it was a big period of my life. It doesn't matter to me if it's "positive" - those guys are really hot, they're bad asses.

The specter of AIDS has been a major influence in both of their lives. Living in San Francisco, Cho grew up in one of the epicenters of the disease's devastation. "When I was 11 or 12 years old, I really saw this whole community, Polk Street, just disintegrate before my eyes," she recalls. "It was, like, this incredible holocaust. People gone everyday. People that were close to me and people who were not so close to me. It was really scary."

Paige says he's been very fortunate and has not lost anyone close to him to AIDS, "I've been very fortunate in some ways. I came out in the age of AIDS, so I don't know anything else. To call that fortunate is odd. But had I been alive, were I 10 years older, there's no way I'd be sitting here right now. There's no doubt in my mind."

Nowadays, Cho says she has many close friends who are HIV-positive. "And they're living really good, solid, healthy lives. But I'm afraid for the younger generation and what's going to happen now. I think there's so much less awareness."

"There's a really dangerous perception that it's gone and that it doesn't matter anymore," Paige notes sadly.

But the future for both performers looks bright. Paige plays the best friend of Josh Charles in the Showtime movie Our America, a film based on the true story of a National Public Radio disc jockey who teaches two young African-American teens to make a documentary about their sometimes shocking urban life. And the character Paige plays is straight. "That was important for me from a career standpoint," he admits. "Not from a self loathing, homophobic place, but I'm an actor. I want to disappear into different roles. And it's an amazing thing that in this day and age they got a gay actor to play a straight guy."

It is very different from where the two were just a decade ago. "I was preparing to do All American Girl, and I didn't really have a sense of what it was going to be or what would happen," Cho recalls. "I was in Boston at the Boston University