'Southern Hospitality' star Michols Peña discusses what it's like being Black and gay in Charleston, South Carolina and his family's reaction to his lifestyle.
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00:00As a gay person, I think no matter what, you have a lot of baggage that you went through and it's
00:03hard to trust people and like letting someone in, romantic or not, is a really big deal.
00:08100%. And it's like even coming in and like living in this area that's like predominantly white,
00:14also being a person of color, also with my family being so pretentious, like it's very hard to
00:20navigate some situations because there is like sometimes there would be like an inkling in the
00:25back of my head that would be like, oh wait, what would my parents think about this? And it was
00:29always that. And that was like kind of something I had to get over. And I was like, if I'm going
00:32to do this, I'm going to be unapologetically me and I'm going to be authentic and just try to
00:36stay true to myself and just find out who I am within the process. And I felt like that just
00:42gave me a lot of confidence to go ahead and just be able to have that conversation and share my
00:46story. And I'm honestly grateful that I did. I got a lot of good feedback from it. I had a lot
00:53of people reach out to me on social media, even like friends, like a lot of family that I never
00:58thought would come around actually reached out to me after watching it. And I was like, who knew
01:02it would have like taken to watch it from behind the camera to, you know, finally get some people
01:07to come around or like have a different point of view.