Of course, if you’re a proper Gleek, you know Glee star Chris Colfer, who played the openly gay character Kurt Hummel.
Glee began airing in 2009, in a cultural climate that was arguably even more hostile towards gay people than it is now — and during a recent appearance on YouTube’s Books That Changed My Life series, Chris got real about the struggles he faced with newfound fame.
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“I loved pretending…I loved creating other people, creating characters,” he said. “I loved storytelling. I never in a million years thought that fame would have any part of my career at all… It got really scary really fast.”
” I was playing an openly gay teenager at a time when people did not like seeing openly gay teenagers on television… It was not welcome. And the death threats and the security risks started almost immediately. I became very agoraphobic.”
Chris went on to say that the level of scrutiny and hate he faced at the time seems unthinkable in today’s climate — but it really did happen. “It’s hard to explain now because the world has changed for the better so much that sometimes people don’t really believe me… but it was not okay to be gay back then, in the early 2000s,” he said.
“Late night talk show hosts would take cracks at me, and it was perfectly fine because I was the gay kid. Politicians would say things about me publicly, perfectly fine because I was the gay kid. Pastors of mega churches would call me the anti-Christ, and it was perfectly accepted, because I was the gay kid. There was no one defending me. There was no one coming to my rescue.”
“When I would talk about it with people, they’d say, ‘Well, what do you expect? You’re the gay kid on Glee. This is just what’s going to happen.'”
You can watch the entire interview here.