For a few years now the It Gets Better Project has been encouraging people to make short videos letting young LGBT people know that while it’s tough as a youngster, things do improve. With It Got Better they’re going a little deeper and that includes Jane Lynch, who goes into some depth in a new video, talking about the difficulties she faced growing up gay.
It’s a pretty moving interview and well worth watching, where she touches on plenty of things LGBT people will recognise about the fears in the early stages of realising you aren’t quite like most other people around you – but that things do most definitely improve. Lynch says, ‘There were certain ways you behaved. Boys did certain things, girls did certain things and I did not fit in that.
‘I identified more with boy things. I enjoyed dressing like a boy. Boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to about 10, I had to fight to play baseball. Every day I didn’t know I was going to be received because I would just hang out until I got to play. Deep down inside I knew that there was something else going on.
‘I finally had a word for it when I was about 14. I had these friends and they said, ‘‘You know on the beach sometimes you’ll see guys walking together holding hands and they’re gay for each other’’ and I thought, ‘I am the girl version of that’.
‘It was almost like I had a disease, I felt like I had been diagnosed.’
Things have definitely changed for her though, as she adds, ‘Now I live in a world where I don’t give a shit if you have a problem with who I am.’
Leave a Reply (if comment does not appear immediately, it may have been held for moderation)