We just can’t get enough of Mr. Jared Leto! In the latest issue of FourTwoNine magazine, the Oscar winner says he doesn’t mind if you called him “queer”.
When the editor-in-chief Kevin Sessums of FourTwoNine magazine mentions that some of his “straight friends have begun to define themselves as queer without it being a sexual term but a cultural one,” he goes on to ask Leto and his brother Shannon Leto whether they’ll oppose by being label queer. “I wouldn’t care,” Shannon said. Jared added, “I don’t think we’d care at all. We certainly identify with people who are different.”
That’s one of the reasons why the Leto brothers’ band, 30 Seconds to Mars, has attracted such a large lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) fan base. “I got a note from a kid yesterday,” Jared said. “We were signing a thousand CDs after a show. If you looked at him, he looked like any young kid maybe in twelfth grade or eleventh grade who’d be on the baseball team or something. A nice looking kid. He handed me a note and it said, ‘I just want to say thanks so much for the music. It’s helped me in many ways–especially with coming out this year to my family.'”
And to think the Letos were born in the not-always LGBT-friendly south.
“We escaped early on,” Jared said. “It’s very oppressive.” He further explained, “We would go back for the summers and stay with our grandmother, though. So the culture was always there that we returned to. We moved around every couple of years growing up. Way up to north Massachusetts. Everywhere. But no matter where we were it was a very creative environment around artists. That is obviously an important reason that Shannon and I are pursuing the path that we are now.”
Now, how awesomely cool is he?
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