The girls from New York City are back for one last romp (or in Samantha’s case, about 20 of them), as the HBO series “Sex and the City” enters its sixth and final season. As part of the promotion surrounding this much-hyped ending to one of cable TV’s most popular and sultry shows, this past weekend HBO and Time Warner Cable hosted a premier for the show at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. The event included a screening of this season’s first two episodes, as well as a guest appearance by “Sex and the City” star Willie Garson, who plays Carrie Bradshaw’s gay pal, Stanford Blatch. The screening and a party afterwards raised over $2,000 for both Mama’s Kitchen and the Hillcrest Youth Center.

The Gay and Lesbian Times sat down with Garson, “Sex and the City” style, for cocktails by the pool at the La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla. Enjoying a rare break in San Diego’s June gloom, Garson spoke about playing gay, life on the set, why this has to be the final season and “Mr. Belvedere.”

“It’s bittersweet … everything has to end and we are ending it in the right way,” Garson said of the show’s final season. “Would I love it to go on forever? Sure, but that’s life. It has to end at sometime, so why not end while it’s great — before it stinks and cousin Oliver moves in, like on the Brady Bunch.”

Fans of the show will recall that at the end of last season, Stanford had a boyfriend, Marcus, “the one with abs,” as Nathan Lane noted in the season five finale.

“That poor kid,” Garson said of his onscreen partner, Sean Palmer. “He plays a cabaret dancer and he is a cabaret dancer. I don’t think he has done a lot of acting, so this is a good job for him, but at the end of last season they did tell him, like three weeks in advance, ‘We’ve got a scene where you come out of the pool and you’re in your skimpy little suit and Nathan Lane has a line about your stomach muscles — so you’ve got work to do.’ I don’t think he ate one thing for three weeks. He looked drawn, but he did great and he looked great.”

Garson said he himself was working on losing four pounds for a scene where he will be shirtless, set to film in a few weeks. However, he said his own diet is self-imposed.

“It’s up to you what you want to do, they never [tell you],” Garson explained. “There is this character now in the new season who is supposed to be just gorgeous and they have actually paid for a trainer for him, but like for me, whenever they write in for me to take off my shirt I think they are writing it in as a joke, so I’m always on this quest to prove them wrong.”

For those anxiously waiting to see if Stanford and Marcus are still together, they are, but Garson is keeping his lips sealed on what the future holds for the couple — who could face a few bumps in the road in upcoming episodes. However Garson said he is just happy to see his character with someone overall.

“It’s great because it gives me a storyline, at least one that is my own,” Garson said. “We don’t really know what they are leaning towards, but the writers have said again and again that all of the characters will have what they need. I don’t know what they are leading towards, but maybe in the last episode Marcus and I will be flying to Canada to get married.”

Like many others playing gay roles on TV, Garson is straight, though it’s not something he makes a big issue of.

“There is nothing worse than when an actor plays a gay character on television and then in every piece of press there is something about how not gay they are,” he said. “There is nothing worse…. It’s like, ‘Don’t ever call me gay’ — it’s unbearable to me. There are some on television who are very popular and in every interview they are jumping up and down screaming about how not gay they are and there are a lot of gay people around…. That’s really insulting, so I just always try to keep it at a minimum.”

One thing that Garson has brought to the show is a piece of himself in Stanford, whom he sees as stylish and optimistic about life. Part of the onscreen chemistry audiences see when he does a scene with Sara Jessica Parker is the fact that the two have been friends in real life for 20 years. He said he thinks this certainly comes across on the show. When Garson first read for the part of Stanford he played down his feminine side, but that changed during his first scene in front of the camera.

“I remember when we shot the pilot [with] Darren Starr, I remember him shouting ‘Gayer! Gayer! Gayer!’ and it started to feel like I was the retarded child of Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Riley or something.”

Garson said he thinks the success of the show and the popularity of his character have a lot to do with the fact that under all of the sex and humor, the show is really driven by the characters. When asked about how his character stacks up against those on other gay shows, such as “Queer as Folk,” Garson laughed. “I watched the pilot and it seemed like it was going to be a primer on gay sex,” he said. “It wasn’t about characters. I remember the guy picked up the young kid and the guy was like, ‘Do you like to get rimmed’ and the kid goes, ‘What’s rimming?’ and the guy’s head goes down … and that’s like the end of the show. I was like, so what’s next week’s episode going to be?”

Garson is proud of the fact that he has become well known as a character actor over the course of his career, which began with his “big break” in 1985, when he got a reoccurring role on “Mr. Belvedere.”

“Nobody ever mentions ‘Mr. Belvedere.’ I played the oldest son’s best friend for five years…. I had hair then,” Garson recalled. “We were supposed to be in college and I started losing my hair. They used to put the extras around us, [who] were like 50, to make it look like we could possibly be in college.”

Since then Garson has starred on a wealth of popular shows, including “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal,” “Melrose Place,” “Friends,” “NYPD Blue,” and “The X-Files.” Of course, Fans of Garson can look forward to seeing him play a big part in the final season of “Sex and the City,” which began airing this past weekend.