The sexy professor: Doug Spearman, the out actor who plays buttoned-up Chance on Noah's Arc, swears he's nothing like his character. Well, except for that part about driving his car into a cheating boyfriend's house.

Unlike a lot of actors who play gay characters, Doug Spearman doesn't waste any time being coy about his sexual orientation. "You know I've been in The Advocate before, right?" he says at one of our meetings in Vancouver, Canada, where the second season of Logo's hit series Noah's Arc is shooting. "I talked about the Black AIDS Institute's Miami retreat in 2003." I learn quickly that Spearman is nothing if not forthright--whether we're talking about his upbringing, his past relationships, or his opinions about how African-Americans are portrayed in the media, his candor is always refreshing.

"He's very cerebral, and I think he really likes to think about Chance and what he should be doing," says Noah's Arc creator Patrik-Ian Polk. "A really talented actor finds the colorfulness in a conservative stuffed-shirt character like that."

For a staffed shirt, however, Chance had his share of drama in Noah's debut season: He moved in with single dad Eddie (Jonathan Julian), who cheated on him and led Chance to take "thug lessons" and to drive an SUV through the front of Eddie's boyfriend's house. Then, when Chance finally decided to give up his apartment, forgive Eddie, and move back in with him, the relationships of Chance's best friends, Noah (Darryl Stephens), Ricky (Christian Vincent), and Alex (Rodney Chester), all vividly self-destructed at Chance and Eddie's wedding.

Everyone's tight-lipped about the show's second season, which begins August 9 on Logo, but there's no doubt that Spearman and company will continue to bring black queer visibility on television to new heights.

How did you first find out about the show?

Patrik brought me in to read for a movie he did called Punks in the spring of '98, and I was kind of his second choice for a role. He didn't cast me because the first person accepted the offer, but my acting teachers were really big on thank-you notes, so I wrote him and said, "If there's anything I can do for you in the future, or if you need help, let me know." We stayed in touch over the years, and we both work with the Black AIDS Institute. We had run into each other after a couple of years at the first gay black men's retreat that Phill Wilson and BAI put together in Miami. I guess it was a year later Patrik called me and said he was going to do this project called Hot Chocolate. [Pauses] Yeah, I know. [Alonso chuckles] So he called me and said, "Hey, Doug, I want you to read for this." I came in and read for the role of Ricky. And then I had to pick him up and take him to a dinner party, and he said, "You didn't get the part." I said, "Fine." So later I was going to New York for a weekend with the guy that I was seeing at the time. [Patrik] called me and said, "I have to replace this guy--can you shoot this weekend?" and I said, "No, I'm going away!" And then he called me the next day and said, "Are you still going away?" I said, "Yeah, I'm getting on the plane." And by the time the plane landed, there were all these messages from Patrik: "Please come back--I really need you to do this." And I thought, Well, it's a series, and it's a chance to work with Patrik, because I really liked Punks. Why the hell not? So I made up my mind to do this in the baggage claim at LaGuardia on a Friday night in October, and I flew back on Monday.

What had you been doing at the time?

Well, I had another job. Some actors wait tables, and I had always directed and produced commercials--promos for television shows, for soap operas, for all the major networks--for about 15 years. I worked in local television in Boston and Washington, D.C. But I always wanted to be a private detective.

Really? You're kidding.

Yeah, but I don't think I ever would. My brother died in November of 2002, and my mother was in her early 80s at the time, and she said, "OK, playtime's over." That was the first year I'd ever completely supported myself as an actor. I'd done a movie called Cradle 2 the Grave, and I was doing a bunch of commercials and extra work and anything I could. But she said, "You've got to get a real job," because I needed to support my mother, so I went and I got a full-time network job. I was on the network track, doing all that.

My partner saw that film on your Internet Movie Database page, and he said, "Ask him if DMX was a homophobe around him."

You never saw him. I mean, the great thing about DMX is that he wouldn't come to the set. It was supposed to be a three-day job; it was a three-week job because he proved to be problematic for the production. So we had a lot of time--a lot of time. Which was good, because I was going through a really nasty breakup and ended up moving to Long Beach. They put me up in a hotel, so I was able to do my domestic reassignment long-distance.

What kind of work do you do with the Black AIDS Institute?

I've done all kinds of things--think tank, work with Phill Wilson. He's been really great about organizing black gay men. He invited me to this retreat, basically getting us together to educate us about what AIDS was doing to the black community, specifically gay black men--I mean, it's like hunting season. There are a lot of cultural and social reasons why people seroconvert, but we talked about the things that were endemic to black gay men--how we could change that, what could we do. So I guess I would consider myself ... not an activist but a survivalist because I'd rather see us thrive and grow than disappear from the face of the planet.

What kind of feedback have you been getting on the show from black gay men seeing themselves for the first time as regular TV characters?

The best thing I can tell you is that people shout, "I love you." [Alonso laughs] No, seriously. Our audience is a lot broader than black gay men, I've found out. People shout at you in airports, or I'll be walking down the street-my hometown is Washington, D.C., and I've been back and forth a lot in the last year--and men will come up to me all the time and say, "I love you. I love your work, and thank you."

I'm imagining that like Queer as Folk or the novels of E. Lynn Harris, Noah's Arc has a strong straight female contingent as well.

Yeah, we do. I'll tell you, there's a woman named Valerie whom I get e-mails from every day and whom I correspond with. She told me this story--she's straight, but her son, who is about 16, came out to her this year. He's a black teenager in North Carolina. She was blown away, this single mom raising a kid, and she didn't realize he was gay, and how is she going to deal with this? She saw Noah's Arc was coming on, and she got him to watch it and to sit down and talk about it. She was helping him acclimate himself, and I thought that was amazing. I've always wondered what my life would've been like at 16 if I'd had a Noah's Arc to watch, you know?

What gay culture did you have in your formative years?

My parents were kind of cool in the sense that ... they had a big library and they liked to read, and we had all kinds of stuff on the shelves. We had the Masters and Johnson report, Kinsey, Inside the Sex Clinic.... There wasn't a whole lot that I couldn't read. And I was a voracious reader--I was one of those kids who lived in my head a lot. I read The Front Runner when I was 13. My grandmother called my mother when she found the hook--she read the back cover, and she was appalled. I remember hearing my mom talk to her on the phone, and my mother said, "Just let him read it." I wrote a book report on The Front Runner when I was in the eighth grade. [Alonso laughs] I know! I got it back, and I remember this because it was in Ms. Wright's English class--she put a happy face on it and a star, and she said, "You are very brave." I got an A-minus. I didn't know what that meant for the longest time. I didn't know what "You are very brave" was about until I was, like, 30, and I looked back, and I thought, Wow. How did I do that? And I did it because my parents let me read it.

Was telling your parents you wanted to be an actor harder than telling them you were gay?

Yes, because both my parents were raised during the Depression, and when I was in high school we had career night. Somebody from the Screen Actors Guild came to talk to us and to talk to our parents, and the guy from SAG, who was a very honest young man, said--and this is in 1978 dollars, mind you--"Only 2% of the membership makes more than $2,500 a year, and it's really hard." My father, who was born in a slave cabin on the plantation where our family had been slaves, who had made it to this upper-middle-class style of living, was not going to hear that his son may not make more than $2,500. He was not having it. When I got accepted to the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, my mother said, "We love you, honey; we know you're talented, and we know this is what you want to do, but you're not going to do it. We're not going to pay for it. You're going to go to school; you're going to study something worthwhile and get a career."

I have a family friend who's like an aunt to me, and she had a TV show in Washington, D.C., called Good Morning Washington. One of the biggest TV shows of my life was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I thought, Aunt Ruth has this show, and Mary Tyler Moore seemed to love working on this TV show. I majored in television production and direction-seriously--because of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Ruth Jackson.

One of the things I love about Noah's Arc is that, yeah, West Hollywood [Calif.] is a white gay bubble, but you'd never know it from the show.

Well, you'd never know that black people live in Pittsburgh either if you watched Queer as Folk.

I know. I like that you play with it--it's sort of how the West Hollywood of The L Word is not the West Hollywood I know, but it's one that I wish existed.

I've lived in and around West Hollywood for 15 years, and I know a lot of people, go to Gold's Gym, that whole nine yards. People come up to me all the time and say, "I love your show--why aren't there any white characters on your show?" I'm like, "Does there have to be?" [Alonso laughs] "Why don't you have a white love interest or something?" And I say, "Well, funny thing--not every black man is gay-white-man shopping."

Does the fact that you're not shooting in L.A. this season change the vibe at all?

Well, we worked on sets before--we were working in a studio that was dark with made-up rooms. I think the vibe is us. The vibe is the fact that this cast has been together for three years. With the exception of Greg [Keith], who plays Trey, I think we were all here originally; we're all the original cast. We've been doing this since we were in the back of Rodney's car, changing our clothes and doing our makeup and eating and trying to stay cool. So we know each other--the vibe goes wherever we go, as long as we're all together.

Tell me what you think about Chance.

Very different guy from me. I call him my "uptight younger brother." I mean, we both went to college, and we made different choices. He's ... I love him. I am definitely not him, but I understand him. I understand the things that drive him, because I had to come up with the things that make Chance tick, and I think a lot of it's fear. I think he's afraid to be alone. I think he's afraid to get older and be by himself, like a lot of gay men, so I think he rushed into a relationship. I think he moved really fast, and I think his friends are all hipper and cooler and slightly less uptight than he is, and I think he really wanted to grab some ground and be settled and know that his life was going to be OK and he was going to be OK. And now, I think, he constantly questions those decisions. I think he keeps a lot of things suppressed, and it bursts out of him sometimes. He does things out of fear, I think--fear and love. And I don't operate that way.

You wouldn't drive an SUV into the front of a house. Or would you? It was a Volkswagen Rabbit.

What, really?

It was a Volkswagen Rabbit Cabriolet. An '84 Cabriolet. It didn't go through the house--it just smashed into the wall. I think I actually told Patrik that story, which is how it happened on the show. But yeah, I did that.

Was this a house or an apartment?

It was a house--it was a town house in Washington when I first moved. I was 26 and very mad at my cheating boyfriend, so I took his car, and I knew where he was and who he was with, and I drove his car and plowed it into the house. I walked away scot-free, unscathed. [Alonso laughs] I wouldn't do something like that anymore. [Pauses] Yes, I would.

Good on you.

Oh, yeah. You're blushing--you didn't expect that.

Actually, no. Noah's Arc is entertainment, but obviously it means a great deal in the culture, for both now and the future.

We're just like anything else--we're just a brick in the road. One day Noah's Arc won't be on the air, and there'll be a generation who has never seen it or heard of it. Some people have never seen movies that you and I love, but they will have gone farther because we actually existed. Without Will & Grace or without Billy Crystal [in Soap], without The Boys in the Band, we wouldn't be here. So we're going to be that, but in the short term I hope people are entertained and I hope we're their friends, that they want us in their houses, that they see themselves and they get to laugh.

Photographed exclusively for The Advocate by Kwaku Alston