Out of the Darkness

By Jaq Bayles

Stephen Hart is a gay actor, YouTuber, and presenter on Radio Reverb’s HIV Hour who managed to turn a harrowing event into an inspirational story for others. He shares his journey with Jaq Bayles.

Stephen Hart has been living with HIV since 2006 after being drugged and raped. While he says it felt like the end of the world for two years, he eventually managed to write his story, which later became a one-man show, Shadowed Dreamer, which ran in New York for nine months, closing off Broadway in 2010.

As a London-based actor for some 20 years, Stephen had “some really great jobs”, but after the rape his life changed.

“It was massive,” he says, “because I remembered so little, which in some respects was a benefit but then in other respects was very confusing, because you feel when you’ve gone through something like that you should remember. It was hard to get my head around. Six months later I was diagnosed with HIV so everything I’d known, everything I’d been working for as an actor, it all just came crumbling down because, even though it was 2006, there still weren’t a lot of people who were talking openly about [HIV], especially in the entertainment industry, so I kind of closed down for about two years.”

Stephen got a job as a theatre front-ofhouse supervisor, which, while still being in the industry he loved, was very different to acting. “I just didn’t see a place for me as a person living with HIV and as an actor. I told a few close friends [about the diagnosis] and my agent told me that nobody with HIV would ever have a lead role in the West End or on Broadway, and that kind of stayed with me.

“My agent told me that nobody with HIV would ever have a lead role in the West End or on Broadway, and that kind of stayed with me”

“It’s crazy – it was only 15 years ago but in the acting game it was hard to get people to understand that it wasn’t a death sentence, because that was how people looked at it still, so I started looking at it that way myself.

“I’d grown up as a gay man and I knew some things about HIV – I remember when Freddie Mercury died, I remember when Rock Hudson died, I remember the tombstone ad and all those kind of things – but I still wasn’t as educated as I needed to be. It took me two years of watching YouTube and trying to find somebody like me, listening to a lot of Whitney Houston and just being really sad.”

But then Stephen started writing his story, which was a breakthrough in itself as he had been brought up in a household where secrecy was insisted upon.

“I’d been adopted at seven weeks old and my adoptive mother had schizophrenia, so my childhood was really hectic. There were lots of times when she was very high and lots of times when she was extremely low. I experienced a lot of things as I child and I was told ‘do not tell anybody’, so I never did.

“But I realised I had to tell someone and by writing it down I felt I wasn’t betraying anybody because it was just for me. Then I showed it to my new agent who told me: ‘You need to do something with this, it’s so powerful it’s so emotional, it’s so important’.”

Stephen took the one-man show that his life story became, Shadowed Dreamer, to New York in the hope he might get a three-month run out of it.” It was far enough away that if it all fell flat on its face it wouldn’t affect my career over here,” he says. “It was also far enough away that I could talk about what had happened to me and that I was living with HIV and not have those same fears I had here.”

“I’d grown up as a gay man and I knew some things about HIV – I remember when Freddie Mercury died, I remember when Rock Hudson died, I remember the tombstone ad and all those kind of things – but I still wasn’t as educated as I needed to be”

Ultimately the show ran for nine months and closed off Broadway, becoming the springboard for the next phase in Stephen’s life.

“It was amazing because it opened the door to so many other people to tell me their stories. I’d get back to my New York apartment at night after the show and there were so many emails from people telling me their stories, so it became this vehicle for other people to be able to talk.”

By now it was 2010 and after returning to London it took a couple of years for Stephen to decide that YouTube would be the best medium to both continue to tell his story and help other people to tell theirs – and so Hart Talks was born, running every other Thursday, with guests from all walks of life sharing their experiences.

The interview format for that caught the eye of a producer for the HIV Hour on Radio Reverb and led to Stephen becoming a permanent fixture on the show. He’s now also working on a play with another writer, and hoping to begin casting later this year.

“I’ve learnt over my 49 years that the more you know about people and their lives the less scary it is and that really is why I’m doing it. For two years I didn’t know if I still should be here, I felt that sad and miserable and alone. I now try to make sure nobody ever feels that way if I can help it.”

www.youtube.com/c/StephenHartHartTalks