Adam Zelasko, who plays Mario in the off-Broadway musical-comedy My Big Gay Italian Wedding, says in an It Gets Better video that he thought about committing suicide.

Sex advise columnist Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project encourages troubled gay teens considering suicide to hang in there and not cave in to bullies, because life gets better.

“I did have thoughts of suicide,” Zelasko says in the video that also features other cast members of the play. “I did think about killing myself. And I had a great life. I had great parents. I lived in a great town. I had everything going for me except for being gay and I hated that. And I was lucky enough to have some really good friends that I thought if they ever killed themselves and left me that I would not know what to do. And I could never, ever do that to somebody else.”

“And if you don't think you have somebody out there that thinks of you that way you're wrong,” he adds. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)

Celebrities and high-profile politicians who have created videos for the It Gets Better Project include President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, New York Governor David Paterson, Fort Worth Councilman Joel Burns, rocker Adam Lambert and actor Neil Patrick Harris.