Jonathan Bailey refused to live in the closet for the sake of his career.
When the Wicked star was first starting out as an actor, he feared being openly gay "would be a hindrance" to his career, but he was willing to "take that risk."
"I was well aware [of] the possibilities and the limits of queer actors and what that means to an audience and whether that bleeds into commerce and how that affects it," Bailey said, reports The New Zealand Herald.
The 38-year-old actor opened up during a discussion with Sir Elton John as part of the inaugural Elton John Impact Awards, which is being broadcast by iHeartMedia as a podcast series.
Laverne Cox, Melissa Etheridge, Billie Jean King, Orville Peck, and pop star Chappell Roan will also be honored as trailblazing members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Billy Porter and Elvis Duran will be acting as hosts.
“So yeah, I think when I was in my early 20s, there was definitely an understanding that, to be gay would be a hindrance,” Bailey continued.
Bailey would have been in his 20s years before Marriage Equality took effect in England in 2014 and was legalized in the US in 2015, but refused to let the homophobia across the globe stop him from achieving his dreams.
"I wasn't going to not hold my boyfriend’s hand in the street, and that was something that I felt so strongly in an animal sense," he said.
Knowing that being visibly queer had the potential to hurt his acting prospects didn’t hold Bailey back.
"And of course if that meant that it was going to impede any potential work, then I was willing to take that risk," he said.
Luckily for Bailey, he's been able to score starring roles in Bridgerton, Wicked, and Jurassic World: Rebirth in recent years.
Bailey, who starred as a gay man in 1950s Washington D.C. in Fellow Travelers, went on to talk about how seeing gay love stories like the one between two cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain helped him, and he hopes future generations won’t feel like they have to stay in the closet.
"I wonder if the next generation just needs to know how to harness the joy that they can communicate to their fans and in the stories they tell," Bailey said.
He continued: "And just know that we’re going to need it more than ever. Because obviously it’s a striking time where there’s a real threat that things can slip. But it’s an amazing thing, isn’t it? Generational relationships and being in a part of a community where we are all just benefactors of who came before us."
