'American Crime' actor Connor Jessup comes out: 'I'm grateful to be gay'
Connor Jessup, from TV’s American Crime and Falling Skies, has come out as gay in a touching post on Instagram.
The Canadian actor, 25, wrote that he knew he was gay at 13, but “hid it for years” under “the rest of my emotional clutter.”
“My shame took the form of a shrug, but it was shame,” he wrote. “I’m a white, cis man from an upper-middle class liberal family. Acceptance was never a question. But still, suspended in all this privilege, I balked. It took me years. It’s ongoing.”
Jessup wrote that he’s sharing it now “because I have conspicuously not said it before. I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly. I’ve played that tedious game. Most painfully, I’ve talked about the gay characters I’ve played from a neutral, almost anthropological distance, as if they were separate from me. These evasions are bizarre and embarrassing to me now, but at the time they were natural. Discretion was default, and it seemed benign.”
He said he never went public because he told himself that nobody would care. He also told himself he shouldn’t have to make a proclamation about it.
“What right do strangers have to the intimate details of my life?” Jessup thought. “These and other background whispers – new, softer forms of the same voices from when I was 13, 14, 15.... Shame can come heavy and loud, but it can come quiet too; it can take cover behind comfort and convenience. But it’s always violent.”
He said he’s coming out now, in part, because he doesn’t want to “censor — consciously or not –– the ways I talk, sit, laugh, or dress, the stories I tell, the jokes I make, my points of reference and connection. I don’t want to be complicit, even peripherally, in the idea that being gay is a problem to be solved or hushed. I’m grateful to be gay. Queerness is a solution. It’s a promise against cliche and solipsism and blandness; it’s a tilted head and an open window. I value more everyday the people, movies, books, and music that open me to it.”
Jessup ended with a message to those who are “gay, bi, trans, two-spirit or questioning,” writing: “If you’re confused, if you’re in pain or you feel you’re alone, if you aren’t or you don’t: You make the world more surprising and bearable.” And thanked “all the queers, deviants, misfits, and lovers in my life.”
Jessup’s latest role is on the upcoming Netflix series Locke & Key, based on the comic book series of the same name.
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