What was that experience like for you?

Well, it wasn't exactly who I was, because at the, by the time I played the role I was 19, 20 years old, so I was playing a, a 15-year-old, 16-year-old teenager.

And so I was reliving some pretty traumatic times in my, in my life, and using that, the, the knowledge and the lessons that I learned from that trauma, of getting over that trauma, um, to tell the story about what it felt like to be a gay teenager in the 1990s when AIDS was everywhere, and all there was at the time was a lot of misunderstanding and lies, um, about who we were.

Um, and so it was an opportunity to, as we are doing on Sunday, to use art to inform our experience, to, to really, uh, expose what it means to be, uh, an LGBTQ person, uh, at that time.

And so many, so many people's minds were changed.

My life was changed because of the experience.

But what was most important to me, and what continues to be important to me, is all of the people who come up to me, and I am not exaggerating, on a daily basis, who say to me, on social media or even out on the street, who say, "You were the first gay person I knew."

Wow.