David Duchovny is going gay. Sorta.

The former X-Files star is producing a feature film about two old gay men who fall in love at a senior citizens home. "David saw a [newspaper] story about gay senior housing and he was fascinated by it," says Chad Allen, the former child star of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman who's developing the project with Duchovny. "We have fantastic parts for older guys in the movie. The one trick we found was it's really tough to get an older actor to see themselves as old. That's the challenge—not the gay thing."

Allen knows about challenges. Before there was a T.R. Knight or a Neil Patrick Harris, there was Chad Allen. Years after becoming a household name playing Jane Seymour's son in the hit Dr. Quinn series, he came out of the closet. Despite supermarket tabloid stories outing his sexuality, Allen says the decision was all his.

"They said, 'You'll never work again,' " Allen tells me over breakfast at Eat Well restaurant not far from his home in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. "I said if that's what comes of it, then fine. This is more important."

Allen's been working ever since, thank you very much.

He currently costars in Downtown: A Street Tale, a long-in-the-making indie flick about a group of homeless kids in New York City. "It's the worst character I've ever played," Allen says. "It's an [AIDS-afflicted], drug-addicted, homeless, racist killer. I'm like, 'What else?' "

Believe it or not, Allen can relate to parts of his character. He's been brutally honest about his own battle with substance abuse. Clean for many years now, Downtown was a challenge because he had only been sober for about year when the movie was shot shortly after 9-11.

"I was spending all day long re-creating getting high and loaded with all of my senses," Allen remembers. "I'd go home and I'd lie there at night and I'd get cravings. Part of my brain didn't know what to do. I'd have to go to [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings at two in the morning."

Fortunately, Allen never ended up drinking or drugging. But he has played another addict since then—in Save Me, a movie about an "ex-gay" ministry. "If you spend enough years of 'rehearsal' doing it, you get it down," he says with a laugh. "I'm pretty good at it.