As a child, 54-year-old lesbian actress Jane Lynch enjoyed dressing like a boy, playing baseball with her her male friends, and walking outside bare-chested… that is, until age 10 when her mom forced her to start wearing shirts — her father nervously commenting, “Her nipples are sprouting!”
Around that age, her male baseball pals began acting strangely around her and she felt differently about herself. It wasn’t until she heard two men walking hand-in-hand described as “gay” that she understood her feelings.
At age 14, Lynch wrote in her personal diary, “I am gay, no one else can know this.” She then walked four blocks away and threw her diary away in someone else’s garbage.
It wasn't until after she'd finished grad school in the 80s, however, that started going to gay piano bars, making gay friends and expressing her own lesbian identity, caught in the current of an empowered gay community that finally made her feel supported and capable.
In her new It Gets Better video to LGBT youth, Lynch says:
“That persistence that kept me on the baseball field even when the boys weren’t letting me play, that served me. That served me in my career. My desire to play is much stronger than my fear of rejection and I think dealing with my sexuality as a young person started that ball rolling. You’re going to find something in you, you’re going to pull something out of your feet that is going to help you move on. It’s going to be something really strong and true and it’s going to make you a more extraordinary person. You’re going to find something in you that’s going to give you the get up and go and you’re going to use that all through your life.”
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