Neil Patrick Harris remembers preparing himself for the possibility that publicly coming out as gay could make for a very bad week.
Instead, almost everyone seemed remarkably unsurprised.
Nearly 20 years later, Harris can laugh about that.
“I was a little bit offended that more people weren’t surprised,” he joked in a new interview.
The actor has opened up about his 2006 coming out during an appearance on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast.
Harris was already famous from his childhood role in Doogie Howser, M.D. and had recently begun playing Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother.
Barney was famously written as an almost absurdly enthusiastic womanizer.
Harris’ private life looked rather different.
He had already begun dating actor and chef David Burtka before auditioning for the sitcom.
The people working on How I Met Your Mother knew Harris and Burtka were a couple.
The wider public did not.
Harris recalled the peculiar compromises that required.
The two men could attend movie premieres together, but Harris would walk the red carpet while Burtka avoided the photographers.
They could tell themselves that they were simply keeping their relationship private.
Both men had careers, after all, and neither was obligated to make their personal life part of a publicity campaign.
But Harris now recognizes another consequence.
While he received the public treatment afforded to a celebrity, Burtka effectively had to disappear.
Harris said that arrangement risked making the man he loved feel “less than.”
It was also becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
This was the mid-2000s, when celebrity gossip blogs had enormous influence and speculation about supposedly closeted gay actors had become its own form of online entertainment.
Harris remembers reading posts inviting audiences to guess which famous actor might secretly be gay.
He worried he could become the next target.
Eventually, the speculation moved directly toward him.
A journalist asked one of Harris’ publicists about his sexuality.
According to Harris, the publicist responded that he was “not of that persuasion.”
Harris had not personally made that denial.
But once the remark was publicly attributed to his camp, it created a new problem.
People who knew Harris was gay began questioning why he appeared to be denying it.
At that point, Harris says he could see what was likely to happen next.
He feared gossip outlets would begin actively soliciting people who had dated or slept with him.
Instead of waiting for that story to develop around him, he decided to take control of it.
“I’ve gotta get ahead of the story,” he remembers thinking.
Harris worked with his agent and publicist on a statement that he felt accurately represented him.
On November 3, 2006, People published it.
Harris described himself as “a very content gay man” living his life to the fullest.
Today, a major television star publicly acknowledging that he is gay may not sound particularly extraordinary.
In 2006, the calculation could feel considerably different.
Harris was playing a major role on a successful network sitcom.
He had spent much of his life working in an entertainment industry where openly gay actors still faced questions about whether audiences would accept them as romantic leads.
And public hostility toward gay people remained highly visible.
Harris remembered thinking about anti-gay protesters who placed hateful signs outside people’s homes.
He knew there was at least a possibility that his announcement could turn ugly.
Instead, relatively little happened.
“There was indifference at best,” Harris recalled.
That left him with an unexpectedly comic complaint.
He had anticipated at least some shocked reaction.
Perhaps people would ask how someone as seemingly masculine as Neil Patrick Harris could possibly be gay.
They did not.
Harris joked that he was almost offended by how unsurprised everybody appeared to be.
Behind the joke, however, he recognizes why his experience was easier than it might have been for actors who came out before him.
Those people had already absorbed much of the punishment.
Each visible gay actor had made the next announcement slightly less extraordinary.
Harris believes their experiences helped create the relatively muted response he received.
His own coming out would subsequently contribute to that same process for actors following him.
Harris went on to become one of American television’s most visible openly gay stars.
He remained on How I Met Your Mother through its nine-season run and won multiple Emmy Awards during his career.
He also hosted the Tony Awards, Emmy Awards and Academy Awards.
Meanwhile, the private relationship he once tried to keep away from photographers became very public.
Harris and Burtka became parents to twins Gideon and Harper in 2010.
They married in 2014.
The couple have now been together for more than two decades.
Harris’ new recollection also serves as a reminder of how recently outing was treated as entertainment.
Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was among the figures who publicly speculated about Harris’ sexuality during that period and encouraged readers to provide information about closeted celebrities.
Hilton has since said he regrets those tactics and has described his past efforts to out gay celebrities as cruel.
He has also said that he later apologized to Harris.
Harris did not center Hilton by name in his new interview.
Instead, he described the broader gossip culture that made him feel increasingly certain that someone else would tell his story if he did not tell it first.
That makes the phrase “forced to come out” slightly more complicated than it initially sounds.
No one physically compelled Harris to issue his statement.
But the possibility of retaining genuine control over whether his sexuality became public was rapidly disappearing.
He chose to speak before the decision was effectively made for him.
Today, Harris sees enormous progress.
He pointed to a culture in which LGBTQ+ actors and same-sex relationships are increasingly visible across mainstream entertainment.
There is still pressure surrounding coming out, particularly for young public figures.
But the consequences Harris feared in 2006 no longer feel inevitable in quite the same way.
And perhaps the funniest detail in his story is also the most hopeful.
Neil Patrick Harris spent days worrying that America might discover he was gay.
America’s response was essentially:
Yes, Neil.
We know.
📷 @nph
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