June 5, 1974– Chad Allen:
“I have long held the belief that those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender have been given an extraordinary gift. We are forced to go inside ourselves and determine, once and for all, that we are good. If we have anything at all to give the world, we are going to find it somewhere along that journey. We are going to show it to the world in a declaration of brilliant defiance against society and its rules. We only go looking because our sexuality forces us to. How lucky are we? But, it’s easy to forget the pain that forces us to go searching in the first place.”
In the terrifically engaging, creative 1980s television series St. Elsewhere, one of the main characters has a young son who was autistic. In the 1988 series finale, The Last One, it is revealed that all the storylines had occurred inside the head of a young autistic boy. That boy was played by the charming Chad Allen Lazarri. As a child actor, Allen went on to work on television series: Our House (1986-88), My Two Dads (1987-1990), and most notably, Dr. Quinn-Medicine Woman (1993-98), none of which I have ever seen, although My Two Dads is a title that might work well for my porn career.
In 1996, at just 21 years of age, Allen was outed in the tabloid The Globe which published photos (sold to the paper by his then boyfriend) of him kissing another man in a hot tub at a party. He was pushed from the closet, but since that time Allen has been an outspoken advocate for Gay Rights.
Allen:
“The letters started coming in from gay people: ‘Oh, my God’, ‘I had no idea’, ‘Just knowing helps me so much’. It helped me, actually, all this pressure I was getting to identify myself, identify myself. It just meant so much to know I wasn’t going through it alone either. After all, what is it about loving men? There’s so much attached to it, but at the end of theday, it’s love. I’ll take it. Whatever it looks like.”
I was especially taken with his strong work in the film Save Me (2007) opposite Stephen Lange, Judith Light and handsome out actor Robert Gant. Developed and produced by Allen himself, Save Me explores the life of a young gay drug and sex addicted man who is forced into a Christian run ministry in an attempt to cure him of his “gay affliction”, where instead he is faced with the truth in his heart and spirit. The film does not take the easy way out and it avoids clichés. Lang is excellent, and Light gives an astonishing performance of understated depth and nuance. Gant and Allen play very moving and complicated characters, plus they have their shirts off in several scenes.
With Third Man Out (2005), Allen began portraying Donald Strachey, a gay private detective in a partnered relationship. This became a series of television films based on the Strachey novels by Richard Stevenson: Shock To The System (2006), On The Other Hand, Death (2008) and Ice Blues (2008). Allen says that Strachey is the first gay character he had ever played on screen.
Allen was in a relationship with actor Jeremy Glazer who he met on the set of Save Me. Allen is best friends with one of my most favorite people, the delicious Philip Mershon, the owner/director of the fabulous Felix In Hollywood Tours. Felix knows his Hollywood History!
Last year, Allen posted a YouTube video commemorating the end of his own website and saying that he has been studying to be a clinical psychologist.
“It’s easy, especially speaking politically, to want to clarify things as gay or straight, homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual. But I’ve always felt like the word homosexual described a person about as well as the word Republican or Democrat. It’s a nice little label to give somebody, but what does it really tell you about them? Nothing.”
Allen claims that he was a child actor, but not really a child star, although his face was all over teen fan magazines in the 1980s. He loved performing, but he also fell in to some of the child actor clichés:
“There was a lot of partying. After high school, I was living by myself in a motel. I had worked all my life, so I had my own money, and things were not so fabulous at home. I mean, I used to go there a lot to eat. They’d make sure I’d come over for food. We’re Italian, so there’s always a lot of eating and arguing. It was good to be away from it, but I kept drifting back for the food. I was a pretty crazy 17 year old, partying, never taking care of anything. My rebelliousness was a big issue.”
He is now clean and sober. I very much admire his talent, activism and good looks. I hope he is happy helping others. Allen’s outing seemed especially cruel and unnecessary, but it was also a major moment because it was one of the first times a young actor was revealed to be gay while they still had that “teenage heart-throb” thing going on and Hollywood could tell that it didn’t hurt his work or the series he was working on, and that was real progress.
