Jessup on American Crime (Image via ABC)

Canadian actor Connor Jessup, who turned 25 yesterday, also chose the day to come out as gay.

He began his coming-out, via Instagram, with a thoughtful, poetic explanation of how he felt in the closet:

I knew I was gay when I was thirteen, but I hid it for years. 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.

He went on to acknowledge — possibly for older gay people — the surprising aspect of how hard it still is for many to come out:

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.

He also described being closeted and talking about playing gay, an interesting insight into something that happens countless times in Hollywood:

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.

Powerfully, he asserted that being gay is too good to suppress:

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.

His full post: