Speaking with UK LGBT glossy Attitude,
out actor Jim Parsons said that he was impacted by homophobia growing
up.
Parsons, 47, is currently promoting his
latest project, Netflix's upcoming gay drama The Boys in the Band.
Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Mart
Crowley's play of the same name arrives on Netflix on September 30.
Crowley's play, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1968 and was adapted
into a feature film in 1970, is an examination of how homophobia
impacted a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party in New
York City.
(Related: Netflix
releases first trailer for gay drama Boys
in the Band.)
Speaking with Attitude, Parsons
said that he can identify with the film's characters.
“I realized that being gay and
growing up around people and in a culture where that wasn't
celebrated – where it was reviled, in many ways – had an impact
on me,” Parsons said.
“Happy as I am, I’m still working
out the fear I grew up with: that by revealing who I really am, I
will somehow lose the love of the people who are important to me.”
"This story wasn’t a direct
reflection of my time, and things have changed rapidly for gay people
over the last couple of decades, but even now, there’s that
residual [feeling],” he added.
Parsons is best known for playing
Sheldon Cooper on the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory. He
casually announced he was gay in a 2012 interview. He married
longtime boyfriend Todd Spiewak in 2017.