Here to represent: Patrik-Ian Polk wondered why there was no TV show about black gay men. So he created one.

"I walked into the club, and it was full, mostly, of black gay men from all over the country," recalls filmmaker Patrik-Ian Polk about 2003's Los Angeles Black Pride celebration. "And I was immediately struck with the notion that this was a group who was just not being served by mainstream Hollywood. There was no film or TV project being produced for that audience specifically."

There is now. The director behind the groundbreaking black gay feature film Punks has embarked on Noah's Arc, a series about the lives and loves of tour African-American men in Los Angeles. Rather than follow the traditional route of making pitches and looking for financing, Polk says, he made a vow to himself at that Black Pride party: "I'm not going to wait for anyone to say yes. I'm just going to figure out a way to do it that doesn't require anyone giving their permission or their money. Whatever I have to do, by this time next year this show will be a reality." Lo and behold, right on schedule, the first episode of Noah's Arc is currently available for sale on DVD at the show's Web site.

The series revolves found would-be screenwriter Noah (Darryl Stephens), who's just starting a relationship with the straight-identified Wade (Jensen Atwood). The fact that Wade doesn't think of himself as gay doesn't go over well with Noah's pals Alex (Rodney Chester), an HIV/AIDS counselor; Ricky (Christian Vincent), a clothing store owner and full-time playa; and Chance (Doug Spearman), a monogamous college professor who's raising a child with his partner. While Polk set out to make a "black Sex and the City," don't look for his lead foursome to completely fit the Carrie-Miranda-Samantha-Charlotte blueprint. "My goal was to create four interesting guys rather than say, 'You're going to be the slut and you're going to be the prude.' Once I trod those one-line descriptions, the trick is to turn all that on its ear and to have those characters doing interesting things and not doing what's expected."

And while Polk, a self-described life-long "TV junkie," may not be out to remake Set, he's certainly including sex as a key ingredient in Noah's Arc. There's a parade of hot men on this show, and the couplings in the first episode are often steamy. Still, the writer-director says he won't ever sacrifice story for sensuality. "I was intending to do this ultrasexy series, but then I found that in the second and third episode, I don't think there's any sex in either one," he says. "But I can't do that Queer (as Folk firing, where it's in your face all the time, seemingly sometimes for no reason."

Getting the show off the ground as an independent project has filled Polk's calendar for the past year. After his Friday night revelation during Black Pride, he recalls, "that Monday, I put casting notices out--I hadn't even written the script yet--and started casting a couple of weeks after that, then wrote the script very quickly." By September he had prepared a short featurette that introduced the show's characters, and by June he had the first episode ready to screen at San Francisco's Frameline film festival.

"The Frameline 28 audience loved Noah's Arc, giving the film a standing ovation," says Michael Lumpkin, Frameline's executive director. "The screening became one of those rare community events where the filmmaker delivered exactly what the community has been hungering for."

Releasing the show in the summer of 2004, however, means that Noah's Arc is surfacing in the middle of widespread discussion of the "down low" phenomenon among African-Americans [see page 32]. But while it's not his primary agenda in making the show, Polk acknowledges that he'll have a special opportunity to provide visibility for black gays while also subtly addressing HIV/AIDS issues for that population. "The powers that be, when it comes to issues of race, they're always behind the curve," he says. "They're finally trying to figure out what are we doing wrong and how can we reach the community, and they should have been doing that since the beginning--realizing that there are different segments of the gay community and that you can't just reach us all by papering West Hollywood with billboards and throwing condoms in the clubs." The Black AIDS Institute has signed on as a producer for Noah's Arc, but Polk insists, "I'm not going to hit people over the head. I want to present it in a way that makes people feel they're not being preached to."

So while Noah's Arc is currently available only as a mail-order DVD, the show is already attracting interest. "One of the gay networks is really trying hard to make a deal," notes Polk, who's currently working on the second episode. "Home-video distributors want it. It's just kind of figuring out what is the best thing for it to be."

Find the link to the Noah's Arc Web site and previous Advocate coverage of Patrik-Ian Polk at www.advocate.com