2009 Evening of Hope

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Four Seasons Hotel, 757 Market Street, San Francisco

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This year's Master of Ceremonies: Alec Mapa

Alec Mapa,
Master of Ceremonies

Alec Mapa is an award winning actor, comedian, playwright, and journalist who’s career on Broadway, television, movies and cruise ships spans more than twenty years. If you think that’s a long time, just imagine how Alec feels. Luckily, he’ Filipino, which means he’ll look thirty when he’ fifty, fifty when he’ seventy and by the time he’s eighty he’ll be too pooped to care. But enough& with the Asian Math! Here’s the story on Alec Mapa.

Alec’s professional career started in shortly after graduating from NYU when he starred in a Tony Award winning Broadway  called “M. Butterfly”. He performed in the Broadway production for nearly a  year  opposite Tony Randall, before hitting the road with the first national touring company. Alec was certain the minute the tour landed in Los Angeles the worlds of movies and television would all come to the theater, discover a brand new talent, and make him a big fat star. He was wrong.

Alec was unemployed for nearly three years in Los Angeles, was flat broke, had a nervous breakdown and had to start all over again. He turned his career crises into a hilarious one man show called “I Remember Mapa” produced by the Mark Taper Forum. Alec’s tragic-comic monologue of triumph and loss won the LA Weekly award for Best& Solo show, enjoyed a successful run in Los Angeles and has since played to sold out houses in San Francisco, New York, Toronto and Seattle. By speaking about the horrors of being unemployed, Alec found plenty of work as an actor, guest starring on on shows like Friends, Roseanne , NYPD Blue, Seinfeld, and Melrose Place. Honest you can look it all up at www.imdb.com!

Alec had the distinction of playing network television’s frist gay Asian series regular character on the short lived CBS sitcom “Some Of My Best Friends”. Alec then spent four seasons on the UPN sitcom “Half and Half”. His “Wisecrack!” coedy special debuted on LOGO in 2005 and has played I heavy rotation ever since.Currently he can be seen on the hit ABC comedy “Desperate Housewives.”

Alec has always returned to the theater. Other Broadway credits include Timon of Athens and A Little Hotel On the Side. Off Broadway Alec appeared in Dogeaters and A Language Of their Own, both with The New York Shakespeare festival/Pubic Theater.

As an out gay actor of Filipino descent, Mapa has long been a worker for causes benefiting AIDS and the gay, lesbian and Asian-American communities, including The Human Rights Campaign, The Matthew Shepard Foundation, Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS),Project Angel Food ,AIDS Project Los Angeles and Lambda Legal among others. For his dedication, Mapa was recently honored with the East West Visionary Award, the Rand Schraeder Distinguished Achievement Award from the Gay and Lesbian Center of Los Angeles and the Davidson/Valentini Award from GLADD, and he was nominated for a Maggie Award for his editorial columns for The Advocate magazine. Mapa was selected as the 2005 Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and was one of Out magazine's "Top Out One Hundred" in 2004. Is it any wonder he’s “America’s Gay Asian Sweetheart”? Of course not. It’s no wonder at all.