“Boy Erased” star Lucas Hedges describes self as “not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual”

\Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges knows that since he’s starring in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, people will ask him about his own sexuality.

“I owe it to this part to speak as honestly as possible,” he says in a new >Vulture interview. “In the early stages of my life, some of the people I was most infatuated with were my closest male friends. That was the case through high school, and I think I was always aware that while for the most part I was attracted to women, I existed on a spectrum.”

He remembers a sixth-grade health teacher describing sexuality as a broad range where many people may fall in some difficult-to-define space between straight and gay. “I felt ashamed that I wasn’t 100 percent, because it was clear that one side of sexuality presents issues, and the other doesn’t as much,” he says. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum: Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.”

Hedges envies people who can speak about such things with more certainty. “People expect you as an actor to have a voice that’s set in some way, and that’s really not what I am,” he says. “I’m very much within the conflict and confusion of my own life, still, and I definitely feel a pressure to step up in a way. I prefer to step up in my art, and I don’t entirely know how to in my life.”