(Screenshot via YouTube)

Matt Bomer opened up about coming out to his family and how keeping his gay identity a secret was pivotal in learning how to act, in an interview with Out. 

Bomer, 39, revealed one of the ways he learned about acting was by “having secrets.”

“Subsequently, I worked on a gas pipeline with my brother for a while—there were ex-cons with us,” Bomer told Out. “It was not an environment where it was safe to be gay. So it was literally acting of the highest stakes. I had my brother to protect me, but as terrible as it may sound it was a way I learned to select behavior and make choices, even if it was a ruse just to survive, you know?”

Bomer continued that he decided to come out to his parents in a letter while working at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. The actor says he was performing in productions of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and felt inspired by the hair and makeup artist. Seeing how the person “can live their truth,” Bomer decided to be honest. At the time, Bomer says he was also dating a girl.

“I would have lost my sense of direction if I tried to do it in person. There was radio silence for a long, long time, at least six months,” Bomer says. “And then I came home and it was then the blowup that I’d always feared. But we got that out of the way and we got down to the business of figuring out how to love each other. It was a struggle. It’s a struggle for anybody to take their paradigms and their set of beliefs and their set of understandings and completely flip the script.”

Bomer has been married to publicist Simon Halls since 2011. The couple has three children. He says that his family has come a long way from when he first came out to them.

“My family is so loving. My mom just asked me, Simon, and the boys to go down and speak to her women’s group in Houston so, you know, I’m here to tell people it can get better. Because I had so many people in my life saying, ‘You need to get rid of all expectations — you need to cut them out.’ But I was like, ‘They’re my family,'” Bomer says.