In his forthcoming memoir, out actor Luke Evans describe being bullied for being gay before he even understood his own sexuality.

“What hurt the most was being pushed away,” the Welsh actor told The Guardian in a recent interview. “Somebody not wanting to sit next to me in class. At break time, not having anyone to hang out with or being safe in a crowd or gang. I didn’t have one.”

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“It’s a terrible thing for a child to have to think, what’s wrong with me?” Evans said. “I felt like I was dirty, like I had a disease. I had to keep analyzing what it was about me that was making them do this: Was it my voice? Was it that I was slightly effeminate?”

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The U.K. outlet also recently published an excerpt from Evans’s memoir, Boy From the Valleys: My Unexpected Journey, out November 7 in the U.K. and expected in the U.S. in February. In it, the Hobbit star writes about his upbringing in a loving but devout family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the anti-LGBTQ+ messages he absorbed as a child. He recalls a children’s picture book depicting the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  

“It gradually dawned on me that those poor people in my picture book were dying a horrible death simply because they were gay,” he writes. “God clearly considered that to be enough of a reason to burn them alive. And if you were a kid who was perhaps beginning to realize that you were different from other boys … Well, that picture was more than enough to make you keep quiet about it.”

Evans writes that his first inkling that he might be gay came at age eight, when his class had an attractive substitute teacher.

“He was handsome and sharply dressed; all the girls fancied him, and all the boys wanted to be him,” Evans writes. “I remember staring at him, muscles busting out of his shirt, and thinking: wow. Even then, I knew I was looking at him in a different way from the other boys.”

He also writes about the bullying he experienced both for his religion and for being perceived as gay, and the conflict it inspired in him from a young age.

“The worst nickname was ‘Jovey Bender,’ because it combined two aspects of my identity that could never be reconciled,” Evans explains in the excerpt. “It wasn’t possible to be a ‘Jovey’ and a ‘Bender’ because being gay was strictly forbidden by the religion. And so began a tormented tug of war in my head that would go on throughout all my years at school.”

So many LGBTQ+ people can relate to Evans when he writes that he “hated school” due to the bullying.

“Children can be horribly intolerant; evil little bastards some of them. Anything slightly different about you and you’re a target – and I was different in almost every way possible.

“It’s so painful,” he writes of being shunned by his peers as a student, “and it stays with you.”

He also strikes an all too familiar note when he writes that he believes his mother would have stepped in had she known about the bullying, but shame made him keep silent.

“I couldn’t tell my parents because I was too ashamed of the names I was being called,” he says.

But, he writes that he came to understand that “it wasn’t me that was the problem, it was the bullies.”

“Throughout my childhood, whenever bad stuff happened, there was a refrain going through my head: this is only temporary,” he recalls. “Even at a young age, I had this clear-eyed view. Once school was over, I knew my life would begin.”

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