Steve Moore
"Mr. Hollywood"
"Everyone thought I was dead so I had to do another one man show!"   

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Washington Post: Interview  NEW! (old review)
Rainbowarch: review HBO's Drop Dead Gorgeous
Style Weekly: review Drop Dead Funny
Style Weekly: review I Never Knew Oz Was in Color
Style Weekly: review Area Comics Yuk it Up to Fight AIDS
Fabulous Pictures presents: We're Funny That Way
Grand Marshall: 1999 Gay Pride parade in Richmond.
Richmond Times Dispatch: Clipping (Long download)
“Roseanne Arnold — Live From Trump Castle.”
 

Steve's Picture Gallery: Photos Of Friends, Relatives, and Stars (updated 4/9/3)
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Washington Post Interview

You Hear the One About the HIV-Positive Comedian? Meet Former Virginian Steve Moore.


By David Richards
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 16, 1997 ; Page G01

Like any good stand-up comic, Steve Moore has a reserve of comebacks to draw upon if the crowd gets unruly or groans at a joke.

"Don't mess with me, folks," he is apt to say in his husky Virginia drawl. "I can open a vein and take out the whole front row." Or he might pick up a stein off a nearby table and ask ever-so-innocently, "Excuse me, Goober, can I have a sip of your beer?"

Even the helplessly drunk and the terminally jaded spring instantly to attention. The 42-year-old Moore, you see, is gay. Nearly eight years ago, he tested positive for HIV. Since then he has watched friends die and his own T-cell count plummet. But in what is surely one of the more amazing instances of show business alchemy, he has turned the terrible realities of AIDS -- the panic, the prejudice, the night sweats -- into the stuff of comedy.

"Notice how there's always a cure for AIDS," he points out. "Did you hear about the one that says you drink peroxide? It oxidizes the blood and kills the virus. And it's only 99 cents. That was the cure two years ago. Well, I drank that [expletive] for two months. My T-cells didn't go up, but my hair looked fabulous! . . . People are always saying, `I can't believe you've been exposed to the AIDS virus. You've never looked better.' I figure, hell, pretty soon, I'll be drop-dead gorgeous."

Gay comedians are no longer a novelty these days, and the odds would suggest that other comics also have HIV. However, Moore, who was here recently for the annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, is the first to take on the taboo so publicly and to dismantle it so deftly. Three and a half years ago, he introduced a few tentative one-liners about his HIV status ("My parents think HIV means `Homosexuals in Virginia' ") into a routine that until then had been distinguished only by its mindless perkiness. They clicked. Since then he has become increasingly candid about his working-class roots, his sexual escapades, the year he spent in the Blue Ridge Mountains praying to God for guidance, the bewildered parents who have stuck by him through it all and who at one point took to growing marijuana in their basement because it helped to alleviate the nausea he was experiencing from the drug AZT.

"Steve's so likable that he gets people to look at AIDS in a whole different way," says Annie Albrecht, who runs HBO Workspace, a stage for alternative comics in Los Angeles. "He's not like a George Carlin or a Dennis Miller, who sear the world with their comments. Steve engages a deeper part of our humanity. He gets the audience to feel through laughter, and he really has something to share."

Moore has made brief appearances on a few TV talk shows. (On an episode of "Rolonda" devoted to gay comics, he was actually introduced as "death-defying.") He played a lippy piano player in Roseanne's Las Vegas nightclub act, and sometimes he warms up the studio audience for her TV show. "Struggling," however, is the operative adjective to describe his career so far. Now all that may be about to change. An hour-long documentary that mixes
Moore's stand-up act with cinema verite scenes from his life is being readied for airing on HBO in June. A rough cut of the program, titled "Drop Dead Gorgeous -- A Tragicomedy, or the Power of HIV Positive Thinking," was screened here as part of the four-day festival. Nothing else proved half as original or affecting.

Moore hopes the documentary signals a change in his fortunes. At the Aspen airport, a limo picked him up, and he was lodged in his own condo (with blazing fireplace). At official events, he wore plastic credentials around his neck that identified him as an "artist" -- which put him on equal footing with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield, who were also in attendance. When he discovered one morning that huge snowflakes were drifting down out of the skies, his happiness was complete.

"I never want to come off as bitter," he says. "I don't want to go that route. I think truly that God gave me HIV to kick me in the [rear] and make me ask what in the hell I was doing with my life. Why was I obsessing about people I couldn't have? Why did I allow myself to be treated badly? I don't do that anymore. I think I would have quit stand-up comedy altogether had I not incorporated AIDS and HIV into it. All of a sudden I had a purpose. I had something people could think about. And that made a difference."

The Quiet Life
He likes to say that when he was born in Danville, Va., his name was Theresa-Kay Moore. It seems that his parents, Sheldon and Wilma Moore, weren't expecting their second child to be a boy. Faced with the reality, they gave him the last names of their best friends, and his birth certificate lists him as Stevens Spencer Moore. With affection, Steve Moore describes his background as "poor white Christmas trailer trash." Wilma puts it differently. "We're as quiet as two folks ever was," she says. "We aren't educated and we don't speak so well. But we don't put on airs. Never have. We're Sheldon and Wilma. What you see is what you get."

Sheldon Moore, 71, whom most people call Skeets, is a retired mechanic for Liggett & Myers in Danville. Wilma, 66, worked in the Corning Glass factory for a long time, then ran the Dairy Hart, a drive-in joint by the Dan River where you used to be able to buy four foot-long hot dogs for a dollar.

Skeets is a man of few words, and there is gentleness in his self-effacing manner. Wilma is the garrulous one -- outgoing but nervous, with lightning flashes of panic in her china-blue eyes. She chain-smokes L&Ms, a lifelong habit that has left her face deeply wrinkled. If Skeets is a repository of bad jokes, Wilma's malapropisms have kept the family amused for years. She once insisted, for instance, that potato salad is better if it "urinates" in the refrigerator overnight, and that wine is cheaper in a restaurant if you buy a "giraffe." While she and Sheldon have lived a hard life, she has come to accept its jolts and vagaries with the raspy observation that "que sela, sela."

It is safe to say that Steve confounded their expectations from the start. They would have liked for him to have taken over the Dairy Hart, but early on he told them he wanted to be a performer. So they bought him a piano and paid for lessons and eventually sent him to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond for two years. Afterward, Moore braved New York briefly and unsuccessfully before heading for Hollywood, where his hopes of landing in a sitcom rapidly evaporated.

Instead, he delivered newspapers, pounded out piano accompaniment at comedy clubs and became a stand-up comic himself. "For years, Steve was relegated to mediocrity, for all intents and purposes," says Belle Zwerdling, a Hollywood agent and Moore's closest friend. "He couldn't find his niche. He was closed off. He had an anger to him. He'd come onstage and say, `Feel the energy!' But it was a joke. He'd be sweating, dancing around and mugging. Obviously the material wasn't working, and his only response was to jack it up a notch."

His romantic life wasn't a whole lot better. Although early in 1980 he married a fellow comic, it was for the sake of convenience. She was a lesbian from Canada who needed papers to continue working in the United States. He found it advisable in the often-homophobic entertainment industry to have a wife. But he jokes now, "Come on! I'm marrying a lesbian from Canada. This is not a phone call I am looking forward to making to Mom and Dad." (The marriage nonetheless lasted 15 years.)

Moore remembers exactly when he learned his test results for the AIDS virus. "July 24, 1989, at 3:22 p.m.," he notes quietly. "You gotta know, I thought I was dying. What else would I think? It's so hard not to buy into that." His health began to decline, and the career seemed permanently stalled. Even some of his friends fell away when he couldn't be cheery all the time. In 1992 he finally gave up and returned to Virginia, settling into a trailer his parents owned on Smith Mountain Lake.

There he wrote some music, painted some watercolors. At least twice a week, he'd drive to Danville for dinner with the family. Sometimes his father came up to the lake and they fished. Mostly he grappled with his fate. "I really did pray a lot to God in that trailer," Moore says. "People thought I had gone home to die, but I'd really gone home to live. That year changed my life in such an incredible way. It gave me a mission. When I returned to L.A., I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to talk about HIV and tell all the stories I'd wanted to tell for years." On a Saturday night in Novemeber 1993, at the Comedy Store in La Jolla, Calif., Moore faced his first audience as an openly gay, HIV-positive comic.

"The first show I chickened out and jumped right over the joke I was planning to tell," he says. "But by the second show, I'd convinced myself to do it. So I said to the audience, `Let me share something with you: I'm HIV-positive. Do you guys know what that means?' And a voice in the audience says, `Yeah, it means you're gonna die.' Time seemed to stand still. Everybody was waiting to see what I was going to say. I didn't miss a best. `Oh, and you're not?' I answered. Then, as if I was a maitre d', I said, `Jesus Christ, party of three! Jesus Christ, party of three!' I don't know where that came from. It was really God with me. But the audience response was huge. I knew in that instant that everything would be fine."

Zwerdling says she knew it, too. "After he contracted HIV, Steve could have been a [jerk] and just hated the world," says Zwerdling. "He didn't do that. He became a nicer, more compassionate man, an inspirational man. What he really talks about now is unconditional love and acceptance."

Laughing at Death

Moore is what you might term "post-cute," with blue eyes like Wilma's and sandy brown hair, rinsed to give it blond highlights. He's the barefoot boy with cheek of tan . . . only he's been around the block a few times. Onstage, his comic delivery suggests Phyllis Diller with a twang. "Yeah, Phyllis Diller and Minnie Pearl had a child -- me!" he whoops.

If there is an edge of camp about his presence, an improbable, small-town, Sunday-go-to-meeting kind of innocence comes through, too. "I think I'm a good candidate to do this kind of material," he says. "I'm a nice guy. I win people over. And if I don't, I just say, `Well, God bless you, and be sure to have safe sex.' "

Ask him to analyze his humor, though, and his brow furrows. "It's just a mechanism with me," he theorizes. "Maybe it's my fear of being too serious. I mean, I have gone to the video store and rented `Longtime Companion,' `And the Band Played On' and `Philadelphia.' I've sat there, drinking Jack Daniel's, watching all three movies in one night, and crying myself to sleep. I know what happens in those movies is a real possibility for me, too. But I have to make a joke out of it. I say that I went to the video store and rented those movies, and, do you know, they wanted cash up front!"

He pauses. "I guess when I'm hit in the heart, my mind goes to a joke."

Meeting mortality head-on, he believes, is a big part of it. "Most people don't know what to  say around around someone who's HIV-positive," he explains. "They're uncomfortable. So they'll say something like, `Hey, none of us really knows what's going to happen, right? I mean, I could get hit by a car tomorrow.' And you want to reply, `You will, if I'm behind the wheel.' Or else they pay you those underhanded compliments about how you've never looked better! But I've performed in hospices where people are dying, and the sicker the jokes, the harder they laugh. I remember this one guy, covered with lesions. I said to him, `You know, people start to look like their dogs. I'm going to have to have my Dalmatian put to sleep.' Well, he howled. I could never do that in a mainstream comedy club."

Moore claims he is educating the general public about a dreadful disease, but in the end, his comedy goes far beyond that. Using himself as an example, he's really urging people to be true to themselves and to live their lives as openly, honestly and fully as possible. "Life is good, folks," he insists onstage and off, with the fervor of an evangelist. "I'm grateful to wake up every morning. I take nothing for granted. I've got nothing to hide. The lesson I've learned is `be yourself.' "

He beams. "What is the National Enquirer going to say about me? That I'm straight, married and healthy?"

True to form, that is a joke. And true to Steve Moore's new form, it is also something more.

Unconditional Love

Skeets and Wilma Moore don't pretend to understand homosexuality or AIDS, although they've read books. "We just stay puzzled," allows Skeets philosophically. But they do stand by their children. So when Steve asked them to participate in the HBO documentary, they consented even though it went against their basic reticence. Earlier this year a small crew pulled up in front of their brick ranch house in Danville and spent the next five days filming them -- in the tidy living room, on the back porch and in the kitchen with the bright yellow curtains, where they are sitting now.

Since the Moores are the basis for many of Steve's routines, the producers, Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, thought that footage of them would lend authenticity to the project. They did, too. Wilma recited some of her more famous malapropisms for the camera, and Skeets demonstrated how he cultivated marijuana in the basement for his son.

"I knew it was against the law," Skeets explains as he pulls his chair closer to the kitchen table. "But Steve was paying $80 for what you'd call a nickel bag, I guess. That seemed awful expensive. And his doctor said it might help him. Only other thing against the law I ever did was drive too fast. But everybody does that, I guess."

The Moores even re-created the Christmas evening dinner when Steve coaxed them into trying some of the pot themselves. For the re-enactment they smoked parsley cigarettes. Wilma, who is a natural actress, pretended to get high and sang a song.

"The real pot gave me the crunchies and made me want to throw my body up in the air. Like Superman," she chuckles. "Oh, I suppose we'll be criticized in Danville for doing this. But Steve asked us. What are you going to do? He's struggled for so long out there in California. More than 20 years. I would've gave up. . . . Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? I think so, and I'm guilty of it."

Word, the Moores know, gets around fast in a community like theirs. After Steve appeared on "Rolonda" they got glances in the supermarket, and they're pretty sure that the congregation of the Shermont Baptist Church, where Steve used to play the hymns on the piano every Sunday, will have a thing or two to say after the documentary airs. Wilma even jokes that "the police will be over here going through my basement, you know that."

She gives her tiny shoulders a shrug. "Que sela, sela."

"The publicity bothers me sometimes," concedes Skeets. "But Steve told us it would help his work. I don't understand gay people, but Steve being gay doesn't change anything at all. He's my son. I put him above all the other people. If some of 'em want to cross to the other side of the street when they see us coming, well, I just figure that gives us more room."

Wilma is asked whether they got paid for their appearance in the HBO special. "Honey," she says, drawing herself up to her full five feet, "we're not for sale."

The Future . . .

Last year Moore added protease inhibitors to the 20-odd pills he takes every day, and since then his T-cell count has risen dramatically. "The long-term effects are unknown," he notes. "I could be growing another shoulder back there for all I know. But my T-cells are up to 370. I have more hope than I did two years ago. In my act, I say, `AIDS, it was awful! I hope I never get that again.' "

Maybe, he ventures, that joke is on the verge of becoming a reality.

And maybe the career that foundered for so long will take off after all. Several executives connected with the Aspen comedy festival seem to think so. For Sheila Nevins, a senior vice president at HBO, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is "a gay Lake Wobegon, and it seems like the offshoots could go anywhere."

Even so, Moore tries not to dwell on the future. "To do my show in a theater off-Broadway, that would be a dream," he confesses. "I've never had a [gay] relationship that lasted more than five weeks. But I want that monogamous relationship and the white picket fence. I was raised that way, and I think I'm ready for it now. But do you know what I really want?"

At this point, the eyes of Wilma and Skeets's little boy light up and a wistful expression comes over his face.

"I would really love," he says, his voice a whisper, "to be an old character actor someday."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.