Gotham’s Cory Michael Smith who plays Edward Nygma, aka The Riddler on Gotham and is starring in the new movie ‘1985,’ which just premiered at SXSW, a young man with AIDS heads home to Texas for the holidays to spend one last Christmas with his family has come out as “queer” aka “gay” in an article in The Daily Beast.

Smith who plays the title role of Adrian in the film said that “There’s something special about telling a story that feels closer to home.”

Via The Daily Beast:

“I’m from Middle America,” he says. “I’m from Ohio. I’ve been living here [in New York] for a while, and there are stretches when I don’t see my family often. Going home and that whole charade is very familiar. The first family dinner after a while. Coming out to a family, the fear of that.

He says his family handled his coming out with “a lot of love,” though it took “a lot of time.” It wasn’t hard for him to imagine the pain Adrian feels as he goes through his last holidays with his parents (played by Virginia Madsen and Michael Chiklis). 

Writer-director Yen Tan was inspired to make and write 1985 by conversations he had with older gay men when he was in his early twenties, fresh out of college and working at a viatical settlement firm. It was 1998, and many of his clients were men living with HIV or AIDS and negotiating the sale of their life insurance policies to third parties.