Not so sneaky! Jesse Tyler Ferguson essentially came out at age 14 when his dad, Robert Ferguson, found his stash of stolen gay porn, the Modern Family star revealed during an interview with Aisha Tyler’s podcast, Girl on Guy.
"Well, I was caught stealing gay porn when I was 14,” Ferguson, 38, told Tyler. "So I always considered that my coming-out … It was so humiliating. I had been stealing porn for a while. I had quite a little collection. And I would bring it into the house, and then I'd get nervous, so I'd hide it under the mattress, or I'd hide it behind a shed in the backyard. And then it would get rained on, and I'd have to go get the barbecue tongs to [get it out]."
One day, the funnyman didn't break away as discreetly, and took off with X-rated material armed with an anti-theft device.
"I had to go back and the woman asked me if I had anything in my backpack," he explained. "She was giving me the benefit of the doubt … she took me to the back room. They brought my dad in, and they showed him the nature of the material I was stealing, and it was really, really humiliating. So I always consider that my coming-out process."
After the incident, naturally, his father had a few questions for him. "[He] was like, 'Okay, are you gay?' And I was, like, 14. I didn't really know. I didn't know what I was going through. But then in my later teen years I did come out to him, and it was like he needed to be told three times … [When I was 21] he asked me if I had a girlfriend at the time, and I was like, 'Dad! You know I'm gay, right?'"
The Emmy winner — with his dad and family's support — married Justin Mikita in Manhattan in July 2013. At the time, Ferguson told Us the couple chose to marry in New York City because "that's where it's legal, so we want[ed] to support the state that's in support of us."
