Glee actress Jane Lynch has admitted she thought being gay was a fate worse than death, and says that she led a life of secrecy prior to coming out.
In the first episode of new web series It Got Better, Lynch says she always identified with male activities as a child and reveals that once she figured out she was lesbian, she hid it from her Chicago friends and family.
‘I identified with boys things. I had to fight to play baseball,’ she says, and once the boys stopped letting her play around the age of 10, she would persistently hang around the sidelines until they eventually let her join the game.
After a discussion with her friends about ‘gay for each other’ men made Lynch realise she herself was gay, she says she wrote ‘I’m gay’ in her journal, then threw the notebook in a trash can four blocks away. ‘To be thought of as different and not accepted was a fate worse than death,’ she says. ‘So, I had to make some really big decisions about how I was going to go forth in life and who I was going to tell something to. It also led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel.’
Speaking about her gay best friend, Christopher, in high school, she says: ‘We never actually said ‘I’m gay’ to each other, but that it was unspoken, we took great refuge in each other. Great comfort.’
After moving to New York, Lynch says she became a part of the piano bar scene, which included many gay people: ‘I started to be more open about it, I started to date people. I found my people.’
Her concerns about coming out proved to be unfounded, revealing that her fear of being ostracised didn’t actually happen: 'I had that deep dark secret that there was something wrong with me and if people found out that I would be shunned and kept from doing what I really wanted to, and that has not been the case.’
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.