Stephen Moyer: Bleeding Heart

That auction benefited Gulf Aid, and you’ve attended the White House Correspondents’ dinner and the Point Foundation Honors with your wife, who’s a longtime supporter of many causes like the Give a Damn campaign. Has Anna inspired you to get more involved in politics and philanthropy?
I’ve always been a flag-waving, bleeding-heart liberal. Anna and I have very similar feelings about a lot of that stuff, including LGBT causes, so we support each other in it. Being in the public eye has its benefits when you can be the face of something important and raise money for a charity that wouldn’t otherwise have had that profile.

As a married man from the U.K., what’s your take on the marriage equality debate in America?
I can’t even believe that in 2012 it’s something that you and I have to discuss.

Tell me about your earliest exposure to the LGBT community. As a choirboy in your local church, did you grow up shielded from gay people?
You don’t necessarily get shielded from that when you’re a choirboy. Perhaps that’s enough said.

Are you making a joke or was your first interaction really in the church?
Yeah, it really was in the church, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, and it probably wouldn’t cast him in the best light, so it’s not necessarily something I’d like to talk about. But I also grew up in amateur dramatics. I was a normal kid at a normal school, but I loved doing drama, so I joined a young persons’ theater group. There were all sorts of gay incidences within that structure, from the director to friends of mine in the shows. I suppose I didn’t really understand it at the time, when I was 11 or 12, but I was friends with gay guys from a very early age. It wasn’t as public as it is now, but it didn’t ever occur to me as anything other than completely normal.