Actor Connor Jessup — best known for his role as Tyler Locke on the new Netflix series Locke & Key — has opened up about how falling in love with his boyfriend, 13 Reasons Why actor Mile Heizer, inspired him to come out as gay.
In a new cover interview for Attitude, the 25-year-old Canadian actor discussed his decision to come out as gay in a lengthy Instagram post last June, coinciding with Pride Month. “It was something I’d been thinking about more and more, and the reasons that I wasn’t saying anything felt thinner to me every day,” Jessup told Attitude. “The excuses that I’d been giving myself for years were dissolving, and I couldn’t think of any reason not to.”
Jessup explained in the coming out post that he knew he was gay from age 13, but decided to hide it for “years.” “I folded it and slipped it under the rest of my emotional clutter,” he wrote, explaining that he would talk about the gay characters he’s played from a “neutral, almost anthropological distance, as if they were separate from me.”
In the Attitude interview, Jessup explained dating Heizer was a big reason why he came out. Confirming that they have been dating for “about 18 months,” Jessup revealed that the relationship is his “first time being in love.” “I’ll spare you the boring story of how we met because it’s truly unexciting,” Jessup explains, “but I will say — not to get sappy — that the other factor that led to me deciding to come out… was that I fell in love.”
“When you’re happy, you want to be happy publicly, and it made me think about the whole construction of my life in a way that I had been avoiding,” Jessup continued. “I probably wouldn’t have [come out] if that hadn’t happened.”
Jessup made his relationship with Heizer public earlier this month, in an Instagram post shared the day after Valentine’s Day. “I’m late but I love you, you’re good, you make me better, happy v+1 day,” he wrote.
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