The story of Charlie David is a true Canadian success story. At the age of 25 he has already been a member of a boy band, a correspondent for network TV, a published writer, owner of his own company. Now Canada’s busiest openly gay actor and the co-host of Bump! on OUTtv, Charlie David has come a long way from playing street hockey in small town Saskatchewan.
“I think I definitely picked a winning ticket before being born here. I have had a real roller coaster of a journey and adventure,” David told GayCalgary.com. “I have always been a dreamer, …I pictured being an actor and traveling and playing make-believe games since I was three. In ways it has felt like I have been preparing for it.”
While he was a teenager, David toured with The Saskatchewan Express musical revue, and then pursued theatre at Victoria’s Canadian College of Performing Arts. At the end of his first year, he got his first taste of fame when he was invited to join a boy band in Malibu.
”That first group was a very manufactured band – the first month was being handed money, keys to a car and a condo, and getting in to clubs. But we didn’t have any music. I thought it was ridiculous and we were imposters. My best friend Derek James, who is also Canadian, [we] quit that group. We really wanted to make it work, so we auditioned some other guys and put together 4 Now. We found an amazing manager who, within a month had us opening in front of 15000 people. We wrote some songs, hired a choreographer and threw together a show. It wasn’t a very good one – in four weeks you can’t put together a miracle, and the crowd actually pelted us with water bottles. It was one of those moments where we thought about quitting. We decided to push forward and with practice we got better. In the band I was not out publicly. While my parents and friends have known since I was sixteen, in the boy band we were definitely told to be in the closet because that is part of the selling tool, to be single and available for teenage girls.”
While opening for Britney Spears, Pink and The Black Eyed Peas were great experiences, David soon felt the siren song of acting, his true love. While his first TV pilot, dubbed “Charlie and The Party Machine” for MTV didn’t get picked up, before long David could be seen all over. His busiest year coincided with a big personal decision – to be out of the closet in all aspects of his life and career.
“We do have actors who have come out, but the trend has been for people to do it after they have become famous or are older in their career like Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O’Donnell and Sir Ian McKellen. They are fantastic mentor figures but they have done it once they had already created a body of work. My challenge as a young man was to do it at this point when a lot of nay-sayers said ‘you’ll never work again, don’t do it.’ The stigma is if you are a young guy in Hollywood who has the potential to be a leading man - coming out is not an option. I wasn’t willing to believe that or sacrifice my own personal happiness and how I want to live my life for my career. I was willing to take that risk.”
The leap of faith has paid off, as David says he has been working more than ever. He has no concerns about being typecast into strictly gay roles.
“There have been gay roles for sure, but I am completely fine with that because we have an under-representation of gay characters in the media. I would be happy to play ’gay‘ for the rest of my life as long as they are interesting characters and bring about an awareness of who we are as a community. We are often represented in stereotypical roles or as the butt of the joke. I’d like to see more roles that take stereotypes and flip them on their head, showing that as LGBT people we hold all types of occupations, are sometimes very good or evil people, that we love the same and are just another face of society.”
David is excited to be joining Shannon McDonough in co-hosting the travel series Bump! The show, which launches its second season January 17th on OUTtv and is seen on five gay networks internationally, is the most watched gay travel show in the world. David talked about his excitement at traveling the world, combined with the realism of how much work the show truly is.
“We go out for two weeks at a time to shoot three cities. With only three days per city - it is a lot to cover a city as massive as Berlin or Paris within those three long days. When I first thought about doing a travel show it sounded very glamorous, and in many ways it is a wonderful opportunity to experience all of this. But it is a lot of hard work, when we are not on camera we are doing research or traveling or talking to people, trying to think of interesting angles. I have a lot of fun when I jump around, but there is a bit of the outsider looking in aspect as well.”
The show brings a uniquely gay look at travel, catering to both the party and cultural audience.
“We have our contingent of hot shirtless guys and girls kissing, but we have a component about the arts, history, and culture of the locales we are visiting. Visiting the Schwules Museum in Berlin, which is the only gay museum in the world and has the past couple of hundred years of the gay movement in Germany, is fascinating. We visited the homo monument in Amsterdam, which commemorates Gays and Lesbians who were in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. That type of history is something that my generation does not necessarily know about and appreciate. It is potentially one of our biggest mistakes because we aren’t recognizing the people that came before us for the freedoms we have today. We strive to see what the movement and culture has been in the cities we visit and how it affects us now, as it will only bode well with the gay movement.”
Being such a public figure can take its toll emotionally and on relationships.
“I have always been a person that is content in solitude, and been blessed that the crews and people that I travel and work with have developed into close friendships. I really strive to maintain my important friendships and relationships with family because at the end of the day that is what matters. A job in entertainment could end at any time, and that is when it could be lonely.- to have it end without having put the energy into your friendships and family and to be left standing there all alone.”
David is presently single, which will no doubt make a few GayCalgary.com readers perk up. But be forewarned that dating someone in the entertainment industry is never easy.
“I haven’t thus far found that perfect match but I am pretty happy being single right now even though I love being in a relationship. I saw an interview recently with George Clooney who said ‘looking at Hollywood relationships why do you think so many fail?’ For many of us as entertainers our careers come first for a very long time. It is such a difficult industry to make a go at and do well, so it takes a lot of time and focus so it is a juggling act to maintain that and the other aspects of life. Having said that, I don’t have any bigger dream than to one day find that man and get married. I want all of that, but am going to put the time in now to enjoy those things in the future when I have stability; being able to choose the projects I want to do and the financial ease to really devote to a family. But if the perfect match came around tomorrow that would be fine too.”
David was recently honored to be included in Out Magazine’s annual OUT 100 List of the year’s most interesting, influential and newsworthy LGBT people – a list that includes Melissa Etheridge, Elton John and Cynthia Nixon among others. For David, it was a shock to be included on the list.
“I was on my way to Philadelphia for a pride festival when my manager called and told me that I would be in this year’s 100 honorees. It was such an amazing surprise, completely out of left field. It was something I had in my brain that in five or ten years I could see myself included among those people, but never expected it would be this year. I am still just starting to make tracks in the gay community and there are some wonderful humanitarians and celebrities listed in that group. You see this list of people like Elton John, Sharon Stone, Melissa Etheridge, all these fantastic people and then me, Charlie from Saskatchewan.”
David’s small town roots keep him grounded as his career continues to soar. He realizes the importance of having gay role models, and is determined to see the LGBT community represented.
“I have to remind myself that I am being given this success, and with that comes responsibility. Anyone in the public eye has a heavy weight that, when given the opportunity, we have to try and be an example. That was an instigating factor in choosing to come out, because this small town boy didn’t have a gay mentor to look up to. You can experience a feeling of solitude and isolation when you don’t have reference points for the feelings you are having. I think it is important today that we have gay magazines and networks and media – it is an incredibly important tool to reach out to those people who aren’t in metropolitan areas. For someone in a rural area like Kansas or Saskatchewan, for them to be able to look at these publications and watch TV and see their story being told, and see people like them, breaks down the feeling of isolation and [gives them] some hope. There are gay and lesbian people who are successful and leading fantastic lives, finding loving partners and achieving their dreams. It’s not a lifestyle we have to hide or feel shameful about.”
www.charliedavid.com
Bump! on OUTtv
www.bumptv.com
