Glee’s Chris Colfer: ‘I was harassed at school every day, called faggot’

Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt Hummel on the hit TV series “Glee,” says “I was harassed at school every day, called ‘faggot’, I had things taped to my back,” in an interview with the U.K. fashion retail site Mr Porter:

Mr Colfer was getting bullied at school. He was a star in the school theatre, but that didn’t matter. He had a out this month-pitched, helium-like voice. And he was a fat kid to boot. “I was harassed at school every day, called ‘faggot’, I had things taped to my back,” he says. And when he went home, he didn’t want to burden his parents with his problems. They had their hands full caring for his younger sister who suffers from a harsh form of epilepsy, sometimes 50 seizures in an hour.

“For most of my adolescence I was in my bedroom writing or watching things I shouldn’t be watching on TV, such as Nip/Tuck [another Mr Murphy show]. And I was obsessed with superheroes. I had this thing where I wanted to be rescued. The other kids wanted to be Superman, but I thought Lois Lane kind of had the best deal.”

And he was rescued, eventually. From the age of 14, he would come down to Los Angeles to audition for “every part for a high-school kid that came up”.

But every time he would get rejected. He’d been through four years of this by the time he read for Glee. “I was auditioning for the part of Artie, the kid in the wheelchair,” he says. “And I didn’t get it. Obviously. So that was it.”

But Mr Murphy saw something in Mr Colfer – he saw that in many ways, he was one of the Glee kids, a young gay teenager who loved theatre, and who’d been bullied.

“So they invented a character for me. They created Kurt specifically.” He blinks and shakes his head. “There are two experiences in my life that I just cannot wrap my head around. That’s one. And the Golden Globes was the other. I just cannot believe they happened.”

Mr Porter adds:

When [Glee] creator Mr Ryan Murphy arranged for Kurt to be bullied at school, Mr Colfer’s portrayal was so rapturously received that he received a Golden Globe, was invited to the White House and declared one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. That’s the Mr Chris Colfer that people know.

…

In a year in which gay issues were at the front of the national conversation – issues such as gay marriage, and the bullying of gay teenagers - Glee was arguably the gayest show on television, and Mr Colfer was playing arguably the gayest character on Glee. And all of a sudden, he was meeting the President. Was it a surprise, the way things played out?

…

“Oh totally,” he says. “It was incredible. I think what started it was the episode when Kurt came out to his dad and his dad accepted him. And I remember when I first saw that script I was mad. I wanted to play all the emotions of being kicked out of the house, all the tears and the drama. So I was like, damn it, come on! I’m never going to get an Emmy now!”

Things snowballed quickly. Today he gets 500 letters a week, many of them heart wrenching, from misunderstood teenagers who have run away from home, or friends of young people who have committed suicide. “I have stacks and stacks of them,” he says.

Hat tip: PinkNews

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