Charlie Carver’s Coming Out Note Makes Him Your New Crush
Charlie Carver (Photo: Miikka Skaffari/WireImage)
In a long and incredibly thoughtful note on Instagram, Charlie Carver, one half of the Carver twins who you may recognize from The Leftovers, Teen Wolf, or as Felicity Huffman’s twin boys on Desperate Housewives, has come out.
Carver, 27, begins by speaking about himself as a young boy — he made his acting debut alongside his twin brother Max in Desperate Housewives.
“I … knew, however abstractly, that I was different from some of the other boys in my grade,” Carver writes. “Over time, this abstract ‘knowing’ grew and articulated itself through a painful gestation marked by feelings of despair and alienation, ending in a climax of saying three words out loud: ‘I am gay.’”
Carver then describes the experience of coming out to his family and acknowledges his privilege in being immediately accepted.
“If you’re ready and feel safe, then think about sharing this part of yourself with others,” Carver says. “I recognize that I was born with an immense amount of privilege, growing up in a family where my orientation was celebrated and SAFE. If you feel like you want to Come Out, make sure first and foremost that you have a support system and will be safe. I would never encourage anyone to Come Out only to find themselves in harm’s way — a disproportionate number of homeless American (and global) youth are members of the LGBTQ community who were kicked out of their families and homes out of hate and prejudice.”
Carver — whose character on Teen Wolf, Ethan, was gay — says that, while he lives his personal life as an out, gay man, through a combination of industry and personal pressures, he has dodged definitively stating his sexuality in the press. However, Carver then gets to the meaning of the quote accompanying his post: “Be who you needed when you were younger.”
“How can I participate? Honesty is probably a great step in the right direction. I now believe that by omitting this part of myself from the record, I am complicit in perpetuating the suffering, fear, and shame cast upon so many in the world,” Carver writes. “In my silence, I’ve helped decide for you too that to be gay is to be, as a young man (or young woman, young anyone), inappropriate for a professional career in the Arts (WHAAA???) So now, let the record show this- I self-identify as gay. And does that really matter anymore?”
