Charlie Carver tells all LGBT+ people: “You are remarkable”
By Ross Semple
Charlie Carver has told all LGBT+ people that they are “remarkable” this Pride Month.
In an essay for Playboy, the Desperate Housewives and Teen Wolf actor writes about his experience as an openly gay actor. He is remarkably honest as he writes about when his late father first came out as gay.
He first spoke about his dad’s sexuality during an interview with Attitude earlier this year, and although he admits that his dad’s journey helped him come to terms with his own sexuality, he struggled with the news at first.
“At 11 years old I found out my father was a faggot,” he writes. “I hate that word, but it’s precisely how the news resonated with me at the time, so I will write it. This was, what, 1999? Before the first civil unions, and not before Matthew Shepard.
“I’d already conditioned myself to believe that any expression of gayness could lead to being tied up to a fence, and so you bet I was doing my damndest to pass in a disguise of frosted tips and Team USA soccer jerseys. But with Dad’s news, the hammer finally fell on a loaded chamber and I was forced to reckon with what felt like was a shameful inheritance.”
Charlie goes on to say that he struggled to live as his authentic self before he came out early last year. “Ultimately, to find happiness, I had to step off and freefall away from the remarkable persona I’d built and back into a more natural state of expression.”
LGBT+ people “resist by existing”, according to Charlie. He goes on to write about the achievements that LGBT+ people have made in recent years: “That quiet history of existence is monumental, even alongside historic victories like the passage of marriage equality and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. While I certainly owe my decision to come out, and to do it publically, to having lived through those moments of progress, not all of us ask for that responsibility, nor should we feel required to.
Charlie urges all of us to protect the lives of our LGBT+ brothers and sisters: “Each of us already contributes through our individual pursuits of happiness—by continuing to live in and through sets of respectively unequal systems among many who would be glad to see us gone. By existing. The chief responsibility for us all is to regard all LGBTQIA+ lives as sacred. May the rest follow.”
Earlier this year Charlie was named Attitude’s most eligible gay bachelor of the year. The June issue of Attitude, featuring Charlie on the cover, is still available to download. You can see all 100 of Attitude’s Bachelors of the Year here.
