Ferguson noted that he’d never known Bomer “to be someone who has hidden your sexuality.”
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“I never did professionally,” the Magic Mike star said.
“I was always pretty honest with anybody I worked with,” Bomer claimed. “There was one professional experience where it was not safe for me to, and I didn’t say anything and I don’t regret it.”
Bomer had been starring in USA’s White Collar — his breakthrough role — for three years before he came out publicly in 2012. Privately, however, he’d been with his husband, Simon Halls, for years, and the couple welcomed their first child in 2005, followed by twins born in 2008. As he gained more of a public profile, gossip blogs began to take notice of his private life.
“It was that time when folks could kind of take over your own personal narrative before you even had a chance to,” Bomer said. “I remember outlets like Perez Hilton talking about my personal life before I had ever had a chance to even do it myself. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I didn’t even have an opportunity to.”
Bomer said that prior to coming out publicly, traditional media outlets weren’t asking about his sexuality. “I just didn’t have a career that warranted that,” he explained. “And so it felt kind of unfair to me that that was stolen by people who did have a microphone at the time.”
“Even when we were walking around the streets, you know, there’d be pictures of Simon and our kids,” he continued, “and I didn’t want them to feel like they were some kind of shameful secret, you know, something I was sweeping under the rug so I could have a great career.”
Bomer first acknowledged Hall and their three children publicly when he was accepting the 2012 Steve Chase Humanitarian Award. It was a decision that came naturally.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna thank my family because that’s what someone would do in this circumstance,’” he told Ferguson. “I had the first Magic Mike movie coming out later that year, and White Collar was this, you know, it was a pretty successful show where I was playing a straight leading man.”
Despite that success, Bomer said he “didn’t have anything to fall back on” at that stage in his career.
“What I had was a loving family,” he said. “That was my safety net. And I was like, ‘You know what? If the worst that happens is that I don’t work again and I have this beautiful family who I love and who loves me, then so be it.’”
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