Crime America Actor James Jessup Comes Out Gay Publicly
"I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly," Connor Jessup said
The 25-year-old Canadian actor, known for his roles on ABC’s American Crime and TNT’s Falling Skies, announced the news Friday on Instagram, explaining,”I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly.”
Despite being more comfortable with his sexual orientation now, Jessup didn’t always feel that way.
“I knew I was gay when I was thirteen, but I hid it for years,” he wrote. “I folded it and slipped it under the rest of my emotional clutter. Not worth the hassle. No one will care anyway. If I can just keep making it smaller, smaller, smaller…. My shame took the form of a shrug, but it was shame.”
“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 balked,” Jessup continued. “It took me years.
Jessup went on to detail his “ongoing” journey to self-acceptance and the “tedious game” he played of hiding who he is.
“I have conspicuously not said it before. I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly,” he said, pointing to how far he went to distance himself from his own characters. “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,” Jessup continued. “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? These and other background whispers––new, softer forms of the same voices from when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…. Shame can come heavy and loud, but it can come quiet too; it can take cover behind comfort and convenience. But it’s always violent.”
Connor Jessup
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Connor Jessup in American Crime
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So what inspired Jessup to come forward now?
“For me, this discretion has become airless,” he said. “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. Queerness is a solution. It’s a promise against cliche and solipsism and blandness; it’s a tilted head and an open window. I value more everyday the people, movies, books, and music that open me to it.”
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