Yes. We are clearly talking past each other. You need to set the "org-hide" text style (or "face") so that it is the same color as your background. Then the stars will appear invisible.
This is explained in the section of the docs I linked to: "The leading stars are not truly replaced by whitespace, they are only fontified with the face org-hide that uses the background color as font color. If you are not using either white or black background, you may have to customize this face to get the wanted effect."
Here's one way you might do that. Do M-x apropos and then search for org-hide. Click "org-hide" and then click "customize this face". Then set the foreground color to be the same as your background color.