In an op-ed for Playboy, out
actor Charlie Carver tells LGBT people that they are remarkable.
Carver, who came out gay last year, has
said that he resented his father when his father came out gay to him
at the age of 11.
“At 11 years old I found out my
father was a faggot,” Carver wrote in his essay titled To All
LGBTQIA+ People: You Are Remarkable. “I hate that word, but
it's how the news resonated with me at the time, so I will write it.”
The news forced Carver to “reckon
with what felt like was a shameful inheritance.”
“My blood felt tainted. I assumed his
was. By the end of that year, I’d changed my name, lost 30 percent
of my body weight, asked to die and was filled with such profound
despair that, looking back on family photos from the time, I still
don’t recognize myself.”
“Remarkable or unremarkable,”
Carver
wrote, “queer people resist by existing.”
“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. 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,” Carver added.