Yuri's Date with John Benjamin Hickey

Before I wrote the story of My Date with Andrew Lloyd Webber, I didn't remember the name of the guy we met at the Broadway Cares Flea Market, who invited us to the party in Brooklyn Heights -- cruising Tom Wopat and getting tacos with Andrew Lloyd Webber sort of drowned out everything else.

I asked Yuri, but he didn't remember, either ("We just kissed and fondled a little -- I wasn't that into him").

So I looked up the Broadway stars who were at that flea market, and by process of elimination came up with John Benjamin Hickey.

I thought that he was much older than me, but he is actually 2 1/2 years younger.  He has been on Broadway since the early 1990s, with roles in several important gay-themed plays, such as Love! Valour! Compassion! and Cabaret.


He won a Tony for his portrayal of a gay man dying of AIDS in the 2011 reprise of The Normal Heart.


On screen, he reprised his role of Arthur Pape in Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997), and starred in a number of other gay-thremed or gay-subtext movies, including The Ice Storm (1997), The Bone Collector (1999), Capote (2005), and Pitch Perfect (2012), as well as a dozen tv series.

In 2003-2004,  It's All Relative, about the daughter of a liberal gay couple married to the son of a conservative heterosexual couple.

In 2010-2013, The Big C, about a woman with cancer, as her eccentric, anti-establishment, bisexual brother (left).

Not a bodybuilder, but a nice solid physique.

His partner is Jeffrey Richman, writer and producer of gay-positive tv series like Wings, Frasier, and Modern Family.



Maybe Yuri should have paid more attention to him on that September night fourteen years ago.