Chad's on the case

On a sunny July
afternoon in Los Angeles, Chad Allen hovers over his
laptop, typing out some last-minute e-mails as its speakers
bathe him in a continuous stream of techno-trance and
Rufus Wainwright. We’re in the offices of
Mythgarden, the production company Allen formed with
producer Christopher Racster and Queer as Folk
actor Robert Gant, in a converted residential house on
a quiet one-way street near the Paramount Studios lot.

Allen is about to
debut Third Man Out on Here TV, the first of
what he hopes will be several made-for-TV movies based on
the popular Donald Strachey detective novels. The
eight-book series, penned by Richard Stevenson
beginning in 1981, follows an out private detective and
his longtime lover in Albany, N.Y. Set to air September 2,
Third Man Out gives Allen a chance to flex
his star power and honor his politics too.

“Chad is
such a positive member of our community,” says
Meredith Kadlec, vice president of original
programming at Here TV. “He does have that
energy that’s a little bit tough and scrappy, but
he’s also great-looking and a really fine
actor. As soon as we talked to him about the project,
we all realized this is a perfect fit.”

Yet Donald
Strachey is only the most immediate of the conversation
topics on Allen’s crowded plate this afternoon.
He is working with all three gay cable
channels—Here TV, Viacom’s Logo, and Q
Television—in one capacity or another, and
Mythgarden is developing feature-film projects with
Robert Gant, Judith Light, David Mixner, and David Duchovny.
And then there are Allen’s recent—and,
he says, profound—experiences in Panama making
the film End of the Spear and in the Ecuadoran Amazon
after shooting wrapped. Scheduled for a January
release, Spear is a $20 million indie based on
the true story of a Christian missionary played by the
gay Allen, a role that he confides he landed in part thanks
to The Advocate.

It has been a
busy year for Chad Allen the actor, and it promises to be a
busy one for Chad Allen the producer. The former child
star’s rapid-fire optimism makes it clear that
for Allen, it’s all good.

You’ve said you hadn’t read the books when
you were first approached about Third Man Out. So
what was it that first hooked you into doing it?
I was immediately entranced at the idea of
[Donald’s] relationship [with his partner,
Timothy Calahan]. It’s a fantastic, real, gay,
monogamous, loving relationship. They have their ups
and their downs, they’ve been together for a
long time, they’re really dependent on each other,
and I just love that. And Donald was a great
character, a detective in the classic sense of an
old-school private eye detective. Gosh, it’s been a
long time—to even say “private eye”
anymore—you don’t even hear that. And
that’s what Donald is—and he’s gay. We
get to make this fun movie with all those classic
elements, like Columbo or even the noir films
from the ’40s, but our character gets to go home and
get into bed with a man.

The Strachey books aside, my concept of a “private
eye” is a serial loner who lives to
flirt—and then some—with a continuous
string of femmes fatales. Was that a consideration
when you were making it?
One of our major goals was to create a really
powerful, loving gay relationship that hasn’t
really been done in television. Donald doesn’t
have his life together. I think he’s good at what he
does, but without his partner he would probably fall
apart. They are a team, in a classic way like the Nick
and Nora [detective] series [from the Dashiell Hammett
novel The Thin Man and the movie series it spawned]
and those old noir detective films.

It was the thing
that I liked more than anything else about the series,
to be perfectly honest—that relationship is what made
me decide ultimately to do it. I’m not entirely
certain that it would have been as interesting to me
had it just been Donald on his own. I want to bring
this relationship to the world. We don’t have enough
examples of committed, loving gay relationships that
work out there.

You know,
you’re sitting in my office at Mythgarden, and our
company is entirely dedicated to turning the page on
gay and lesbian storytelling in film, television, and
theater. We believe that it’s time that our stories
can be told fully: good relationships, real relationships,
honest characters, in all of the genres of
storytelling—fantasy, fiction, fairy tales,
great mysteries, adventure films, and honest drama. [See
sidebar for a full list of Mythgarden’s
upcoming projects.] That’s what I love about
acting, what I love about great stories. I think that is
what is going to appeal to a lot of people.

The producer of the movie was telling me how great it was
to have an openly gay actor play Donald Strachey.
Was that important to you as well?
Oh, man, I’ve wanted to play a gay
character for 10 years. I’ve always been told I
wasn’t gay enough, quote-unquote, to play gay, even
though there have been a lot of [gay] roles that I
would like to play. So, other than theater, this is
the first gay character that I’ve ever played. And
yeah, it’s really important. Apparently, there was a
writers’ panel going on at Outfest the other
day, and they were talking
about—[sighs]—how difficult it is to
get gay actors to play gay roles, and all this crap
that sounds like it’s from another decade to me.
I think we’re in such a very unique, beautiful time
when we can finally tell our stories. We can finally
be out of the closet and be successful working actors
if we’re all willing just to show up. And it’s
happening. [See sidebar for the story on Chad’s
role as a Christian missionary—a role he landed
in spite of, or perhaps because of, his sexuality.]