Darryl Stephens and Jensen Atwood bring back the Arc

AE: Noah’s Arc has such a huge fan base; we’d be interested to hear in what types of people come up to you now. Is it gay men of color, white gay men, straight women, straight men?
JA: Well, at first, the fans were all gay black men. Then, I’ve kind of seen some evolution in the emails, because then it started to be straight black women, and now at this point, it’s the whole spectrum, I mean white housewives…

DS: People from Tokyo…

AE: Oh, so there’s an international following?
DS: Yeah, they come from everywhere. I mean guys in the military…

AE: I used to be in the military myself, and you’d be surprised how many guys there are closeted in the military.
DS: Oh, they’re not closeted!

AE: Oh, really?
JA: Yeah, they’re not secretive. I mean, I’ve gotten pictures of people, soldiers in Iraq holding Noah’s Arc DVDs and stuff. What I love the most is that I still get emails from people who are just discovering the show and just now starting to get excited about it for whatever reason. So, it’s just amazing to me how this Noah’s Arc thing, even when it seems to stop, it just kind of keeps going.

AE: Noah’s Arc has had to carry the burden of visibility for gay men of color for a while, and I wanted to know if you both felt any pressure as far as the role your show had in helping to get these images out there.
DS: Well, you know my friends Quincy and Deondray do a show called The DL Chronicles on here!, Jensen’s on a show called Dante’s Cove, and clearly there are some gay men of color on that show because Jensen’s on it. I would say I think that there may have been a lot of pressure at the beginning. We got a lot of flack from people who felt like the four main guys weren’t representing enough of a broad spectrum of black gay men.

AE: Absolutely. Can you talk to that for a moment? You all caught a lot of flack for the characters being too effeminate, and that issue of masculinity and femininity in gay culture is actually addressed in the movie.
DS: It is in the series as well, and I think that the people who are asking that question need to ask themselves why they’re asking the question. Why are you so uncomfortable that a gay man is acting like a gay man? If that means he’s slightly effeminate, okay. You know, people who need to see these thugged-out, macho guys with their pants hanging around their asses need to first figure out why they need to see that. They need to understand that this is about four particular men. If everybody who watched Sex and the City or every woman over 70 who watched The Golden Girls expected to be represented in one of those four characters, well, good luck, you know what I mean?

Patrik did that very deliberately and I think it was very bold on his part. What Patrik did was that instead of playing into this whole idea that gay men need to be mocking all of these heterosexual archetypes, said well why don’t we just have the sensitive emotional one tie the story together, and have everyone else center around him? If you look at the show and go from Greg Keith to his character’s lover Alex Kirby, played by Rodney Chester, there is a very wide spectrum of gay men of color being represented.

The people who take issue with that are, I feel, the same people who don’t like going to gay clubs where they’re playing house music and the kids are voguing. If you want to go to a club where all they play is hip hop and everyone looks like a thug, well good for you. Good luck, God bless you, but that is not the whole gay community and that’s not the gay community that Patrik was interested in depicting.

AE: What’s next for the two of you? What should we all be looking forward to next from Jensen Atwood and Darryl Stephens?
JA: I’m in a 2009 calendar which you can find on Men of Eros. And really, I mean the auditioning continues. I’m attached to a movie called I.E. that Snoop Dogg is also attached to, but of course the auditioning continues.

DS: I shot a film last year with Anthony Mackie called Bolden, which is a jazz biopic about a musician named Buddy Bolden, who was one of the first coronet players in New Orleans during the 1900’s. It’s a period piece, and we’re hoping it comes out next year, but I’ve heard word that it will come out in 2010. I did an episode of Rick and Steve with RuPaul on Logo, and that should be coming out next year.

Also, like I said, more auditioning. Pilot season is coming up, and I think both of us are excited about doing something new. We were both tied into this movie during the last pilot season, so we couldn’t really do anything. This is the first time that I’m not attached to anything for a really long time, so we’re excited!

AE: …and we’re all excited to see what’s next from you as well. Thanks to the both of you for your time and I think our readers are going to get a kick out of hearing what you had to say.
BOTH: Thank you.

Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom is playing in select theaters starting on Friday, October 24th. For locations and showtimes, visit www.noahsarcmovie.com.