From The Advocate Magazine in partnership with Glad, this is LGBTQ and A.

I'm Jeffrey Masters, and today I'm talking to the actor Daryl Stevens, who of course

played the title role in the TV show Noah's Ark. That show, which aired between 2005 and

6, showed black gay men as fully developed characters

in a way that we really haven't seen since, not in that quantity at least.

There are amazing examples on Pose and other shows, but Noah's Ark is the first show

built entirely around Black, gay men, and of equal importance,

now 15, 16 years later, it remains the only show to ever do that.

No others have come close to replicating it, which I think needs to be said when we celebrate

it as the first.

So today we talk about that, about how Noah's Ork incorporated and dealt with HIV, and then we talk about what Daryl is doing now.

Because not only is Daryl acting on the CBS show be positive, he's also a brand new dad.

So all of that is coming up.

Let's hear it.

So I want to go back to the beginning of Noah's Ark.

When you're making a show, you've no idea how it's going to be received or connect with people.

When did you start to realize the impact it was having?

Well, certainly not for the first few months.

It felt like the majority of what we were hearing was actually not positive.

It was disappointment in the flamboyance or the femininity of the characters.

It was umbrage around the just sort of fabulosity and how there wasn't enough

inclusivity in terms of the spectrum from masculine to feminine

...