Canadian actor, writer, and director, Connor Jessup has come out as gay in an emotional post on his Instagram.
The 25-year-old who is best known for his role as Ben Mason on the TNT science fiction television series Falling Skies and for his roles in the ABC anthology series American Crime, detailing his decision to publicly come out in his post explaining, “I knew I was gay when I was thirteen, but I hid it for years.”
Jessup added, “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 baulked It took me years. It’s ongoing. I’m saying this now because I have conspicuously not said it before.”
Jessup who says that he’s been out in his private life for years also describes how hard it was for him to discuss gay characters he’s portrayed in the past without acknowledging that he could personally relate to them.
“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. It would be presumptuous to assume anyone would care, yeah? And anyway, why should I have to say anything? What right do strangers have to the intimate details of my life?” Jessup continued.
“For me, this discretion has become airless. I don’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,” Jessup concluded.
Jessup is currently working on a new production where he is set to star in the upcoming Netflix drama titled Locke & Key.
