Daniel Radcliffe on Gay Actors and Transgender Rights

Is there any celebrity cooler than Daniel Radcliffe? There's nothing like a humble heartthrob to make folks swoon. And it's all the more grand that Radcliffe has decided to be a celebrity that speaks out passionately for equal rights for LGBT people.

Earlier this year, Radcliffe starred in a public service announcement for The Trevor Project, tackling the subject of suicide among LGBT youth. Radcliffe's (and The Trevor Project's) message? If folks are feeling helpless or hopeless because of struggles with being LGBT or questioning, there are allies out there in the world who will help.

Radcliffe has also taken on homophobes directly, and in an interview with trans musician Our Lady J. over at Out Magazine, Radcliffe gives some more love to the LGBT community. His focus? The impressive talent and mad skills of openly gay actor Sean Hayes, and the need for more education to combat homophobia and transphobia in our schools, workplaces, and public institutions.

"I think that with every generation, people become more open to those ideas and more aware and more educated. But it’s a really, really slow process. If you take any family with parents who are bringing their kids up in a narrow-minded way that includes homophobia, it will take a very profound moment of realization to change those deep-seated views," Radcliffe told Our Lady J. and Out Magazine.

That dismantling of homophobia and transphobia is exactly why Radcliffe pumps resources (both time and money) into supporting the Trevor Project, which is the largest organization working to combat suicide among LGBT youth.

In the interview, Radcliffe also throws a heaping amount of praise to Sean Hayes, who juggled two starring roles this summer: one, lead actor in the Broadway show Promises, Promises; two, host of the Tony Awards. To do both of those simultaneously, let alone doing both of them well, puts Sean Hayes in a class of his own.

"I’ve got to mention Sean Hayes, who is in Promises, Promises at the moment, which is a fantastic show. Up until he hosted the Tony Awards, he was rehearsing. The hours he was doing and the commitment he showed -- because the Tony Awards is not just an awards show, it’s a massive Broadway party, and for him to be showing both huge commitment to that and his own show as well -- was amazing," Radcliffe added.

Huh. Maybe he should forward those comments over to Ramin Setoodeh, who while writing forNewsweek managed to boil Sean Hayes down to nothing but a gay guy who occasionally acts, but could never be seen as anything other than a gay dude.

To check out the whole interview with Radcliffe, head on over here. My only criticism? Quite a bit of praise for some of the low-level fruit that the Obama administration has picked in terms of LGBT policy stuff, but not a thorough critique of where the Obama administration has been absent. Outside of that, the interview affirms for me that when it comes to celebrities, it's hard to find someone more concerned about LGBT rights than Harry Potter.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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