‘Modern Family’ star came out after stealing gay porn
By Will Stroude
Modern Family’s
Jesse Tyler Ferguson has revealed that he was forced to come out to his father as a teenager after being caught stealing gay porn.
Ferguson, who plays Mitchell Pritchett, one half of the award-winning sitcom’s gay couple, admitted that he’d been regularly stealing explicit magazines before he was eventually caught by a shop assistant.
“I was caught stealing gay porn when I was 14; I always consider that my coming out,” he explained in an interview with The Talk‘s Aisha Tyler during her Girl On Guy podcast.
“It was so humiliating. I had been stealing porn for a while, I had quite a bit of a collection. I would bring it into the house but then I’d get nervous so I’d hide it under a mattress or I would hide it behind the shed in the backyard and it would get rained on…”
The 38-year-old continued to explain how he was eventually caught, adding: “I had been stealing porn and I had three magazines underneath my shirt, so tucked into my pants and my shirt over the magazines.
“I guess a certain magazine that I had picked up had a little sensor in it and I set off the alarm and I had to go back to the woman who asked me if I had anything in my backpack.
“She was giving me the benefit of the doubt. She was like, ‘Did you forget to pay for something? Maybe something fell into your backpack?’
“I couldn’t be like, ‘Some porn fell inside my pants!’ Instead, I lifted up my shirt and I had tears in my eyes and she took me to the back room. They brought my dad in, showed him the nature of the material that I was stealing… It was really, really humiliating.”
Ferguson went on to add that eventually had to come out to his father three times before he finally accepted his sexuality.
Ferguson’s character Mitchell married his on-screen partner, Cameron Tucker, in the most recent season of Modern Family – and Attitude celebrated their nuptials with a special version of our recent Love & Marriage issue cover – check it out here.
Modern Family season five was released on DVD in the UK last week (September 15).
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