HIV-Positive Comic Brings Lessons Learned

Glens Falls - Steve Moore has made his livelihood in the world of comedy for the past 25 years.

So when the funnyman’s answering machine leaves a forwarding number that advises ringing him at his mother’s home in Virginia, the first thought that comes to mind is: Is this a put-on?

‘Who is this?’ a voice says, answering the telephone.

‘Hello, Steve Moore, please. This is...’ ‘Who is this?’ the voice says again.

‘Hello,’ trying again. ‘Steve Moore please? This is...’ ‘Who is this, and what do you want?’ the voice, laced with a Southern accent, responds.

‘Steve Moore, please. This is ... hey, wait a minute. Am I being ‘punk’d’?’

A moment later, when Steve Moore comes to the phone, he explains that he truly is visiting his parents, Wilma and Skeets, at their home in Virginia.

When Wilma comes back on the line to express apologies for any misunderstanding, she is jokingly asked whatever happened to the cliché of a warm and welcoming Southern hospitality.

‘Yes, of course we have hospitality,’ Wilma says. ‘But we can only take so much.’ You don’t have to look very far to guess where her emotionally resilient son Steve gets his spirited comedic moxie.

On Monday, Moore makes his first journey to the region, appearing in a combined lecture/performance at Adirondack Community College in Queensbury.

As an entertainer, Moore has appeared with the likes of Rodney Dangerfield and Ellen DeGeneres, and was featured in his own one-man award-winning HBO special.

He is to Roseanne what Billy Martin was to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner: fired by the same boss on five different occasions.

Comedy awards and celebrity glitter aside, Moore is perhaps best known for material that focuses on his views of a world from the perspective of a 49-year-old gay man living with HIV.

‘I tested positive in 1989. It was July 24. At 3:30 in the afternoon. Not that I remember it or anything,’ Moore says.

After learning he tested positive for the virus in his mid-30s, ‘I had a little nervous breakdown and went and lived in a trailer for a year,’ Moore says.

When he emerged, the reality of being faced with his own mortality had a profound effect on him. A veteran of stand-up comedy for more than a decade, he began writing material based on his own personal experiences with the illness. By 1993, he was courageous enough to start working them into his routine. ‘After that,’ Moore says, ‘my career took off.’

Growing up in Virginia, Moore originally set his sights on life as an actor. At the age of 19, he moved to New York City. When he turned 21, at the height of the disco era, he moved to Hollywood, where he lived for the next 23 years.

He became part of a lifestyle that can only happen in Hollywood. He worked the celebrity circuit. He became the legal guardian of Pauley Shore. Some of his fondest memories are the four months he worked with Dolly Parton who, to this day, Moore calls ‘one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life.’ On another occasion, the openly gay man sought a more traditional path, walking with a female companion down the wedding aisle.

‘Oh yes, I was married,’ Moore says of the union that lasted 15 years. ‘She was a lesbian from Canada, and so much more of a man than I could ever be.’

Moore was approached by HBO to put together a one-man show. The result was ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous: The Power of HIV-Positive Thinking,’ which first aired in 1997.

‘The HBO special went really well. It was very Hollywood. It won a Cable Ace Award,’ Moore says proudly. ‘To this day, whenever they run it again, I hear from people all over the country who are seeing it for the first time.’ Moore invested his earnings from the TV special and bought a place in Richmond, Va., to be closer to his family.

‘My parents are real Southern Baptists. They love me and support me so I have got a real stable base,’ he says.

Moore has even found a place for his parents, whom he calls Wilma and Skeets, in his routine. Apparently, he said, they thought HIV meant ‘Homosexuals In Virginia.’ ‘What’s strange is they used to worry about losing me,’ Moore says. ‘But I am doing well. Next year, I’m going to be 50 years old. Now that they are in their 80s, I am the one who is afraid of losing them.’

While people are generally more accepting of his material in 2003, Moore says HIV is not as high in the public’s awareness as it once was.

‘I find nobody wants to talk about it anymore. You don’t see the red ribbons as much. It’s like the Vietnam of diseases,’ he says.

Moore also cites the high cost of medicine, attainable only to ‘the very wealthy or the indigent,’ as well as the problems that exist when people avoid getting tested, out of fear that if they tested positive, they would have to face up to all the responsibilities that go along with having HIV.

He lectures around the country about maintaining a positive outlook while living with HIV, and also conducts healing weekends.

‘Those are a gathering of people who are HIV positive -- straight women and gay men, the rich and poor, black and white -- such a big diversity of people. It’s so powerful meeting all these people who all share the same fears as you do,’ he says.

Through it all, Moore quite literally hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

When his HBO special premiered, Washington Post reporter David Richard wrote a detailed study of Moore’s stage manner and his in-your-face way of dealing with hecklers in the crowd.

‘Don’t mess with me, folks,’ the comedian would announce. ‘I can open a vein and take out the whole front row.’ Moore’s appearance in Queensbury will be part lecture and part performance. He says the question he is most often asked is how he first contracted HIV.

‘People always ask ‘How did you get it?’ So I tell them that HIV is not just a gay disease,’ he says.

‘I explain to them that I got it from a toilet seat.’

After a pregnant pause, generally met with a silent hush falling over his audience, Moore continues: ‘Of course, there was a man sitting on the toilet seat at the time.’

by Thomas Dimopoulos, The Saratogian, November 2003.