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Steve Moore
(1955 - living) U.S.A.

Steve Moore

Comedian

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he was born in Danville, Va., as Stevens Spencer Moore, to Sheldon, a mechanic for Liggett & Myers, and Wilma Moore, who 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. 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, he couldn't find his niche. 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.

Moore is gay. In 1989 he tested positive for HIV. Since then he has watched friends die and his own T-cell count plummet. 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.

Steve MooreThere 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. 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.

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. Meeting mortality head-on, he believes, is a big part of it.

He 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 he was going to say. He didn't miss a best."Oh, and you're not?" he answered. Then, as if he was a maitre d', he said, "Jesus Christ, party of three! Jesus Christ, party of three!" The audience response was huge. He knew in that instant that everything would be fine.

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.

Moore 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 (illegally) in their basement because it helped to alleviate the nausea he was experiencing from the drug AZT.

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Source: excerpts from an article by David Richards, Washington Post, March 16, 1997

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