By myself. And from a certain point of view, it's all I have, but now I'm supposed to put that at risk to be a role model to someone I've never met, who I'm not even sure exists. It did not make any sense to me. It did not resonate... at the time.

Also, like many of you here tonight, growing up I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test and there were a thousand ways to fail. A thousand ways to betray yourself. To not live up to someone else's standard of what was acceptable, what was normal. And when you failed the test, which was guaranteed, there was a price to pay: emotional, psychological, physical. And like many of you, I paid that price more than once in a variety of ways.

The first time I tried to kill myself I was 15. I waited until my family went away for the weekend and I was alone in the house and I swallowed a bottle of pills. I don't remember what happened over the next couple of days, but I'm pretty sure come Monday morning I was on the bus back to school pretending everything was fine. And when someone asked me if that was a cry for help, I say, "No, because I told no one. You only cry for help if you believe there is help to cry for." And I didn't. I wanted out. I wanted gone. At 15.

"I" and "me" can be a lonely place and it will only get you so far.

By 2011, I had made the decision to walk away from acting and many of the things I had previously believed was so important to me. And after I had given up the scripts and the sets which I'd dreamed of as a child and the resulting attention and scrutiny, which I had not dreamed of as a child, the only thing I was left with was what I had when I started: "I" and "me," and it was not enough.

In 2012 I joined a men's group call The Man Kind Project, which is a men's group for all men and was introduced to the still foreign and still potentially threatening concepts of "us" and "we," to the idea of brotherhood, sisterhood, and community. And it was via that community that I became a member and proud supporter of the Human Rights Campaign. And it was via this community that I learned more about the persecution of my LGBT brothers and sisters in Russia.

Several weeks ago when I was drafting my letter to the St. Petersburg International Film Festival declining their invitation to attend, a small nagging voice in my head insisted that no one would notice. That no one was watching, or listening, or caring. But this time, finally, I knew that voice was wrong. I thought, If even one person notices this letter, in which I speak my truth, and integrate my small story into a much larger and more important one, it is worth sending. I thought, Let me be to someone else, what no one was to me. Let me send a message to that kid, maybe in America, maybe some place far overseas, maybe somewhere deep inside. A kid who's being targeted at home or at school or in the streets that someone IS watching, and listening, and caring. That there IS an "us." That there IS a "we," and that kid or teenager or adult is loved and they are not alone.

I am deeply grateful to the Human Rights Campaign for giving me and others like me the opportunity, and the platform, and the imperative to tell my story; to continue sending that message because it needs to be sent over and over again until it's been heard, and received, and embraced not just here in Washington state, not just across the country, but around the world and then back again. Just in case. Just in case we miss someone.

Thank you.

（視頻來源：優酷，編輯 Helen）