Bittersweet

Actor Cheyenne Jackson talks to The Advocate about being out in Hollywood, closeted actors, his childhood, coming out and everyday domestic dramas.

My favorite part:

"As a pleasant contrast to the e-mails he receives through his website from right-wing Christians warning him that he’ll “die a horrible death," Jackson’s inbox is regularly flooded with messages from small-town teenage boys whom he’s inspired to come out. "One of them asked me to send him a picture, and he said he held it as he told his family because it gave him strength. A couple weeks later when his friend was going to come out, he let the friend hold my picture. It’s kind of heavy, but at the same time if they feel support and strength just by the way I live my life, that’s great."

It’s a comfort Jackson didn’t have attending House of the Lord Christian Academy in his tiny, rural hometown of Newport-Oldtown on the Washington-Idaho border -- "very Little House on the Prairie," he says -- where the only gays were known as "the dump dykes," two mullet-sporting lesbians who ran the local garbage dump. "The school would quote Scripture -- ‘It is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord to lie down with another man’ -- and I was told that I would be going to hell, so from a very young age I knew that it was something that I would have to deal with later in life."

Though Jackson always had girlfriends, his heart belonged to Chuck, his best friend in high school. "I was in love with him," Jackson recalls. "I truly thought that we would be together. If he got a girlfriend, I’d purposely make sure that my girlfriend was best friends with his girlfriend so that we could always do shit together. He was a Mormon, and right before he left on his mission, I took him to lunch and said, ‘Chuck…’ And he said, ‘I know. I’ve always known.’ And I was like, ‘You have? Oh, my God!’ To this day, he’s still a friend, but now he’s married and has five kids."

Source: Cheyenne Stands Tall, The Advocate, Issue 1006, April 22, 2008