When his speaking agent asked if he'd ever heard of a school called Cal State San Bernardino, Wilson Cruz smiled.

The actor, best known for playing Rickie on "My So-Called Life" and Angel in the Broadway musical "Rent," grew up locally. He graduated from Eisenhower High School in Rialto and attended Cal State San Bernardino until Hollywood called.

Wednesday afternoon, a bit nervous, he came back to speak for the first time.

"I have this community to thank for the education I received," Cruz said. "I became an actor here in San Bernardino. I remember living here, thinking 'We're only 60 miles from Hollywood.' But it felt like 3,000 miles."

Cruz, 30, has a disarming grin and easy manner. As his talk moved from animated and funny to desperately serious and back again, the small audience stayed with him 45 minutes longer than planned.

"Everything he said is so valid and so real," said Wil Trevizo, a Cal State San Bernardino graduate student and the executive director of Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance in San Bernardino.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Cruz moved to Riverside when he was 8. Two years later, he moved to Rialto.

"We brought as much of Puerto Rico as we could into that small house," said Cruz, who is Puerto Rican. "Our house always had music. It was always about music and how that made you feel. My mom played music just to get dressed in the morning."

A self-proclaimed "arts nerd," Cruz played saxophone and clarinet in the Eisenhower High School band before the choir teacher discovered him singing "Phantom of the Opera" in the hallway and talked him into joining the school's singing ensemble, The Madrigals.

He and four friends told each other of their sexual orientation, although Cruz insisted he was bisexual. Brushing his teeth one morning though, then 16-year-old Cruz came out, all the way out, to himself.

"I wondered what would happen if I said it out loud," he said. "Perhaps the ceiling would fall in and the floor would crack and swallow me if I said the words."

But he gave it a shot, saying out loud for the first time, "I am gay."

He remained closeted at home. But Cruz was loud and proud when he started at Cal State in 1991.

"I made this transformation into this gay super hero on campus," Cruz said describing jeans painted with pink triangles and rainbows with red ribbons pinned to them. "Now that I'm thinking about it, it was a bit too much."

Midway through his second year at Cal State, Cruz left to play Rickie Vasquez in "My So-Called Life," described in the script as a half-black, half-Puerto Rican, sexually androgynous 15-year-old.

"I've never reached to a piece of material like this before or after," Cruz said. "It jumped off the page. I felt like someone followed me around high school and wrote it down. I had to have it."