Miles Heizer has already played several memorable queer characters on screen, including Cal Price in Love, Simon and Alex Standall in 13 Reasons Why. Now, the 31-year-old is opening up about his own turbulent coming-out story, which built the foundation for his distinctive performances.

“I had a very, unfortunately, classic gay coming-out story. It was a nightmare, and everyone was upset,” Heizer told Variety in a new interview. “I’m lucky my sister, who’s my best friend, could not have cared less and was very there for me. My friends around me were super-supportive, and things have gotten so much better in that regard with my family over the years. But at the time, I definitely had the old Christian upbringing.”

Heizer was born in Greenville, Ky., in 1994. Coming out to his “super-conservative, religious family” wasn’t easy at 19, but moving with them to Los Angeles to support his acting at 10 years old did, at least, open him up to another world.

The actor’s first gig came when he was only 11 — a single appearance in a 2005 episode of CSI: Miami. His career continued with small roles in series like Ghost Whisperer and Private Practice, before he landed the part of Drew Holt on Parenthood, which launched him to fame.

Since Parenthood, Heizer has played several queer characters, but he’s revisiting his time in the closet on the new Netflix series Boots.

The nerve-racking comedy tells the true story of Greg Cope White, whose passage through the brutal Marine Corps basic training regimen detailed in the 2015 memoir The Pink Marine serves as the basis for the series. Heizer plays a version of Cope, a closeted Louisiana teen who follows his only friend, Ray McAffey (Liam Oh), to a South Carolina Marine base for an antagonistic, high-octane, weeks-long boot camp.

Andy Parker, the creator, of Boots told the New York Times that he, too, was a closeted teenager in the ’90s, and like Cope White, decided to join the Marines during the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era, which endeared him to the memoir.

“I think what we’re trying to do is shine a real light on the personal cost of these policies,” Parker said. “We get to see what it does psychologically, spiritually, emotionally to people who have to distort themselves or lie or put themselves away or be shunned from an organization that they love and a country that they want to serve.”