Darryl Stephens: Noah's Arc Returns! Celebrating 20 Years of the Groundbreaking Gay TV Show

LGBTQ&A

Jeffrey Masters

Society & Culture

4.7 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2019, almost 15 years after the beloved TV show, Noah's Arc, cemented itself into queer history, its star, Darryl Stephens, was considering shifting his focus away from acting. His subsequent roles were often met with the same response, fans expressing variations of "You'll always be Noah to me" and questions of "When's Noah going to come back?" If he couldn't do anything but remind people of Noah's Arc, Darryl thought, maybe he would do something else. "It had its impact. That's not a terrible legacy."

Imagining a career focused behind-the-scenes coincided with the beginning of a new chapter in his personal life: the decision to become a parent. "And then interestingly enough, when we decided to have the kid, work picked up."

The groundbreaking show returns with Noah’s Arc: The Movie on June 20th, streaming on Paramount+.

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[This conversation with Darryl was originally recorded in 2021.⁠]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and when Noah's Ark premiered on TV in 2005, there had really never been anything like it.
0:13.5	It centered around the lives of four black gay men, and now 20 years later, it still remains the only show to ever do that.
0:22.7	Here's what the writer Denmichael Norris told me in a previous interview
0:25.7	about what it meant to her to discover the show
0:28.5	and also it starred Daryl Stevens, who is our guest today.
0:32.5	Oh my God.
0:33.8	Up until that point, I had seen so little representation of black queer people in media
0:39.3	that when I was much younger, I thought I couldn't be queer because that was a white person thing.
0:44.2	Like, I literally thought that because there just wasn't any.
0:46.5	And Noah was visibly effeminate.
0:48.9	And he was like, had an active sex life.
0:51.1	At that time in my life, I did not feel like I was desirable. Everything
0:55.0	that I ever heard from almost any gay man that I was ever interested in was, oh, I'm not
0:58.6	into black guys or I'm not into femme guys. And so I really like went through college without
1:05.4	dating almost anyone without feeling like I was desirable. It wasn't until I got into the real
1:09.4	world that I learned that in in fact, I was sexy,
1:11.6	and that there were plenty of people who wanted to bone me.
1:14.7	And so there was this character who was living
1:16.5	kind of the life I wanted to lead
1:18.0	and was finding love and was actively being pursued
1:22.1	by many men at different times.
1:24.7	It was sort of like my very first, it gets better moment. So that is why
	...

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