Jessica Alba: Homophobia made me leave the church
US actress Jessica Alba has spoken out on how the homophobia at her childhood church made her decide to stop going to it.
She told The Daily Beast: “I fell in love when I was 16 and had this major crush on… I guess he was a drag queen? He was bisexual and a ballerina, and this was while I was at the Atlantic Theater Company in Vermont. We used to go to this gay club and I’d dance with him all night, four nights a week.
“I was so in love with him and thought, ‘There’s no way this guy’s going to hell,’ because in my church, it was, ‘Anybody who’s gay is going to hell’ and ‘Premarital sex is evil,’ and I thought, ‘There’s no chance! This guy is amazing!’ So that went right out the window.”
When asked about criticism she encountered over playing a teen with an STD on TV series Chicago Hope, she said: “That was actually my born-again Christian friends that didn’t approve of that one, and yeah, that was my born-again Christian youth group I was in. Very twisted.”
Alba has spoken up for gay rights in the past, and tweeted her support of the Defense of Marriage Act being repealed last year.
