Almost exactly 30 years ago, in the fall of 1988, I was attending high school in a suburb of Los Angeles when I caught the acting bug. In that part of the world, wanting to be an actor was more of a rite of passage than a particular vocation. A lot of us went through some kind of acting phase. Nevertheless, I took myself quite seriously at the time, so I dropped out of high school, took an acting class, and landed my first paying gig saying two lines in a sex education movie for high schoolers and youth groups. While my performance was… ahem… not Oscar worthy, the crew took a liking to me and was generous enough to invite me to the movie set every day while they were shooting. One afternoon we filmed an interview with a man who would become the first person I would actually meet who was living with HIV/AIDS that I knew about. His story moved me, (and haunted me, and inspired me) in a way all the vague and ominous news reporting about this thing called âGRID,â the âgay cancer,â âARC,â and AIDS had not. And it was a bout to cheange the entire direction of my life…
