Neil Patrick Harris admittedly felt that publicly coming out as gay was “an inevitability.”
“I had started dating David [Burtka], who’s now my husband, well before I auditioned for How I Met Your Mother. When I got the job, everyone on that show knew David [and] knew that we were a couple,” Harris, 53, recalled on the Wednesday, August 12, episode of the “Great Company” podcast. “That was at a time when there were bloggers on the internet that you would go to read the salacious, ‘Try to guess who this actor is that’s gay and in the closet’ comment. There was a fear that I would be, like, the next target on that.”
While Harris noted that he and Burtka, 51, would often attend the same red carpets, they strategically never posed for photos together to downplay their relationship status.
“David and I would go to movie premieres together, but I would walk the carpet, and he would go around the other side of the photographers because we weren’t a [public] couple,” the Emmy winner said. “We could justify it and say, ‘That’s our private life,’ which it was, and ‘We don’t need to sort of parade stuff around and ask too many questions, I’m here for work. I have a career, so does he,’ which was all very true, but intrinsically makes David potentially feel less than if I’m getting to walk across it while he’s skulking behind.”
Eventually, Harris became the “target” of rumors surrounding his sexuality.
“A comment had come out that I had said that I wasn’t ‘of that persuasion,’ which was the quoted phrase,” he told podcast host Jamie Laing. “Someone asked a publicist about my sexuality and the publicist said I was ‘not of that persuasion.’ That turned into, ‘That’s weird for him to say because we know that he’s gay and why is he doing that?’ Then it became, ‘I’m gonna have to say something.’ I got to get ahead of the story because I don’t want to be coming out in reaction to, ‘If anyone has any information on Neil Patrick Harris, have you ever slept with him, please come forward?’”
Harris worked with his agent and publicist to craft an “authentic” and “really truthful” statement, which was shared in 2006.
“At that point, I was a little scared [of] what would come from that, like, what kind of stigma would come from that,” he said. “At that time, there were people that would go and plant ‘God hates f**s’ signs on lawns of people[‘s houses], so it was a potential to be, like, a bad week.”
Luckily for Harris, “none of that transpired.”
“There was an indifference at best,” he quipped. “There were a lot of people before my coming out that had a much harder time and that … paved the way for me to be able to come out in a way. I was a little bit offended that more people weren’t surprised.”
Harris and Burtka got married in 2014, four years after welcoming twins Harper and Gideon via surrogate.
