Actor Nicholas Downs has joined James
Duke Mason's Trailblazer campaign.
Mason, the son of singer Belinda
Carlisle, launched the campaign, which urges gay actors to leave the
closet, with his own 3-minute-40-second video.
“It's going to take a movement to
beat the naysayers who would rather we remain silent, scared and
afraid,” Mason
says in the campaign's inaugural video.
Downs, who landed his first starring
role in last year's gay-themed
romantic comedy Is It Just Me?, called the campaign
“inspiring.”
“I recently heard about the
Trailblazer campaign and felt completely inspired and motivated to
make a video of my own,” he says in his 2-minute-14-second video.
“My sexuality never became an issue …
until recently when I did a film called Is It Just Me?”
“I did the role,
it went over really well, and then on the festival circuit … I
started getting asked if I was gay.”
“And
literally, the moment I said, 'Yeah, I'm gay,' I just felt this huge
weight lifted from my shoulders. I felt so amazing, so free, so
uninhibited. Not the experience that I feared, or that I thought
that I was going to have.” (The video is embedded in the right
panel of this page.)