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Kyle Dean Stankey arrives late and out of breath for our lunchtime meeting at Thyme Line, the celebrated vegan restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Tanned and fit in his casual Dolce and Gabbana slacks and Donna Karan burgundy pullover, he apologizes for his tardiness and slides onto the banquette at our corner table, quickly ordering a grapefruit-arugula salade composé and, for good measure, a carob-spirulina smoothie. As he slips off his L.L. Bean flak jacket, I spot paw prints on the sleeves.

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I was on my way here," the 32-year-old actor explains, "but I only got as far as Houston when I heard these pitiful arf-arf sounds-- like this little voice yelling, 'Help me! Help me!' There was this bichon frisé stuck tight in this, I don't know, grating thing over the sewer, right there at East Houston and Mott, half in, half out, and I'm like, 'Oh my God!' Because no one, not a damn living soul, cared to give the little guy a hand before he got squashed under traffic or fell down the sewer-- they had better things to do, I guess-- and so I got down on my knees in the gutter and yanked that poor suffering pup right out of that sewer thing, whatever it's called, and got a cab and brought him to the nearest vet, where he is now, and I have to say, I'd do it again, even though he peed on my coat."

Random acts of kindness are Stankey's stock in trade. He's in New York to accept a GLAAD Media Award at a March 26th black-tie gala at the Marriott Marquis. Although his dramatic role in the recent TLA release Curly Fingers is not a gay part, the script does examine gay issues. Nick Nolte and Patricia Clarkson play a bigoted couple who manufacture pencils and affect the lives of those around them, especially a gay Chinese employee played by B.D. Wong, in insidious ways. Stankey appears in a pivotal supporting role as Rico, the blind plumber.

"Thanks to Kyle Dean Stankey," says GLAAD spokesperson Vanna Lynn Zwicker, "Curly Fingers is 90 minutes of undiluted uplift, instead of the gutter crawl it might have been if Kyle hadn't intervened. The people who might have seen this film and then killed themselves owe him their lives."

Just before shooting started, Stankey read the script and was horrified to discover that his character had to say the word "fag" on three occasions. He not only demanded rewrites of his own lines, he insisted that homophobic and anti-Asian language be purged from the script entirely, even when uttered by clearly bigoted characters.

"We ran behind schedule and over budget thanks to Kyle Dean Stankey's off-the-wall niggling over language," says director Wayne Weck, reached at his Venice, California, home. "By the end of the first week of shooting, I wanted to throw myself under a train. I'm mortified to admit this, but we kept doing surgery on poor Tim Scouse's brilliant script for the sole purpose of shutting Stankey up. As a result, a creation that started out as a swan became, in my opinion, a legless duck. Even if Kyle had been right, I swear to God I would rather have liver disease than work with that moron again."

Nick Nolte, reached at his apartment in Rome, where he's filming Ultimo Buio for Dario Argento, is less diplomatic. "Kyle Dean Stankey is a total nut job," he says tersely but matter-of-factly. "Actors who censor ought to be shot."

"It's sad how some individuals' negative juices flow so freely," says Stankey, troubled, but outwardly taking his co-workers' comments in stride. He falls silent for a moment, stirs the pine nuts in our condiment tray with a thoughtful finger, then speaks.

"I have to say that Wayne Weck, who collects used condoms, just happens to be his own private hell," he asserts, stabbing his napkin. "And, personally, I have nothing to say about has-been actors who go limping off to Europe, Italy, to look for work. Nick Nolte is more to be pitied than censored. It's not like I'm this big censor person who runs around censoring everything with, like, scissors or black Magic Markers or some such crap. I don't even believe in censorship. I just think certain words and ideas are so bad you shouldn't be able to say them. That's what I think. And GLAAD agrees!"

So do legions of his fans. Controversy hasn't marred the rising star's career in any discernible way, and may have helped it. Winning acclaim at Sundance last year despite repudiation by its director, Curly Fingers just recently went into limited release. Stankey now has three films under his belt-- besides Curly Fingers and A Home at the End of the World 2, in which he appears opposite Colin Farrell, there's Trimark's The Man from Missoula, which awaits a June, 2007 release.

Childhood survivor

As our food arrives, the tensions produced by the mention of Weck and Nolte disappear, and, munching arugula, Stankey once again exudes the warmth he's famous for. He is, of course, best known for the role of Sparky, Jim and Kim Brimble's irrepressible gay neighbor, on the Fox Network's "Up Your Family," now in its third season. His Emmy-nominated work on the popular sitcom has earned him international recognition and an avalanche of fan mail.

"That role is such a gift," he says with a satisfied grin, digging into his greens. "I mean, Sparky's got such human qualities. The guy's a cut-up, sure, and yet his heart's as big as all outdoors. You'd think he'd just be like this giant walking cannoli, yet beneath that froufrou beats an iron will. You look at Sparky and you know this person's journey is one big, tough arc of survival. This role is my way of saying, hey, look, America, gay people can be human, too! Plus it's an honor to work with Dame Judi Dench and the rest of the cast."

Stankey's come a long way from Dimptree, a village on the edge of New Jersey's famed Pine Barrens, where he was born to Marcie Lee Pidgeripper Stankey on September 3rd, 1974. His dad, Casper Dean Stankey, ran a small chicken ranch. He and his older sister, Lila Jean, had what he describes as a "magical" childhood.

"We learned to make the most of what we had," he says with a faraway look in his eye. "About four or five cars would go by every day, and we'd lie in wait and pelt 'em with pine cones. Whenever we got tired of that, we'd watch the chickens. We would study all their personalities and practice imitations. On Sunday afternoons we'd put on chicken shows for Mom and Dad and Gran, who'd laugh so hard she'd wet her pants."

Stankey returns to Dimptree whenever his schedule permits. "I was there three weeks ago," he tells me. "It was more the same than ever. I even visited Mr. Yurkus, my biology teacher, the first gay man I ever met. He never laid a finger on me growing up, although I knew what he was thinking. It's thanks to Mr. Yurkus that I learned you can be a homosexual, but in a good way."

Stankey pauses, raking watercress across his plate, then thoughtfully spearing a grapefruit chunk.

"Hey, these days I know oodles of gay people off-screen," he says. "I've found they're not just every bit as good as everybody else, they have their own special qualities they have to offer. They work out, they have hair product insights, they can tell which different clothes are what to wear at all the same time, plus, God!-- can they cook! My wife and I love getting dinner invitations where we go have dinner in gay people's houses, and sometimes I let my gay friends take me shopping."

I ask him if many of his fans assume he's gay, and if that bothers him.

"Everywhere I go," he admits, "I get looks, especially when I wear my jingle-bell hat-- the one Elizabeth gave me when we were working on this amfAR thing last year-- Elizabeth thinks I'm the type who should jingle-- and call me crazy, but when Elizabeth gives you a hat, you not only put it on, you wear it. Anyway, I know a lot of people think I'm gay because I play one on TV, but hey, whether they think what they want or not, they will just the same. When people say, 'Kyle, are you or are you not gay?,' I say, 'Why don't you go ask my wife?'"

For the past five years, Stankey has been married to Breanna Flenk, a former footwear model. Kyle and Breanna met when both studied acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse in the late '90s. "One day our sense memory exercises happened to achieve convergence," he recalls, "and the rest is history. Domesticity agrees with both our keen domestic bents, Breanna's both as well as mine."

Diverse children

His "Up Your Family" earnings have helped Stankey build his and Breanna's dream home, a nine-room pyramid-shaped structure near a quiet bend of the Russian River. "It's so peaceful there," he says, "and the river comes right up to the bank."

For the past year, the Stankey household has included personal trainer Heck Sheck, three Jack Russell terriers, four cats, and a cockatoo named Botox. The Stankeys' four adopted children-- from Uganda, Mozambique, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan-- live with Mara Barsinao, their vibrant, colorful Brazilian nanny, in the San Francisco co-op where the Stankeys stay on occasional trips to the city.

"At home," he says, "we balance relationship time with self work. Heck and Breanna and I spend whole days in the hot tub, blending our karmas and letting electrolytes swish up and down, but sometimes I like to go off by myself and just talk to my bucket."

It's no ordinary bucket, Stankey explains. The four-gallon vessel, acquired on a recent trip to Laos, is an antique bronze container said to have been used as a waste receptacle by Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha himself, in 500 BC.

"It's my power object," Stankey says. "Whenever I place my head in there and voice my thoughts, I get back deep cosmic ticks. It's like a spiritual MRI. If you saw my bucket, you might think, yeah, just one more 2500-year-old South Asian wastepaper basket. But-- personally-- for me-- it's the touchstone of my spirituality, which is one of those life quests everybody shouldn't do without."

His spiritual quest is grounded in a longtime dedication to Ho Dai, a holistic regimen devised by Chinese goatherd Tzu Wah-Pu in the Late Han Dynasty. Stankey starts his day by flushing out his sinuses using a neti pot, performing Ho Dai buttock exercises, and consuming a serving of Kellogg's Special K with soy milk, hominy grits, shaved daikon radish, and spelt. For inner discipline, he applies Ho Dai techniques both to his acting and to Hua Zą, the Chinese art of flower arrangement, a skill he's been perfecting under the guidance of Hua Zą master Lung Foon Feh. Hua Zą, which translates loosely as "flower mess," is a much less linear process than Ikebana, its better-known Japanese counterpart.

"Flowers are awesome," he says, caressing the lone yellow tea rose brightening our table. "Roses, dahlias, whatever. I love how they fit together or not, depending on where you might not put them. Calla lilies are a special turn-on for me, so sexual and yet so full of Zen. Sometimes I just have to lick their stalks. Ho Dai allows that kind of sensual behavior; it's known as Embracing the Wheel. Nagarjuna says, 'The misery which follows pleasure is the pleasure which follows misery.' Hard to grasp, I know, but if you're patient it emerges from this miserably pleasurable hidden intuitive level."

One of the precepts of Ho Dai, he notes, is the Celestial Bounce, which requires a person enriched by the material world to give something back.

"Bree and I prefer to give of ourselves via special needs children from different parts of the world that don't even have iPods. Marmalade, our nine-year-old from Mozambique, has ADD. Our daughter Rugby, who we found in Borneo, needs braces. And the other two have slight dyslexia or something. So maybe their needs aren't really all that special, when you hit the nitty gritty. But right now we're negotiating down in Paraguay, Chiliguay, somewhere down there, for this three-year-old girl who's got flippers."

The Stankeys' Third World adoptions reflect a trend among American celebrities. "Madonna's efforts on behalf of little black kids in whatever that country was has been a key inspiration," Kyle admits, "but our biggest role models have been Brad and Angelina. They may have caused Jennifer a lot of pain, it's true, but you have to hand it to them, they do lots of good for all mankind."

Satanic simmerings

So far, Kyle Dean Stankey has maintained a delicate balance between his humanitarian efforts and his career. He's deeply committed to his next film, a theatrical feature to be helmed by Joel Schumacher (Lost Boys) for New Line. Principal photography begins in May at a location near Bison Lint, Saskatchewan. When Stankey talks about this project, his face glows with pride.

"Devil Take My Baby is the working title," he relates, "but in my role as associate producer, I'm lobbying for Hellchild or possibly Take Him, Satan, He's Yours. It's about a man who's in his 30s, like me, and he goes around being normal, kind of like me, until one day he recovers these memories of stuff that went down when he was seven, a time when his mom turned him over to this Satan cult so they could stick him on a spit and roast him at this full-moon devil-feast, but then luckily his Uncle Mike went in there and whisked him away while they were sharpening the knives. The film will lift the lid off devil worship in the USA. Plus it's got a great cast. John Travolta's signed to play my uncle, and Jodie Foster's all lined up to play my weird Satanic mom, and maybe I shouldn't talk about this, but we're hoping to get Kevin Spacey to play Zargoun, the cult leader person who may be my dad.

"I'm really looking forward to working with Jodie-- it's a stretch for her, this devil gal who gnaws on human barbecue, but I happen to know that when Jodie did Silence of the Lambs, she begged them to let her play Hannibal Lecter. Well, here's her chance. Anyway, to me this is an critically important project, not just because the role of Todd is such a great role, which it is, but because it says a lot about America today and our need to get down and dirty with devil worshippers, sex predators, creeps like that, and it shows how you don't always remember what memories you have but don't remember having until maybe you remember you forgot them all because of trauma."

Stankey's record as a booster of humanitarian causes earned him the Human Rights Campaign's coveted Cheryl Jacques Memorial Award for 2006. His acceptance speech was the centerpiece of HRC's black-tie gala at LA's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last December 10th, an event at which he shared the stage with Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tipper Gore.

"The HRC's greatest strength," he said, "lies in its courageous willingness to be up-front about the greatest problems facing America today. I'm talking about homophobia, hurtful words in the media, ritualistic sex abuse, racism, violence, discrimination, lack of diversity, sex abuse by priests, the paternity of Anna Nicole's baby, and laws forbidding same-sex marriage! Let's have more laws, better laws, nicer laws, broader laws, bigger laws, laws with teeth, laws with balls, and let's make damn sure they're enforced!"

Stankey's words earned him a five-minute standing ovation, as well as an impulsive open-mouthed kiss from 2003 Amazing Race heartthrob Reichen Lehmkuhl, who had already raised eyebrows by showing up naked for the event. I ask Stankey if the incident embarrassed him.

"It took me by surprise, all right," the broadminded actor admits, "but he can't tongue-kiss half as well as H-- Heck! It's late! I told the vet I'd be back in an hour, because, see, if nobody claims that bichon frisé I pulled out of the sewer, I'm taking him home and naming him Guttersnipe! It's the kind of thing I do."

Stankey rises, dons his muddy jacket, grabs the tea rose, sticks it in his lapel, and waves goodbye. Between our table and the door, however, fate intervenes. Aware that Kyle Dean Stankey is passing her table, Linda Zmetch, a cost accountant from Queens, begins gagging convulsively. Patrons and waiters rush to her aid as she falls to the floor. But Stankey gets there first, hoists the blue-faced woman to her feet, and performs the Heimlich maneuver with consummate skill. Easing Ms Zmetch back into her seat, he retrieves the wedge of lotus root expelled from her windpipe, autographs it, and kisses her hand.

In a moment he's gone, but his presence still hangs in the air like a nurturing mist.

Author Profile:  Maxwell Silt

Maxwell Silt covers the Hollywood grind for The Guide's April editions