Sparks on fire: he's angry with the president. He's tired of being misunderstood. And he's ready for another season of making out with Robert Gant. Queer as Folk star Hal Sparks lets fly with an in-your-face interview.

Michael Novotny, the protagonist of Showtime's Queer as Folk, is so convincingly mousy that you forget he's fictional--until you meet the man who plays him. When I greet Hal Sparks, he's carrying a Chinese sword. It's his own, not some fake from a prop house. For his Advocate photo shoot, the 34-year old star has just finished whipping the weapon through a dazzling set of the kung fu moves he began to master at age 8. That was before he posed naked with a rainbow flag.

This behavior would be way too cool for Michael. Sure, the mild-mannered Pittsburgh comic-store owner is the secret of down-and-dirty QAFs success--the everyman has anchored the story through three seasons and into a fourth now shooting in Toronto. Amid a presidential campaign that's whipping gay marriage around like a saber, Queer as Folk's message of "us and them" has never seemed more relevant.

For all his virtues, Michael could never play Hal Sparks. The comedian-actor-musician, who was raised in Kentucky before moving to Chicago, is charismatic, decisive, irreverent, sexy, and scary-smart. He is also straight, and right off the bat, when the QAF cast did its first round of press, he ran into a rough patch: Asked in an interview what it was like to kiss another man, Sparks compared it to kissing a dog. Outrage ensued. The comment tapped into gay fears that the hetero ex-host of E!'s cheeky Talk Soup might not be sufficiently respectful of a role on TV's boldest-ever series 'about gay life.

But Sparks hung in and paid his dues. For a time after QAFs debut, the talk shows and game shows where Sparks formerly exercised iris quick wit stopped calling. They didn't want to mention the word "queer" on the air. He says the ostracism never shook him: "I live in such a fearless space in my life, I really don't give a rat's ass what most people think about me."

Besides, he's busy: Weekdays he's shooting long hours on the QAF set; weekends he does stand-up. He's now mixing the debut CD of his heavy metal group, the Hal Sparks Band, for a spring release through his own record label. "I decided a long time ago that I was the president of my own corporation," Sparks says of iris supersaturated schedule. "I'm a blue-collar" actor. I'm in the med school phase of building a career."

Now, with QAFs third season newly available on DVD and its fourth season set to start airing in April, Sparks's schedule and The Advocate have finally come together. Over a seared-tuna salad in a Venice, Calif., restaurant, he gives me a glimpse inside his energetic mind. On the page, Sparks may come across as abrasive; not in person. He radiates benevolent energy and higher purpose: For a comic, the man is disconcertingly spiritual. But Iris stand-up rhythm kicks right in as he starts riffing on homophobes, the Bible, Enron, his future mate, anal sex, and the coma that made him funny.

Let's start with politics. What do you think about Bush's backing a constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I think George Bush is to Christianity what the Enron accountants are to capitalism. They use the laws to their advantage when they can, and when they don't, they break them. Bush is using this to ignite his conservative base to get them to vote. It is absolute posturing. But I think it's going to turn on him.

How so?

The big case they're always malting is, "We're protecting the sanctity of marriage, which has always been between one man and one woman." Well, yeah, tell that to the Mormons, for one. Secondly, if gay marriage hasn't been around till now and marriage is at a 50% divorce rate, obviously gay marriage isn't the problem. Let's say there are gay people who've forced themselves into straight marriages. They're just now getting divorced because they're awakening to who they truly are. You could cut down on the divorce rate by allowing them to be who they are from the start. You want to protect the sanctity of marriage? Allow gay people to marry gay people.

I know the show strives to reflect the news. Will Michael and Ben decide to get married?

I wouldn't be surprised. In fact, I'm expecting it, in many ways.

After three seasons, Queer as Folk still seems to get people hot under the collar. Why?

There's so much fear around this show--from both the gay and the straight side--that I feel like it's a responsibility to back away from the fray and say, "Can we all settle down and look at this for what it is?" Those who are against it need to look at the import of the show, the genuine desire to do some good in the world [on the part of] myself, the rest of the cast, the execs. And then give everybody involved the benefit of the doubt.

What in the world drew this heterosexual comedian, Hal Sparks, to a show called Queer as Folk?

The main reason I took the job was because nobody else would. That fall I could have--and this is not arrogance--gotten a sitcom and been on it for the last three years. But it would've been a seven-year contract, and at the end some people would've said, "Yeah, but can he act? Is he going to do anything important instead of just fluff?"

How did you hear about the show?

My manager said this script was floating around--had been for, like, seven weeks. I'd been on Talk Soup and I was fired, and then two weeks later I got Dude, Where's My Car? and they were looking and looking again for Michael. They couldn't find Michael, they couldn't find Brian; they'd found a Ted and a couple of Emmetts. Apparently they weren't having much trouble finding lesbians, so the girls really get the kudos for being chosen out of a large group, but for the rest of us it was fairly refined. And I was one of the few people who had any kind of a name who was willing to do it. The pilot script was very touching, very emotionally extraordinary. And my manager, to her credit, said, "This is important--it's worth going up for." She said something very interesting and, I think, true: "It's either going to be a phenomenon or it's going to disappear." There was going to be no middle road with Queer as Folk.

What was it like meeting Dan Lipman and Ron Cowen, the American show's creators and executive producers?

They were at the auditions. They were very sweet. But you have to think back to that time: I didn't know these people from Adam. [If I agreed to do the series], they'd have power over my career for six years, because that's how long our contracts were. As a businessperson and as a human being, you are taking an enormous leap of faith.

That must have been terrifying. What convinced you to do it?

I had a long phone call with Ran and Dan, and they were great and very reassuring. I was like, "We're going to enter into a sort of gentlemen's agreement that this show--and Michael, the character that I'm playing--will remain heart-oriented, as op posed to head or penis. Because the minute we shift to head or dick, you're done. It's a waste of time. You can rent better penis stuff, and nobody needs to be intellectualized about this."

What do you mean?

You can't argue on an intellectual level with a fanatic. But if you can touch their hearts, the armor falls away. We get letters from parents and children, like "I hated my son for being gay; my wife had me watch this; now I love him more thru11 did before I found out he was gay, and I miss the time I could have had with him." That's why you do this show.

When we met at the spring Television Critics Association press tour, I said you had made a negative comment about kissing another guy. And you said, "No, I didn't."

I said something that was construed as being negative when I was trying to be purely descriptive. Somebody asked me what it was like to kiss a guy. Keep in mind that at this point I had not kissed a gay man--I had kissed Gale Harold and another guy. Two straight guys. So if you think I'm referring to kissing gay men as like kissing a dog, then you're wrong on that count, and let's start there.

OK, go on.

Secondly, the point I was trying to make was, have you ever seen somebody who has a dog and they love their dog? They have so much emotional connection to that dog and they kiss it right on the face--tight on the mouth. And they can conjure up all this emotion about how much riley care about this animal, but they don't want to luck it. That's what playing a gay man and kissing other men is like. As much as I can conjure up the emotion of caring and love and support, I don't want to fuck them.

So you had good intentions.

It's important that people know that, because a lot of people think gay is contagious. In most of the Interviews I do in the straight press, they keep asking the same questions over and over again--"Are you straight, are you gay?"--even though they know I've answered it a hundred times. The reason, on a sociological level, is that they are answering the big fear that most of America has, which is "Are you gay yet? Have you caught it yet?" My point In answering those questions is "Don't be afraid of it. They are who they are; you are who you are; it's OK It's not the flu."

Tell me about meeting Robert Gant and starting to work together.

They brought him up to Toronto be cruise they really liked him. We read a scene together, and it was great--he was very good, very on. I liked him immediately. He's a genuinely cool guy and really excited about file project.

I have to ask about the sex scenes.

Working with Bobby has been the easiest and best relationship stuff I've had to do on the show. Not just because he's a really good actor, but we're both very respectful oo what the other needs in a scene. Shooting a sex scene is not sexual at all, especially--especially--if you want to convey emotion and you want people to feel that there's some connection going on.

And with Bobby you're kissing a gay man.

Yes. It's easier to work with Bobby, hands down, because the gay men are more at ease with the actual kissing and the actual contact. A lot of straight guys have that "dodge" reflex: If a guy leans in to kiss you, your first reaction is to twitch back--"What're you doing, dude?" Bobby always spots it too. He'll go to kiss me naturally in a moment, and if I'm not aware that we're going to kiss, I have to watch that flinch reaction. A couple of times it has actually worked in the scene, where Michael is angry at Ben--so we kept it.

What do you say to people offended by two men kissing?

You know, wackos on both sides can go fuck themselves. I don't live my life by caring what they think. Once you know that, then all the attacks, the Christian right people who are threatening to throw acid in your face--

Wait. Christians actually threatened to throw acid in your face?

Yeah. Then you've got gays who think all we do is promote promiscuous gay sex or that our characters are drugged up--just watch the show, for chrissake. My character's been in an HIV-positive--HIV-negative relationship for two years. AS for the promiscuous sex scenes, kiss my ass. It's just annoying.

Is it hard for you to play the guy who's being penetrated?

The bottom? Not necessarily. Sometimes when I play Michael, I'm not playing a gay man, I'm playing a woman. I'm playing the feminine in the relationship. A lot of the mannerisms and stuff' that I built for Michael, I've gotten from my mom and my aunt Karen.

Some people do seem to think "playing the feminine" would be harder.

It's just fear, that's all. I think in the general populace more people are afraid of anal sex than death--of being on the receiving end of it. When people talk about going off to prison, they never talk about being killed in prison. [Anne laughs] Yore' chances of being killed in prison are pretty high. But that's not what everybody's worried about, are they? No. It's always about being raped by some big guy in the showers.

I think people are appalled by the idea of doing something in the same canal that you defecate through.

Yeah, but we piss with the other one. I don't know what the big deal is. Most people just live in fear of being discovered. That's what the really hard-line Christians are afraid of: The only way they can divert attention away from their sins is to point at yours: "Look, I may have thought about cheating on my wife, but that guy's a fag!" It is so funny that of 'all the firings that God supposedly hates in the Bible, they manage to make that one of the top ones.

Isn't it great?

It's retarded. I was a born-again Christim1, baptized when I was 11; I was a Bible scholar and the whole deal. Believe me, there is a lot more in the Bible that supports just being open and loving of people than the two verses that they rattle as a saber. The truth is, they're dying off and they're freaking out about it. The fundamentalist idea is a factor of old people watching their system die. The big rise in the religious right is the dying gasp of Jason Voorhees at the end of Friday the 13th--you think he's dead, completely, and he's got that one last hinge at you to scare you a little bit. [Anne laughs] Because he's really got nothing left.

What was the first thing you wanted to do? Music? Comedy? Shooting film? Martial arts?

Hmm. I've been doing martial arts since I was 8 years o111. It just makes my heart beat correctly. There's no want in doing it, and I wouldn't be so crass as to call it a need--it's just part of who I am, and it was, probably, before I was born. Same filing with being funny. You know, I almost died when I was 5 years old.

How?

Drug overdose. My sister was on this medication. She'd take half a pill every three days. They tasted like mint, and I ate 12 of them. I was in a coma. It was like new Beatles/old Beatles: After the coma, my mom said, "You were funny after that."

That's hot. Tell me another formative experience.

When I was 13, maybe 12, I looked in the mirror and I said, "Well, you're ugly. Get used to it. But you still want to get laid, find the girl that's fight for you, and all that. What are you going to use?" I thought, OK, I'm funny, I've got a decent personality, and I'm caring and honest and truthful.

YOU weren't really ugly, right?

I was Hispanic-looking in Kentucky. Some people think I'm a New York Jew or part Italian. I get most of my looks, l think, from the Native American stuff in my family. But in an area of the South where there were a lot of redheads with freckles and blood people--you know, country-lookin' folk--I was just naturally an outcast. [But] once I went, I'm OK with this; [just want to be who I really am inside--then literally within a year my face changed. 1 grew 2 1/2 inches. I think that that choice, to be an expression of myself, affected me physically. But also, on a metaphysical level, being OK with who you are ['allows you to] become a better expression of who you are.

So martial arts came first with you?

And then funny came second. I loved the fact that I could make my family and my friends laugh, because you know you're making everybody feel better.

Did you know you wanted to be a comedian?

I didn't realize till I moved to Chicago that you could make a living as a comedian. I was just a small-mouth pain in the ass up until that point. I went to New Trier High School, and a woman named Suzanne Adams, whom I loved dearly, was my acting teacher. She recognized that I had some talent beyond just being funny. She was really focused on "Look, you already know what yore' natural talent is--grow the part of you that doesn't come naturally or doesn't feel like it does." So I did True West and The Glass Menagerie, things that built up that other skill.

We still haven't talked about how you started in music.

I used to give little concerts when I was 8 years old to the hill in front of our house. I would move the stereo speakers out and do Kiss concerts. My dad cut a flying-V guitar out of plywood and put a banjo neck on it mat gave it to me. I would just dance around on the porch. Then in high school I became the singer in a band that did Kiss covers. I was terrible. But I got better over time.

What's the experience of the Hal Sparks Band? It's metal, right?

Some people think I'm opening doing comedy until they come in and see the band, see the black fingernails and the smoked eyeliner, and hear the riffs. And they're amazed.

You seem incredibly motivated, even driven. What's your motor?

I believe with "all my heart that human beings have almost unlimited capabilities inside ourselves in so many different areas. But we have been crowbarred into this idea that you must pick your path and stick to it. Nothing could be further front fire truth. My way of living is, if I do something, I will do it to the greatest extent of that ability.

Are you such an altruist that you'd have done this for gay people in the abstract, or was there someone in your life that motivated you?

It's a combination. Two friends I had from when I was very young are both gay and came out among their friends but couldn't come out to their parents. I didn't know they were gay until after I'd moved away from Kentucky. Imagine [having] a friendship with someone for a long time and yet they still had to keep such a secret front you. You just wish you could've said, "Man, you could've told me, and it would've been OK." When 1 worked with [spiritual author and lecturer] Marianne Willlamson--

How did your friendship start?

I came to her lectures for the first time in '92. I saw her and fell madly in love with her immediately, because any woman who can put "God" and "luck" in the same sentence is OK in my book. At that point she was doing her work with AIDS Project Los Angeles and Project Angel Food. Marianne was sitting vigil at so many deathbeds. [At her lectures] we had to deal will1 [AIDS] every night, with a different person in a wheelchair having to come in. She helped facilitate the crossover for a lot of people.

You began to take an onstage role at her lectures, didn't you?

Yeah. My role was just to be a goof and raise spirits. 1 was Mr. Bright Smiles, as best I could be, in the face of some really difficult stuff.

Does your message of support for gays ever get misinterpreted?

I really go out on a limb when I do it. I did this interview for DirecTV that I took a hit for, where they asked, "How do your parents feel about you being on the show?" I said, "Well, they live in the South--they probably deal with harder issues than cast members whose families live in New York or L.A. But my parents are the kinds of people who, if you were gay, would love you anyway." People took the word "anyway" to mean "Oh, gay people are mentally retarded" or something.

Like "My parents would forgive me for being gay."

Yeah. What I meant was "My parents are the kind of people who wouldn't give a shit. They would love you. You're their son, you're their daughter--that's who they are." I give them a lot of credit for that. But it was immediately spun by some of the people who read it as being negative and me backing away. You have a group of people who have been marginalized their whole lives. And the minute I say something that could be read two ways, they'll take it the harshest way as proof that "I'm always getting fucked by the system because of the nature of my life."

We do look for conversational clues on whether somebody dislikes gays, it's tram, so that we can figure out if we're safe.

Yes, absolutely. [But] what serf-respecting homophobe would be on Queer as Folk for more than two days? Seriously. Granted, we have had people come on the show who peeled through for a couple of episodes here mad there or whatever who were absolutely that way. They think a shot on Queer as Folk will give them a boost careerwise, and as long as they don't have to do too much, they'll do the "seven-day gay" in a movie, a miniseries, whatever. But to do a series like this--this is years. This is a multiyear commitment. There aren't any Mormons out there who would sign up for "gay college," and that's what this is. This is four years of Homosexuality 101.

Forgive me, but there's one way in which the show seems dated. It still feels very "us and them."

Oh, yeah. We don't have any straight friends. It drives us crazy as a cast.

So what's up with that?

That's something you'd have to address with Ron and Dan. I decided when I chose to do the show that I would not affect the story. I broke it once, in that I wanted Michael to stay in the closet longer because them are a lot of people who are represented by that story line. But it blows my mind that we don't have straight friends. Daphne is pretty much the only straight person, and the parents. That's one of the uncomfortable spaces to be a straight performer on the show, when you hear Brian saying, "There are only two types of straight people: those that hate you to your face and those that hate you to your back'--you're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute."

Exactly. I don't really get it.

I think the main mason for it is the lack of time, and to create a relationship with a straight person doesn't necessarily tell us one more story inside the gay world. This is a dramatic series. It's meant to be the most difficult, provocative, and harsh moments in their lives. If you start showing acceptance, it undercuts the drama. If you are realistic--

Then they'll want to leave Pittsburgh!

Yeah. Well, I think they should.

Is there somebody special in your life right now?

No. I broke up with my girlfriend a couple of months ago, mostly because of time constraints--I live in L.A. haft the time and Toronto the other half. It's really hard to maintain a relationship. At some point, I will be what I consider a white-collar comedian, a guy who can do three movies a year and some TV appearances. But if you want to get to that point, something's got to give, and in my ease it's been my love life. But the work I'm doing now is creating a career that will carry me for the rest of my life. It will put my kid through college; it will bring my wife and me a home when that time comes.

What is your martial arts practice?

Right now I study wu shu, a Chinese martial art that comes from Shaolin kung fu. Specifically, it's Shaolin in a northern long-fist style. It's what Jet Li does--the pretty, kind of flamboyant, big arm movements, big leg movements stuff. The art that I study as my fighting art is called kung fu sansu, which is a street-fighting art. It's very brutal.

You're about to start being Michael again. What does he need in this fourth season, and what challenges does he face?

Well, Michael ran off at the end of last season with Hunter--he's running from the law. He's a gay man who's taken an underage gay youth away from his mother and the police. The danger of having Iris entire life ruined is so high. Michael is one of those guys--this has been since the beginning--who will die for you. But he's always been that way in a service-oriented space: "I will do this for someone else." Now he's using who he is and what matters in his life and his own strength.

Michael's learning.

Yeah. I want Michael to be a man in and of himself at the end of this show so that the guy he was in the pilot, who was kind of annoying and sheepish, has blossomed into a human being, an actualized gay man who is comfortable. He's not picking a fight about being gay, he just is. And that's it.

What has playing Michael taught you about Hal?

I used to have this doormatty, altruistic, "do nice things for other people at the expense of myself' [nature], and playing Michael has taught me not to do that. The other thing is that I've never felt ms at home in my heterosexuality. I'm a little more aggressive physically with women, which is nice because it's a more honest expression of who I am. And certainly healthier, instead of being in a doting, fearing, "I hope she likes me" situation. And I've had better relationships because of it.

Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to say?

You cannot try to win everybody to your side. Don't bother, because they're not the cool guys and this is not high school. The fundamentalist Christians and the Catholic Church and the Republicans and the Bob Jones University assholes and the Fox media guys, they're no fun to hang around with. They're mean, and you can't have a normal conversation with them. So why bother?