Who is gay on the l word in real life

When the first episode of The L Word aired on Showtime inthere had never been a show quite like it. And on this show about queer women, Leisha Hailey, who played Alice Pieszecki, a peppy talk show host, was the series' only openly queer cast member though that later changed —starring in The L Word helped Kate Moenning come into her own identity.

Hailey had been out since the age of 19, when she moved from Nebraska to start her life in New York. The L Word: Generation Q pays homage to the original's trailblazing legacy, while acknowledging how much has changed since for queer people. Below, Hailey recalls her childhood in Nebraska, coming out as a teenager, and then having to come out all over again when she became a public figure in a time when being gay still made headlines.

There were train tracks and a slaughterhouse, flatlands and cornfields, a lot of cows. My dad was in the Air Force, but both of my parents were very liberal, very open-minded. Anything I was into, my parents let me do. But I always felt different. I never really understood what it was, even though throughout my childhood, I often got called a boy or mistaken for one.

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She had girlfriends—Kathy would be around for a couple of years, then Louanne was around for a couple of years. And even though people knew that my teacher was gay, he could never come out of the closet because, according to those same people, he could get fired.

Basically, I was taught that, outside my family and within the larger community, you had to hide this stuff away, even if others knew. The shame was in the silence, in not allowing people to speak for themselves. I felt it when I was first developing my own sense of who I was.

In third grade, I would get super excited around my math teacher, who I thought was just so cool. When I was in fifth grade, there was this high school girl, CJ, who had short hair and who took me under her wing. I painted her in my art class, literally painted her face, and gave it to her.

There was never an attempt to process what was happening. I think part of this was because we were happy. We kept it to ourselves. She ended up moving away to college while I was still in high school, and I became really depressed. I gained weight. I was quiet. I was heartbroken, crying all the time, but I had no outlet for that pain, so I just buried it.

I even got a boyfriend. Bellevue was filled with some of the sweetest people. It was an overwhelming place to be your authentic self. As I hoped it would, almost everything changed when I moved to New York. Despite that, however, I was still living a secret life.

It was