Growing Up Gay, Matt Bomer Played Both The Field And The Stage

Matt Bomer took the stage alongside partner Simon Halls last night to accept GLSEN's Inspiration Award and to discuss his own experience growing up gay in high school.

"When I was in high school, there was no safe haven, there was no outlet for you to speaking your mind," he said, according to E! News' Marc Malkin. "So I did what any self-preserving 14-year-old would do—I signed up for the school play and also the football team to cover my tracks."

"When that happens, when you aren't allowed to speak about who you are, one of the most authentic parts of who you are, which is who you love or is who you're attracted to, [one] feels invisible."

He went on, "GLSEN gives visibility and authenticity to kids all across the country."

Bomer's Magic Mike co-star Joe Manganiello spoke before giving the men their award in Beverly Hills, telling the couple and a crowd that included Jim Parsons and Amy Adams, "You are the example that the rest of our country needs to wake up and see in terms of equality and putting and end to the bullying epidemic and making sure that every family is respected in our schools and our society."

[Image via Just Jared]

Matt Bomer Delivers a Shirtless Knock-Out Punch: VIDEO

Matt Bomer demonstrates his boxing skills and his pretty skills in the ring with Tim DeKay in the next episode of White Collar.

Watch a short preview (and one more still), AFTER THE JUMP...

(via square hippies)

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Astronaut Sally Ride's relationship with a woman has become a hot political topic now that she's died. The AP notes that Ride's passing has launched a "post-humous debate about coming out," while to Amy Davidson at The New Yorker, Ride's death raises questions about essentially about "how old is too old to stay in the closet: "[We may] have reached a moment where being a “private person” is no longer a satisfying answer to the dilemma of the closet. Ride was sixty-one, and so there is talk of the mores of a certain generation'... But at some point the line between quiet, and silent, and withholding becomes unclear."

Sally Ride's sister has also spoken about the late astronaut's relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy.

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Movies: "Magic Mike"... More Than We Dreamed He Could Be

"You are the husband they never had. You are that dreamboat guy that never came along."

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

YOUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

An exhilarating all night double date is winding down on a bridge in Tampa, just before the sun rises. MAGIC MIKE (Channing Tatum) stands up on the railing, looks over his shoulder and dives gracefully backwards into the water to the mild delight of the anonymous girls. His new protégé "The Kid" (Alex Pettyfer), already eager to follow in his new buddy's footsteps (and body rolls), jumps in awkwardly after him.

"Hey Mike, I think we should be best friends!" 

The Kid blurts the invitation out with both of them bobbing in the water. He's like a little boy who's just discovered a whole new playground. It's a perfectly crush-worthy unguarded moment -- the kind that makes you give yourself over completely to a movie. My heart is yours, movie. Treat me right. 

This gem of a scene is also, as it turns out, the exclamation point to a perfectly formed Act One, "June". The movie takes place over the course of one life-changing summer for Mike and The Kid: June, July, and August. You go to Magic Mike to see seven spectacularly formed male bodies but the movie turns out to be all sculpted, too: June is introductions, flirtations and promise, by July you're deep in love/lust and too hot for clothing, and in August... Well, you know how sticky August gets.

MORE, AFTER THE JUMP...

Grateful Fans Bring Matt Bomer to Tears, Lick Him All Over

Matt Bomer talks to E!'s Marc Malkin about his coming out:

I never really endeavored to hide anything. But there were times I chose not to relegate my history to the back page of a magazine, which to me is sort of akin to putting your biography on a bathroom wall."

Bomer says he has been touched by some reactions to being more open about his sexuality:

"I had somebody from the military approach me a few weeks ago just saying how this helps people, affects people. It brought me to tears."

Bomer then revealed some of the surprises he encountered filming stripper movie Magic Mike:

"When they called me, I thought, 'Do they have the wrong number? Did they mean to call the guy from Vampire Diaries?'And at the time I was really skinny so I think there may have been a five-minute window from when I hung up the phone to when I went to the gym."

Bomer tells Malkin that stripping for a woman wasn't something he was used to:

"Channing told me, 'You have to use the stretcher and just get up on this girl and grind your junk in her face. But this girl was not going to just sit there and be ground upon. She started licking me in all kinds of special places and we just kept going…It was one of those situations where you were in an environment where moral parameters are not the same as they are if you're doing a political drama. You just sort of have to say yes to everything and embrace it."

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