But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Outspoken podcast Network. This interview was taped in front of a live studio audience for our very first live show, and before we start, I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who made the time to come. It was awesome to meet every single one of you, and I've enjoyed building a relationship with you since we
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You watch over the years and you would see aids kind of it would creep closer and closer like you. Of course, you hear about celebrities, and then in my twenties, I remember my best friend in high school calling me and telling me that our friend Tim had died, and hearing about our high school classmate Jeffrey Lewis who died or this, and so, you know, just coming closer and closer close friends being HIV positive and so it was really important.
To see for people to see it's not a death sentence.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Patrick ian Polk, often considered
the father of black gay cinema. We'll learn about how he broke ground in making the first show on television to center black a Life, how that show got canceled at its peak, and how his fan base was forever changed because of it. From My Heart Podcast, I'm Jordan go and Solves and this is what we loved. When I came out at twenty one, I had two best friends that were proudly gay, and even though they were
my age, they mentored me through my coming out. At that time, I was shocked at just how confident they were, how proud they were to be something that I was so ashamed of. I had spent a lifetime trying to be anything but gay, fixing my walk, perfecting the timbre of my voice, training myself to look away anytime a handsome man walked by me. But for these friends, they did the opposite. They thought the world should conform to them,
and for years I wondered why until I asked. Funny enough, they didn't know each other, but they both had the same answer, Noah's Arc. At first, I was like, wait, the story from the Bible, But actually it was a TV show that came out in two thousand and five. It was the very first scripted show about black gay men, and more than that, it showcased characters that were proudly out,
proudly living with HIV, and proudly black. Despite it being a rating smash, it unexpectedly got canceled, but in the nearly twenty years since, new generations of queer people continue to find this timeless show over and over again. My next guest, Patrick ian Polk, is the creator of Noah's Ark. At a time when people in entertainment were losing their careers, for coming out. He doubled down. He knew from when he was a kid that he was destined to be
a storyteller. I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your busy weekend to come and see our show live. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our guests for today's live episode of But We Loved the Illustrious, the Luminary Patrick Ian Polk. So, Patrick, we start out every show pretty much the same way, and I think it kind of gives our audience a little chance to get to know where you're from and how you grew up. So take us to the moment where you knew you were.
Gay, damn right out the box. Okay.
Well, Probably the first sort of piece of pop culture or entertainment that I sort of connected to on a on a sort of sexual level was my uncle had just hundreds of record albums. I loved music as well, and so I would constantly go through and kind of pill for records.
And one of them.
That I gravitated towards was I was a big fan of Prince and I still am. It was the nineteen ninety nine album. On the sleeve that the album was in is a photo of Prince. I don't know if you know this picture, but it's like a bed with purple satin sheets and he's draped laying across the thing, you know, butt naked with the sheets kind of wow, just at the bottom of his butt cheeks, you know, laying you know, laying on his stomach, kind of like very sexy.
And that picture was like, holy cow, wow.
I just very distinctly remember, and I definitely kept that album.
So yeah, that's sort of the first kind of thing.
But I always understood at a very young age, I don't know when what it was, and I also understood inherently that it was not something to share or be spoken about.
You grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I wonder if you have a story that sort of epitomizes what it was like to grow up as a gay kid in a town like that in the seventies and eighties.
Hattisburg, I say, is it's like the Austin of Mississippi, Oka.
So it's a college.
It's less than two hours from New Orleans, so it's probably would I would argue, the most progressive city in the state, but it really was. I think around junior high into high school that I met some other you know, gay kids. We kind of found each other, or rather, this one kind of older gay kid kind of found me and just you know, and befriended me. And then
I remember we were driving home one day. I was riding with him, and he was just like and suddenly he just pulls into the guy's driveway and said, we're just going to his house, and we went to his house. And then from that day on we were all kind of friends. And then eventually that guy and I became like best friends. He's like my best friend in high school.
And he was a star of the church choir. I was not super religious because I was raised very very very permanent mom and so I was allowed to kind of explore. I could do what I wanted in terms of religion. But he was very much Baptist. Would travel all over the States, singing at churches and stuff, and he would be dating men in the church like pastors and deacons and this and that. And it was just
amazing to me to see kind of this happening. And there were certainly examples of those kids who just either completely cannot hide or choose not to hide, and so you would kind of see those kids and you'd be kind of terrified for them and at the same time terrified that people would maybe identify you with that, But at the same time, there was kind of a quiet reverence and appreciation because they were the ones that.
Were kind of like on the front lines.
I remember there was a kid in my neighborhood who rode the same bus and his nickname was Miscotton Candy and I couldn't even tell you what his real name was, that was what people called him.
And he was.
Extremely, extremely flamboyant, and I would watch him and of course, you know, people would come for him and he would let them have it, and it was very bold, and so there was this sort of like respect that he commanded, and people kind of learned not to don't come for him, and if he was stupid enough to come for him, he would really lay into them, like a superhero kind of thing, and you kind of think, like, maybe one day I can be like that.
Well, so fast forwarding a little bit now to the late nineties, and you've graduated from USC as a filmmaker. You're out and you write the precursor to Noah's Ark, which is punks, anyone in your herd of bunks, and
you premiere it at Sundance. And this is at a time in America where people's careers are ending because of coming out in the entertainment in the stroom, thinking about Ellen DeGeneres at that time, and I'm wondering, you know, this is all happening at the same time, what was driving you to create a film knowing that these themes might end your career before it could even begin.
So when I left Mississippi, graduated high school, and I always knew I would go I was going to go away to college, like outside of the South, and I got a full scholarship to Brandeis University in Boston. And I got on the plane in Jackson and as the plane took off and I looked out and watched, you know, Jackson kind of getting smaller and smaller. I said, very clearly to myself, when you step off this plane, every person that you meet from this day fourth will know that you are gay.
I don't know.
Why that came to my mind, but that that was the thing. It was like, this is what it's going to be. And then that's what I did. I went to college. I was out. I remember going to the bookstore Harvard Harvard Square, the co Op, and there was a whole section. I remember marveling, like, Wow, there's a whole sort of section of these are all gay books. And there was one book that I could see on the spine had an illustration of brown skin, and I
grabbed that book. And that book was Blackbird by Larry Duplachan. And it's this amazing coming of age story set in the seventies, this gay black boy and he sings in the choir and it's just beautifully written. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it if you, it's it's amazing. And so as I was kind of studying film and learning to teaching myself to write, I adapted
that book as sort of an exercise. I mean, I love the story, and I thought, oh, this would be great to do as a movie, but I don't know that I thought it would really happen. So I think I looked at it as more of an exercise. I wrote that script. Script was good. Fast forward. I'm in LA I've done film school at USC. Right out of film school, I kind of fell into a job as an executive a junior executive at MTV Films. I'm in the industry. I'm on the inside. I'm learning how movies
get made. Studio system. So I'd written Blackbird, had gotten some good notices, had a couple of agents interested, whatever, but I knew again, no one's going to make this black gay high school story.
In the nineties, so.
I met a black gay British writer director named Ricky beatle Blair who wrote a movie called Stonewall, the original Stonewall.
So Ricky had.
Come in to meet with us because Stonewall had come out and in the film festivals, and my boss had seen it and invited and was like, this amazing guy is coming from London, you know. And he walked in. If you've ever seen him, he's just long blonde dreadlocks, and he had on these tight suede sort of Native American types, fringe down the side, spaghetti strapped top, you know, just completely out and you know whatever. We became fast friends, and he became sort of a big brother and like
an artistic mentor. And I asked him, I said, so, you know, I've written this Blackbird script. It's gotten some good notices, people like it. No one's going to make this thing. I'm trying to decide what to write next.
What do you think? What do you think I should write?
I'm thinking I need to write something that's going to sell like and he said very simply, and I've kind of lived by this. He said, write the story that only you can tell. And so I think that straight away, Like that week, I started and I wrote the script for Punks in like eight days, and then.
I didn't really do much with it.
I was working, we were making movies, and I got hired by Babyface and Tracy Edmunds to come and work at their film company. And while I was working there, by this time, I'm like, okay, you're it's just like ninety six, ninety six ish. I've been in La now four or five years going on, and I was like, Okay, you're getting You're getting farther and farther away from your
goal of being a filmmaker. So if you take this job working for Babyface, you have to The deal I made with myself was that I would start making films. So we had a holiday coming up, and I had started raising money and my old boss at MTV gave me some money. Another friend of mine who came from a wealthy Hollywood family, gave me a little bit of money, and I was asking Babyface and his wife to give me the rest of the money so I could do
this short. And we had this meeting like they were getting ready to go on a tour of Greece for their Thanksgiving holiday, and we had a little project meeting and go over everything, and one of the things on the agenda was me presenting this idea because what I did was I was going to do a short version of Punks. So I kind of boiled this story down into the base, the little basic, and I pitched it to them. I told them what I needed. It was like twenty thousand and oven something and I pisched the
idea to them and they said, well. They kind of looked at each other and they said, well, I mean the idea sounds cool. Why do the short as opposed to doing the feature because any was based on the feature. And I said, well, because I don't have the money to do a feature. So and then they were like, well, I mean the story's kind of I mean it sounds good, like right, well, I mean we prefer to just do the feature. And I was like, I mean, okay, sure,
that's fun. So I gave them the script, and I fully expected they're going to come back and be like, there's no way we can make this movie. And to the contrary, they came back from this sort of yacht tour around the Greece islands and their entire family everyone had the script, the brother, the mother, the grandmother, the dah.
Dah dah, and they just loved it.
They thought it was so funny and they were excited and we were off and running and so yeah, so they paid for they paid for the movie, produced it, and we made it, and you know, it did what it did. Obviously, it did incredibly well in New York and Atlanta, Atlanta and d C. And it was at the Quad here, it's like a legendary independent movie theater. So the movie played there. Literally the lines were around
the entire city block to see that film. And so it did really well in these five or six like you know, we're black, gay cities. We got into Sundance, which back then in two thousand was a huge deal, much bigger than it is even now. And then, of course, you know, expecting maybe doors to open and things to happen, and they did not. You know, none of the studios or any any Hollywood people wanted to buy the film
or distribute the film. And we had you know, Baby Faith and Tracy Edmonds, we had William Morris our agents. But you know, this black gay film. Nobody was biting.
When we come back. Patrick makes Noah's Ark. In two thousand, Patrick premiered his first feature film, Punks, at Sundance. It wasn't the success that he had hoped for, but he discovered that there was a huge audience for his work. A few years later, he was inspired to build on that and create Noah's Ark. In two thousand and five, Noah's Arc premiered on Logo TV, a subsidiary of MTV Networks. Immediately,
the show was a massive success. Fans likened it to their own version of Sex and the City trade gay black life in a refreshing way, characters that were quirky and intellectual and sexy. But Patrick didn't originally set out to be groundbreaking. He just wanted to make a show that reflected his own life. I want to talk to
you Patrick about Noah's Ark. Now, so not many people may know this, but Noah's Ark was pretty difficult for you to get produced, but you were going to make it into a web series, it was going to be a DVD show. Take me back to those hustle years. What was it like trying to get this show produced? And was there a point where you almost gave up on getting it produced? And what was it like to kind of overcome that?
Well, I mean, I don't know, it's interesting to hear you say that ask the question that way, because I don't really I don't think it was difficult to get it produced at all. Really, Well, here's the thing, so I take it all the way back to being a child and sort of like having a young mother who
she was twenty one when she had me. I was just never really told no. So when I came home at like first grade, and I wanted to play the cello because you know, my little white best friend who's her father was a doctor, she played the cello and every Tuesday and Thursday she would go off to music class and I would be like, what's that you know? And she didn't say as I'm sure a lot of parents would be like, boy, what the.
Fuck are you talking about? If you don't go outside and play in that yard? Or whatever. We went to the music store and got a cello.
And so I was raised with this sort of idea that I could do what I set my mind to do. And so with Noah's ark, I'd done Punks. So it's like I certainly knew there's an audience for this stuff. I mean, my goal really was just to see myself on screen, or see my friends on screen, or to see black gay stories. I wanted to see myself represented. And so after Punks and and it kind of didn't break down doors for me, I decided that would be my jumping point. I'm gonna leave my job. I'm gonna
go do this full time. So right out the gate, I sold a T show idea to MTV, the network. It was a college show. I had written this college this feature script set in college, based very loosely on my experiences at Brandice, and they decided not to make.
It, and I was just kind of like, Okay, well, what am I gonna do?
So I'd gone to Phil Wilson had started this organization called the Black Aids Institute, and they had this summit where they invited blacka men from all different disciplines medicine, entertainment, media, journalism, whatever business to come and think tank for a weekend at a hotel in Beverly Hills about ways that we could from in our es help them in the battle
against HIV. In the Black A community, there's a kickoff party boor Trade at the l Ray Theater on Most Boulevard, And if you've been in the l Ray, it's got a sunken danceler in the middle.
So I'm kind of standing and I'm seeing this whole crowd of black, gay and lesbian people.
And as I'm standing there, the thought hit me and I said to myself very clearly, I'm going to.
Make a show about these people.
Like it's just to me, like, Okay, these people are coming from all over the country. They're buying plane tickets and hotel rooms, are renting cars, and there's a market here that no one's making programming aimed at this group at us.
So I said to myself, I'm.
Going to do a show Black A sex in the city, and I'm not gonna pitch it to Hollywood because no one's going to make this. I'm just gonna make it, and I'm going to figure out how to make it. And then I'm going to bring it directly to the community and they can buy DVDs and that's how we'll do it. So yeah, so just started doing it. I Rodney Chester, who plays Alex, who had been in Punks.
I was a friend of mine by this point.
He worked at a dance agency and so he said, we can use our offices on the weekend. So we had the casting in the offices, like over one hundred actors. I think, and mind you, this is the time when mainstream actors is nobody's trying to play gay any even gay actors who are working in Hollywood are certainly not trying to play gay. So it was a lot of newer actors whatever whatever, we had these we saw all these people. I cast it. We shot this six minutes
short with no money. You know, again favors from people. Oh we can shoot in this store. Rodney's friend owned the store on Melrose. We shot in there.
You know.
It was all these different just the streets and doing it. Shot the thing, put it on the internet Gangbusters. The site kept getting shut down. I had to keep buying more bandwidth because it was being watched that much.
You could see where it was being watched right in the world.
And it was literally all over the world. It would be like military bases all over the world if people were watching it. Wow, And so I knew, okay, oh, okay, well there's definitely a market for this, Like, there's clearly a market out there, So full steam ahead. Then I decided, okay, now I need some money. So, thinking back to that summit, I went to Black As Institute, where I first got this idea that oh, there's.
A whole community of black gay men who.
Are successful, who were like doctors and lawyers and Wall Street people and all this stuff, and they have money and they are all fans of punks. They told me so. So I wrote to all of those people and some other people that I knew, and eighteen eighteen people I raised you knowsd dollars.
Wow.
So thousands of people saw this, and at this point then we started getting press. And then I got a call that oh, MTV is launching this game and lets me a network called Logo and we want to meet with you. I went into a meeting with the president and she explained to me that new network smaller budgets. We don't have the money to develop scripted television but you've already developed it, You've made the pilot.
We want to do the show. So I said, okay.
So the next thing I knew this thing that I never intended to be on TV. I always thought, this is not going to be on TV. No one's going to do it. It's going to be done this way. So then next thing I knew, we were shooting it the series in La.
So, you know, talking about Nozarc, one of the things that struck me so much is how you approach the topic of shame. It's interesting because when you think about the characters, they're not ashamed of themselves, the ones that are living with HIV, the homophobic violence that happens in the show. Noah is not ashamed of his sexuality. It's clear that the way you write the show is that we as the audience, understand it's everyone else that's ashamed,
it's not these characters. And I wonder how did you develop that approach, What made you want to take that approach, because that was a pretty bold approach for these very stigmatized identities in the early two thousands.
So when I was out of film school and you were in.
LA, I met a guy in Mickey's and you know, and I would go. I was very young, I was I was very shy. I was kind of a I wasn't a late bloomer. I wouldn't call it late bloomer. I mean, if you really know me, then you know that I'm an introvert and you know that I'm not the life of the party in a big crowd. But I would go because again, I'm you know, I'm gay, and it's interesting and I want to kind of you know, this is the.
Community, this is what you do.
So I would go and I just kind of would watch people, and I kind of be in the corner and this guy who was kind of tall and very very dark skinned.
Gorgeous, like model beautiful body.
He I think he just kind of came up to me and was like and just engaged me because he saw me standing alone, and you know, and he was from Tennessee, He's from Memphis, and so we just became fast friends. And I think he would I know, I think, I know, I come. I certainly came to find out that he was certainly used to picking up guys left and right because he had that you know who he looked like Jaimund Hunt Sue and the Janet Jackson leve
will never do without your video. That's what he looked like. Literally, he looked like that, and so he was constantly picking up picking up people. But we we it was friends from the beginning, and eventually we became roommates and I lived with him in a house in West Hollywood, and I was with him through the entire experience of getting sick, being told he's HIV positive, dealing with getting on the medications, with all the different side effects from the medications and everything.
And I saw him go through this process of coming to terms with it and activating to this new way of living. And then at the same time, he's continuing his sex life and continuing to have just as robust a sex life as ever. And all we saw about HIV was death and sadness, and it was a it was a death sentence. And I literally witnessed someone just actively living and thriving with the disease. So I really wanted to represent that. I wanted to see that. I
knew it was important to see that. You watch over the years and you would see aids kind of it would creep closer and closer like you of course, you hear about celebrities, and then in my twenties, I remember my best friend in high school calling me and telling me that our friend Tim had died, and hearing about our high school classmate Jeffrey Lewis who died or this, and so, you know, just coming closer and closer close friends being HIV positive, and so it was really important
to see for people to see it's not a death sentence, because again, what I wanted to show was what I knew, the people that I knew. Chance in Noah's Ark is very loosely based on my best friend from college, who is a professor teaches at a wonderful university political science and is very kind of a bit straight laced and everything, and I never saw him on TV or in a film, and so it was really about showing these people that existed, that were real.
In two thousand and six, Noah's Arc became the highest rated show on its network, but unexpectedly it got canceled. Logo decided to go in a different direction, and fans were devastated because the season left off on a major cliffhanger. But Patrick was able to get a movie deal a few years later that picked up where the series left off.
It's been nearly twenty years since Noah's Ark has been off the air, but fans have continued to push for it to come back, and this year it was announced that the show will return in twenty twenty five.
You know, when the show was canceled, they commissioned a movie and then and then when that sort of outperformed overperformed expectations, they then commissioned a spin off. So it was sort of like Frasier to Cheers where and I wrote a script where no n Way moved to New York. And then by the time I finished developing that, they
decided they weren't going to do scripted. Logo was getting completely out of the scripted game at that point, and so that didn't go anywhere, and I was completely disillusioned again with like a Hollywood and the pandemic happened.
And then someone who had worked who had been.
Our big high up exec at Logo, he was the number two at Logo, had reached out to me and said, oh, what do you think about doing something a little Noah's Ark reunion or something, you know, zoom skyping. And I was like, yeah, sure, But then I got to thinking about it, and very quickly I was like, no, we're not doing that.
We're going to do you know, Noah's arc.
So we're going So I wrote a whole script for the Pandemic where you know, we caught up with all the characters and we see what they're up to, and everybody was down to film it, you know. So we made we shot the Rona Chronicles and it turned out really really well. I mean we've seen it. It's like
an episode of it's like a full on episode. And that had like the first night, I think it was over half a million viewers on the first night, and that was like better than that's better than cable TV viewers, you know, So I think that.
Was probably a factor.
But basically they reached out to me a few years a couple of years ago and said we want to commission something, and I said, okay, sure, let's do it.
That's amazing. So last question, Patrick, you have really spent your entire career making content and media that is dedicated to centering black and brown queer stories, and you know, even when there's been fallout and loss for you from that, and I wonder what has kept you so faithful to that commitment all these years.
I think there's certainly things I could have done that would have been more lucrative or mainstream. I don't know, because I look back and think, God, maybe he was kind of a bit of an idiot, and maybe you should have done fucking, you know, a procedural or something else. You know, But that's just not the kind of artist that I have been or who I was. It was just what I would, you know. I just did what
I wanted to do. I told the stories that I wanted to tell, and I was kind of lucky enough that Noah is our hit big enough that it afforded me the opportunity to kind of continue working. Obviously, blazing trails is difficult work and it's often thankless. Often the ones who blaze the trails don't really get to enjoy the fruits of that labor, just because it's just kind of just not how it works. It's beat you down, it takes its toll, and you're lucky to come out the other side of it.
For Patrick, he simply created a show that reflected his own life, but for many people across America and the world, he told a story that people saw themselves in for the very first time with three dimensional characters that defied tropes and stereotypes. For fans, he validated their friendships, their dreams, and their love.
Certainly, I've enjoyed hearing over the years from all of the people who tell me that the work has somehow influenced them or moved them, or saved them, or helped them come out, or help them help their parents come to terms with their sexuality. The scores of people that have told me they literally were hiding in the closet watching the little TV or standing by with their finger on the last channel remote button, you know, in case
someone walked in. Like I've heard those over and over and over and over, and even as young people continue to discover the series. So I certainly understand and have a sense of how important the work is to a lot of people in the community. And so, you know, it means it means a great deal to me to have the work appreciated like that, And in many ways it is the thing that that has kind of fueled me and kept me going in those times when maybe you know, it wasn't as easy, and so yeah, it's
always kind of reminded me of just how important. The work is And I remember when I was working at MTV in my early twenties. I remember it was around the same time. I think I was trying to decide what to write before I wrote Punks, So it was the same.
Yeah, And I.
I remember saying to myself and someone that you know, at the end of at the end of what I hope will be a long, storied career as a filmaker, like, what do you want to look back on? And looking back, I think the fact that twenty almost twenty five years later, people are still talking about Punks, people are still talking about Noah's Ark.
You know that?
Again, it lets me know that this is important. The work is important, the work is lasting, the work has made a significant impact, and for that I am very grateful, So thank you.
What We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us but We Loved at gmail dot com, or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at but we Loved. We are a production of the Outspoken podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with pushin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our. Executive producers
are me and Maya Howard. Original music by Steve Bone special thanks to Jay Bronson and rockl Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.