From OUT Magazine: Coming back from the brink of disaster, also known as the 2006 sitcom The Class, out actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson had all but given up on television success. Then a script for a new pilot called Modern Family arrived on his iPhone, and Ferguson’s life would never be the same. Now the 34-year-old star of the breakout hit—whose ratings best 30 Rock, Glee, and The Office—opens up to Out about going public with his sexuality, the responsibility of playing gay on TV, his Jonas Brothers fantasies, and why it’s OK for gays to look to Bert and Ernie as role models.
Each week Ferguson feels the pressures of playing a gay character, and although he has always been out in his privates life, until recently he remained hesitant about opening up about his sexuality publicly. “I just didn’t feel like it was doing [The Class] character any service, so I lived my life the way I had been living,” Ferguson says. “I just wasn’t doing it in the pages of Out or The New York Times. But with this show, it was never a question about quote unquote staying in the closet—which I’ve never been in.”
Although he has never been “in” in his personal life, Ferguson knows the responsibility he, and the show, has in introducing a gay family to Middle America. “We’re introducing this gay couple in a very safe way, and maybe that’s why right off the bat we’re not showing full-on make-out scenes, and we’re not showing them in bed together [initially]. But a lot of the people who are a little leery of ‘that gay couple,’ especially a gay couple raising a baby, are seeing this very normal grounding, loving pair. So we’re sneaking into so many Middle American living rooms, maybe more than any gay couple ever has before.”
Off the screen Ferguson has obsessions of his own, including Ellen DeGeneres and American Idol, and the Winter Olympics catalyzed a not-so-secret crush on ice skater Evan Lysacek.Ferguson declares, “I’m not hiding it. I hear he lives in L.A. too, so it’s just a matter of time before we meet. Although I don’t know if he’s gay.… He’s a brilliant skater, and he’s also really handsome, and he seems like a really sweet guy, so I swoon when I see him.… I need to get out of the 20-year-old age bracket. Like, I have crushes on all of the Jonas Brothers. I assume that’s OK?”