When Chaz Bono announced publicly in 2009 that he was transitioning, he became a trailblazer for trans actors in Hollywood.
The actor, whose roles in American Horror Story: Roanoke and American Horror Story: Cult have earned him cult status, recently sat down with Demi Lovato on their podcast, 4D with Demi Lovato, where he spoke about how his journey toward sobriety and his journey toward discovering his gender identity are intimately connected.
“Having lived it, I don’t think of myself as that brave,” Bono told Lovato. “I figured out that I was trans almost 10 years before I transitioned and was terrified, absolutely terrified of it.”
A “kid of the ’70s,’ Bono didn’t have “YouTube or the internet,” but knew from an early age that there was something “totally different about me.”
“I knew I wished I was a boy. I knew I felt like a boy. I didn’t have a name for it,” he said. “When I was about 13, I started to identify my attraction to girls. I knew ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ so I thought that’s what this feeling is, and I tried to fit in that identity for about 30 years.”