and imbues it with new layers of meaning and wit by recontextualizing it, which is my favorite kind of revival. And the maximalist costumes—seemingly hundreds of them!—by the talented designer and Black trans activist Qween Jean are hilarious and clever, full of visual gags, and get ever more fabulously insane as the show unfolds.
Well, of course, me being me, I am having all sorts of political feelings these days per usual, but I’ll spare you them in this tee-up because in fact it turned out that, with little prompting from me, my chatmate this week was having a lot of political feelings as well. So I’ll just note that this chat is quite political at the top—because that’s how our talk unfolded, and I like to present these chats as they played out (save a bit of judicious pruning). So if you’re tired of politics, just skim until the part when…
Oh! I guess I should introduce my guest. It’s Darryl Stephens, 52, who was the title character on the brief but truly seminal mid-2000s TV show Noah’s Arc…
…which did for Black gay men in L.A. what The Golden Girls did for old white women in Florida, SATC did for young(ish) white women in NYC and Girlfriends (remember Girlfriends?) did for young Black women, also in L.A. Which was mainly to show them as a chosen-family that, despite all the yucks and stock characters (the bossy alpha, the lovable slut, the uptight careerist, the idealistic ingenue, etc.), pushed the conversation forward on sex, gender, relationships, etc.
Rewatching the two seasons of Noah’s Arc (created by Patrik-Ian Polk) to prep for my chat with Darryl, I enjoyed its corny, campy messiness, but I also realized how progressive, 20 years ago, the show’s vision was of a community of gay Black men who, generally speaking, were out-and-proud and not D.L. The show also handled HIV really admirably in the era when the CDC announced that a staggering 1 in 3 gay Black men in the U.S. had HIV. (Rates of new infections among Black gay men are still very high compared to rates among white men.)
And, just like SATC, the show has had its follow-ups: There was Jumping the Broom in 2008, the 2020 The ’Rona Chronicles that reunited the cast virtually during the pandemic, and last year’s Noah’s Arc: The Movie, in which the gang have all become daddies.
Speaking of daddies, five years ago, Darryl became one—literally. He has really interesting and candid things to say about why he entered this new chapter, and how it’s changed him. We also talked about how the more famous and part of the Hollywood machine you get, the harder it is to speak out about certain things you care about if you don’t want to lose your status.
I want to thank my gay men’s health activist friend Andy Spieldenner (whom I interviewed here last year) for connecting me to Darryl, who talked to me thoughtfully, deeply and quite frankly for more than two hours.
If you have a connection to a famous or notable older gay man (usually 55+) who you think would be up for chatting with me, please drop me a line at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com. And please consider becoming a paid subscriber at $5/month if you’ve been a free one for a while and like what I’m giving you.
Here’s Darryl Stephens!
Hi Darryl! Thanks for chatting today. So you live in L.A., right?
Yes, south of Hancock Park, with my husband and daughter [whom he keeps very private, so no photos, alas]. It’s a duplex that was built in the 1920s. My husbands’ parents live downstairs, so we have a built-in babysitter. We remodeled both floors in the last ten years. A giant monstera in the corner and fiddle-leaf figs all over the place. My husband is 47 and is a radiologist. We met in 2017, just when Trump was coming to power. My husband is from a foreign country, so he offered me a perspective on the U.S. that I needed to hear at that point. I was really believing that we were going down and there was no way out. Of course it’s nowhere near what we’re going through now. But my husband told me that there were places in the world that are much worse than this and regimes in place that are far more brutal. He told me about the cyclical nature of authoritarian regimes, how they rise and fall. He’s not super-political, though. Because of the work that he does, with cancer, he doesn’t want to get into the darkness of day-to-day life when he comes home. There’s enough darkness in his office.
I think now I am probably less alarmist than I was in 2017 even though things are much worse. I’ve trained myself to process things differently. Having a child in the house also precludes you from having an emotional breakdown every day. You have to keep your head above water when there’s a child who’s paying attention to you and looking for you to be the voice of sanity.
My brother says the same thing about my five-year-old niece, that you want to shield them from the world’s darkness and anxiety as long as you can.
It’s particularly troubling if you’re raising girls right now because the world has never had its shit together with regard to respecting women. And now we’re going backwards, with women losing bodily autonomy. My husband will look at me sideways or pat my chest—playfully!—when I say that you can’t always trust the police. Things kids should not have to hear but that I find myself saying out loud because I cannot let the lies that America has made institutional continue to flourish in her mind. I have to carefully dismantle them in ways that don’t shatter her entire world view but also keep her alert and aware. It’s very challenging, and troubling to see not only old men doing the same shit they’ve always done, but young men [taking up] this red-pill manosphere way of viewing women. It’s all really dark.
But mostly I want to keep my family out of this conversation, for their safety, because I’m vocal about how I feel about this administration. And they’re tracking everything we’re saying and posting.
What do you think is going to happen? I feel that there’s not a lot anyone can do until the midterms—at which point, if we can’t turn this around…
Isn’t there also a tactic to fascism that involves making the population feel helpless? Like we have to wait to do this peaceful thing [voting], while navigating our restrictive voter laws. They don’t want us to be able to vote by mail. There’s talk of them having ICE agents at the polls. How many times can they tell us, “You can only defeat us if you wait another six months, but we’re doing everything in our power today to make sure that you can’t do it then, either.” When do we just wake up and say we have to do something else? What’s the Plan B? They’re counting on us expecting that nothing will change, and that it will get harder and harder for us to even say anything, to utter words publicly.
I feel like if the midterms happen badly for us and it’s broadly understood that the administration and complicit Republicans compromised the vote, or if he imposes martial law right before the midterms—if people don’t swarm the streets at that point and and initiate a tax boycott or a major consumer boycott, then I really think we’re fucked. And that it will have said something about the temperament of this country, because people in other countries have swarmed the streets and largely nonviolently put down dictators. But maybe we’re too coddled and comfortable and lulled into passivity by our screens.
Exactly! We can’t effectively boycott Amazon or Target because we just want that thing that we need.
There is so much power in economic refusal. If a critical mass of people just stopped using Amazon, that would be so seismic. But like you, I don’t know if we have the discipline or the character to do that. Too many people have been coddled into submission.
Too many people are actually still comfortable. We thought that when Alex Pretti and Renee Goode were murdered in the street, white people would wake up and go, “Oh! So what Black and brown people have been saying for centuries is actually true, that they’ll kill anyone in the street.” We thought that the masses were going to wake up. The same way we thought that after the George Floyd protests. Nothing changes because the people who need to wake up are still comfortable. There’s always an excuse. “If that Black man had just complied.” “If Alex Pretti hadn’t had a gun.” “If Renee Goode hadn’t been in her car.”
My feeling about the George Floyd BLM moment is that it divided white people in the U.S. For half of them—maybe more or less than half—it was a genuine consciousness-raising. But I think the other half were silently doubling down on their, um, racism or white supremacy, and when Trump was reelected, that legitimized that energy. It was like backlash energy plus his winning again that allowed that energy to surge the way it is surging now.
Having said that, I do feel that whereas last year a lot of Americans were stunned and clobbered by the sheer speed, force and volume of the administration’s assaults after Inauguration Day, earlier this year the people of Minneapolis were so fierce against ICE that it kicked a lot of the rest of the country in the pants. Like, “Stop being paralyzed by fear. You have power.” And I feel that, especially now with the war, people are more vocally rebuking him than ever.
And meanwhile, nobody’s been prosecuted from the Epstein files.
And meanwhile, we’re living in an authoritarian country but, for us in New York and L.A., there’s still this bubble of relative progressivism and diversity.
Absolutely. I’m looking out on blue skies and jacaranda blossom right now.
There’s been a lot of conversation about whether Black people should be participating in the protests going on now, with arguments on both sides. You sound very engaged politically. What’s your feeling about that?
I think that Black people in the streets right now would give the administration permission to start being even more violent and declare martial law so that the midterms don’t happen. But also, white people did this! White people chose this. So this is white folks’ problem, not Black people’s. If you, as a white person, were not able to talk to your grandpappy and grandmammy about the insanity that man was talking about during the campaign while they were cheering for him, to convince them to vote otherwise, then you need to go out in the streets now and deal with it. Because we Black people have been in the streets, telling you, for fucking centuries now. What do you need us to do? You had the opportunity to elect somebody else who was not perfect—no politician is. Black and brown folks are the target of this Gestapo. So we can’t be out in the streets. They’re just waiting to kill us.
What do you think, if anything, is the role for Black folks in this moment?
I think Black folks are tasked with continuing to build community. Something I am always trying to do, in my own way in the house on my phone, is remind Black folks that we are all we’ve got right now. And that the queer and trans folks that you are turning to your church for excuses to vilify and exclude are actually part of the community you need to be looking toward. Because they have the intelligence and the background when it comes to taking care of folks. And when shit goes down the way we know shit is going to go down, you will need the queer and trans folks in your community on your side—because they’re coming for all of us. So let’s figure out ways to stop separating ourselves down here on the bottom rung of the society they’ve built on top of us—and figure out ways to take care of ourselves.
So, taking care of one’s own community.
Yes! Their method of attack has always been to divide and conquer poor people of different races. We need to change our response and say, “We see you—we know what you’re doing.” It’s not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. But instead we’re vilifying trans people and immigrants. How many cycles of this do we have to suffer through before folks recognize this very transparent tactic?
I sometimes think there is a growing sense of that top versus bottom, maybe especially among young people, and that maybe there could be a political realignment around those ideas. Mamdani, for example, got so much attention for focusing so ruthlessly on the haves versus have-nots. Do you think enough people from left and right could align around that idea?
I think what’s happening right now is the possible turning point. We’ve recognized, on a larger scale than ever before, that the U.S., as far as geopolitics go, is the bad guy—the aggressor. We’ve teamed up with Israel and we’re looking like the axis of evil. It’s clear that our leaders are operating beyond the rule of law, committing war crimes without consequences. More folks are waking up to that than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.
At the same time, I hate to say this, but I’m seeing a lot of folks using antisemitic tropes to justify their hatred of what Israel is doing, conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. That’s very concerning to me because it’ll put people in danger who really have nothing to do with this conversation.
I feel the same way. I have so many Jewish friends here in NYC who are in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and are at the forefront of protests against what Israel is doing. For me, they illuminate a very bright line between being Jewish and supporting Israel. But, like racism, antisemitism goes back so far and runs so deep that it’s really hard for a lot of people to separate Israel as a political entity that’s only about a century old from a much deeper legacy of antisemitism. But I also think people have to acknowledge that, because not everyone is bright or enlightened enough to separate the two, if Israel continues to do the things it does, it’s fueling global antisemitism.
One-hundred percent! And because Israel calls every criticism of their government antisemitic, we’ve lost the meaning of that word. We can’t criticize you bombing children?
I agree. But I also feel as though more people than ever are starting to push back on that and say, “No—these are two different things.” And that’s important. The Palestinian liberation movement in this country has always been held back by the fear it would be called antisemitic. But more people are saying “No—it’s not antisemitic to speak out against this.”
Right, but also true antisemites are seeing this shift and exploiting it to actually be antisemitic. It’s a slippery slope. As much as I’m excited to see this consciousness shift, I fear that there are bad-faith actors who will continue to exploit these old tropes.
I sense we have very similar politics, so let’s get off politics a bit. Walk me through a fairly typical day. When do you get up?
I’m living Groundhog Day. I live the same day every day. Wake up around six, get the coffee going, start making the kid’s lunch, figure out what she needs to wear, pack her bag for swimming lessons after school. She and the husband get up around seven. I get her dressed, make breakfast, get her fed, in the car and to school. Then I may go to the gym if I don’t have something to do that morning. Today I skipped the gym for a meeting with an organization called Making Caring Common, which started out of Harvard. They have a program where elementary school parents get a lesson every month and go into the classroom and teach kids about empathy and kindness. This month our lesson is about how to express it if someone hurts your feelings, and how people receiving the message can say, “I’m sorry—how can I fix this?”
This week I’m also being a teacher’s aide to my kid’s teacher.
Two days a week I have a standing session with my writing partner. Right now we’re finishing up the first draft of our feature. We’re going to a film festival for a pilot we wrote and produced.
Is that the Vimeo you sent me? About the trans boy on the sports team?
Yeah.
I loved that. Where does that stand right now?
Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is not being very receptive to trans stories right now. And many of the streamers that you would normally go to to sell a show like this have been bought up by very conservative folks.
Why do you think Heated Rivalry was so wildly popular in this atmosphere we’re in right now?
Folks are starved for male intimacy in a way that feels honest and genuine. And I think the show would’ve been a hit anyway, but how those two actors navigated that promotional tour was so refreshing to see. It felt revolutionary. We didn’t know who was identifying as gay or straight in the beginning. I think we have a better sense now. But the idea that the two actors were all over each other, hugging and kissing whenever they could, made us go, “Oh, there’s a new way to—” We were just talking about the manosphere. I think that many men are starved for representation that allows them to be emotionally vulnerable and physically affectionate with each other. And women are starved for even just the image of men who are not cavemen. Men navigating the world with any iota of emotional intelligence is like porno for them. As rough as it is for queer folks right now, straight women are really dealing with the dregs of society. Women have woken up to the reality that most straight men ain’t shit and that they have to make due with the limited imagination of straight men for their entire lives. I think they’re realizing, “Oh maybe I’m happier just hanging out with my girlfriends and maybe finding a man for sex every now and then—but not dealing with them on a regular basis because they’re emotionally stunted.”
Also, on the show, Hudson is half-Asian but white-presenting enough. That show could not have happened with two Asian- or Black-presenting men, or two men of color—
I think a big reason for the show’s success is that they’re both really masculine. I think it could’ve been as successful with, say, a Black and a Latino guy if they were both as gorgeous and masc as the two guys on the show.
I disagree. And only because I’ve been on the gay side of this industry for a long time and I’ve seen beautiful Black men come into gay stories and how Black folks respond to those stories with skepticism and fear. When Noah’s Arc came out in 2005, half the Black gay men who watched the show felt like we were too feminine—and white people weren’t watching the show at all. I think the success of Noah’s Arc came from Black straight women who were starved to see men being physically intimate and nice to each other. When do we get to see that?
But the majority of this country is still white somehow and I don’t think that Heated Rivalry could’ve hit as hard as it did in the U.S. without two white-presenting, masc-presenting main characters.
Hm, ok. So pivoting back to family for a minute, how did you and your husband decide to have a kid—and what is the experience like? Has it changed you?
My husband is very connected to his family, which attracted me to him early on. For whatever reason, in my own life I had been less connected to my own family. I met his parents very early on. This could be immigrant culture. They take care of their parents in ways that I don’t think Americans do. It was so impressive. He’s a doctor, so any time someone gets sick in the family, he’s the one they call. So over time, I got very invested in his nieces and nephews, as he is. I learned what uncles could be. “Wow, look what family can be when you care enough to be involved and present.”
So about seven years ago, about a year and a half into our relationship, he asked what I thought about having a kid. I was like: “A kid?” While I marched for marriage equality, marriage itself had never even occurred to me as reality for me. So I went away for a couple days and thought about it. I was in my midforties by that point. I thought about the work I do, my career, and realized that I didn’t see myself doing it forever. If there’s any legacy to be attached to my name, I’d probably already done the majority of that work. So what would a next phase of my life look like? Well, I’m the mama bear to my friend group, the one who looked after them at raves in college, making sure they got home okay.
So I said to my husband, “Let’s do it.” It felt like an exciting next phase for me, because it didn’t look like me hustling to get three lines on Grey’s Anatomy. I wanted the focus to be on someone other than myself. As a gay male actor, the gym is a focus. Who cares, really? We’re all rotting as we speak, so how long can this be the focus?
Right. Did you guys use a surrogate?
My husband’s brother’s wife in fact was our surrogate. My husband’s brother had a job in China at the time, so he was living there with his wife and their three kids. She was just sitting in the house all day, so when we were talking about having a kid, she said, “I could carry her.” So they came here around Christmas 2019 for the embryo transfer. They were going to return to China, but then Covid hit there. So they all ended up living with us on our L.A. mini-compound for a year. It was kind of amazing. Not only did we get to be with her the entire time she was pregnant with our kid, we also got to really connect with their three kids, who were between ages six and ten. It was a crash course on parenting for us, seeing the day-to-day of having kids. We all ate dinner together at the table. While many of my gay friends were in their one-bedroom apartments alone because of Covid, we were ten of us in our house. Thank God we had a pool. I was never bored—we always had someone to talk to. It was a magical year. And then our daughter was born.
My biggest takeaway about being a parent is that you don’t realize that there’s a depth of love that most adults don’t access until they have a child. I was able to access that deeper, unconditional level of love, feeling like they deserve everything. There’s a kid on your chest right after she’s born whom you’re connecting with, bathing, wiping clean after she poops, waking up in the middle of the night to feed—I mean, I had no idea my mother went through that.
It’s intense that you were all together while your husband’s brother’s wife was carrying your daughter. Was it hard for her to let go post-delivery and go home?
They actually ended up not going back to China and moving back into their own house in L.A., which they had leased. So she actually nursed the kid the first few months. Now they live nearby and she’s my kid’s favorite auntie, very much involved with her life. It’s not a typical situation where the surrogate is paid to carry and deliver the kid—
And then buh-bye?
Right. Their kids and our kid are each other’s favorite cousins. We’re also in touch with our egg donor, who has five kids of her own. We share pictures and it’s fun to see my kid growing up looking a little bit like her.
Tell me more about how you feel that being a parent has changed you.
I’ve realized that it’s a pleasure and a gift to take care of someone other than myself, focusing on her growth and humanity and understanding of the world. I’m now in awe of my mother, who was in her early twenties when she was raising my brother and me. The patience that parents have to have to raise children, I don’t think humans have in their twenties. Our brains are still developing. Now I think that young, single parents are a miracle. I’m so blessed to have built-in babysitters downstairs, plus a husband. Anyone raising kids alone is miraculous. If you were raised by a single parent, I want you to call and tell them how amazing they are, even if they weren’t perfect.
Doing a promo last year for Omaha, Nebraska’s first Black Gay Pride…
Right. When you and your husband were talking about having a kid, did you talk at all about what it would be like raising a kid in this world, with the intersection of climate events and Trump and—
Well, in 2019, Trump was on his way out and we were hoping that whatever fever dream led to that situation was over and that America had finally woken up after that joke and failure of a first term.
What about climate?
No. In my household, there’s me, who has enough free time to keep up with the news, and him, a busy doctor dealing with people’s real-life day to day problems—possible breast cancer and things like that. When he comes home, he wants to watch rom-coms and not be inundated with bad news. American Horror Story would never play in this house. And he’s the fun dad while I’m the day-to-day dad, the disciplinarian. The challenge of introducing the hardships of real life in this country, this world—we want to protect her from the truth for as long as we can and allow her to develop her brain in a space that feels safe and reassuring. As for climate change—are any of us really dealing with that in a way that feels productive?
That’s true. Did having a kid affect your friendships with other gay friends who don’t have kids? Do you ever still party or do the West Hollywood gay lifestyle?
I think I’d already aged out of any interest in the scene already, a little bit disenchanted, five years before having her. And that disenchantment played into my decision to welcome this new phase in life. I think that when a lot of gay men get to middle age, we don’t really want to be in bars screaming over music and paying $20 for a cocktail that we don’t really want to drink because it’s too sweet. We’re watching the men we were here with 20 years ago grow old, as we watch a whole new crop younger than us walk in and look at us like we’re crazy for being there.
So you start having a more home-based life, like a dinner party or a game night. During Covid, we had these social bubbles. I had gay men who created pods with other gay men who were—how do I say this without sounding judgmental?—who were living life…