As childhood gives way to adolescence you are interested in girls, but in a confused, quasi-perfunctory way. It’s what’s expected of you. Boys in hig… - Neil Patrick Harris

Some would say you were in a closet. Some would say you didn’t even know you were in a house. The “truth” about a person’s sexual preference is often revealed through a long journey of tiny steps, and acceptance is one of the last ones. It’s an individual story for every person. There are unique personal prejudices in everyone, created by our families, our social circles, and mostly by ourselves. It’s tough to confront those things that you are afraid of in yourself.

Playing gay in the theater is more fulfilling than on film because you can create a whole character and a backstory and you get to chip away at something over a long period of time. When you’re acting on film you sort of have one afternoon in front of a crew to just do it. And you don’t want to then be too overt and like that stereotype. But when I was doing A Paris Letter with Josh [Radnor], I was playing someone overtly flamboyant from the ’60s seducing him, and if I did that on film, I think it would look like I was acting too hard. It’s one of the fun things one wants to do as an actor, to play the flamboyant gay guy. But when you are gay that ends up being offensive to people. Say I was asked to play a flamboyant steward in an Airplane!–type farce. It would be a difficult decision to say yes to that role at this point because a lot of people would accuse me of making a mockery of gay people.

Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.