Raised in a devout Catholic home, he grew up with discipline and devotion. But as fame and adulthood collided, addiction soon took over.
“At the end of the day, I was alone, and I couldn’t stop drinking…
In the end, things spiraled so far out of control that he found himself sitting alone in his Malibu condo, completely isolated and teetering on the edge of death.
A close friend, actress Heather Tom, finally walked away. That was a painful wake-up call that forced him to choose between destruction and redemption.
He entered recovery and found that helping others was not just healing, it was transformative.
But 21, while starring in Dr. Quinn, his world came crashing down.
Outed, exposed, and reborn
In 1996, a U.S. tabloid published photos of him kissing another man in a hot tub at a party. The images were sold by someone claiming to be a friend of the couple and splashed across pages, paired with fabricated rumors.
“So I was scared. Just scared,” he said.
He didn’t want to lie, nor did he want to become anyone’s headline.
”There were certainly plenty of people in my life who didn’t know I was gay, because they never cared to ask or weren’t close enough to me, but there were plenty of people who already knew,” he said.
Lawyers, managers, and executives debated how to “handle” him. But he refused to play along. The cast of Dr. Quinn was supportive, and he stayed on the family-friendly show, but once the series wrapped up, “it was tough.”
“My dad couldn’t look me in the eye. And that hurt. Because a boy always wants his dad’s acceptance. And I knew I’d been lying to them”, the actor shared.
His mother, unsure how to react, began to cry and said she had always assumed he was too cute not to have a girlfriend.
The fallout was painful, but something unexpected happened. Letters started pouring in from young gay men across the country, thanking him for being visible.
For the first time, he wrote back, by hand.Continue reading…
