“It felt kind of unfair… that was stolen…”
Matt Bomer recently appeared on the Dinner’s on Me podcast with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and opened up about how he felt when the tabloids outed him early in his career.
During his conversation with Ferguson, Bomer recalled a time “when folks could kind of take over your own personal narrative before you even had a chance to.” He specifically referenced “outlets like Perez Hilton,” which appeared to relish in “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 publicly came out as gay in 2012 during the Chase Humanitarian Awards, calling his husband publicist Simon Halls, and their three children “my proudest accomplishment.” But by that time, speculation around Bomer’s sexuality was rife, and the rising actor had been the subject of numerous items in celebrity news sites and gossip blogs that speculated on his sexuality. In 2024 Bomer revealed he was told being outed this way cost him the role of Superman in a film to be directed by Brett Ratner.
Though there was rampant and damaging speculation during the late 2000s, Bomer told Ferguson that “no media outlet was ever going like, ‘Hey!'” – as in, they were happy to print rumors, but not inclined to give Bomer the platform to tell his story on his own terms. “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.”
“It was a weird time,” Bomer reflected, because he never hid his sexuality in public. “Even when we were walking around in the streets, you know, there’d be pictures of Simon and our kids and I,” he explained. Leading up to a planned speech at the 2012 Steve Chase Humanitarian Awards in Palm Springs, Calif., Bomer began thinking that he didn’t want his family “to feel like they were some kind of shameful secret or, something I was sweeping under the rug so I could have a great career.”
“I didn’t have anything to fall back on,” Bomer continued. “But what I had was a loving family. 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.”
Bomer’s career did begin to flourish after he came out when he was cast as con artist Neal Caffrey on the TV series White Collar. After that came Magic Mike, its 2015 sequel, as well as the 2014 television film The Normal Heart. More recently the actor has gone on to star in series like Fellow Travelers, a historical series set in the world of politics in the 1950s, and the just-released Mid-Century Modern, a Golden Girls–like TV series, set in Palm Springs with Bomer cast as a Betty White character type and Nathan Lane as a Bea Arthur character type.
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