Matt Bomer feels he was the subject of “unfair” treatment by the media early in his career.
On Monday’s episode of the Dinner’s on Me podcast with Jesse Tyler 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 during a 2012 awards speech, calling his husband, the publicist Simon Halls, and their three children “my proudest accomplishment.” But by that time, the rising actor had been the subject of numerous items in celebrity news sites and gossip blogs that speculated on his sexuality. In 2024 he 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, 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.”
Though he lost the role of Superman in 2013’s Superman: Man of Steel to Henry Cavill, Bomer’s career began to flourish in the early 2010s, with a plum role in the USA Network series White Collar and a big-screen break in the form of Magic Mike. But both characters had begun to cast him in the mold of “a straight leading man.”
“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.”
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The actor has gone on to star in series like Fellow Travelers, a historical series set in the world of politics in the 1950s, which explores the deleterious psychic effect that being forced to live in the closet can have on LGBTQ people.
Speaking about his character Hawk to Entertainment Weekly in 2023, Bomer noted, “Hawk does have a public persona that he needs to survive and maneuver in the world that he’s in, but underneath it all is a real ‘f— you.'” The actor called that, “So refreshing to get to play, but it was also really refreshing to see — not that every intimate gay relationship is like that, but to see an aspect of gay sex brought to life in such an authentic and unflinching way.”
You can listen to the rest of Bomer’s interview with Ferguson on the Dinner’s On Me podcast above.
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