The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)

THE MAN WHO HELPS THE STARS COME OUT

Veteran PR maestro Simon Halls, the founder of Slate and husband of actor Matt Bomer, opens up in an exclusive firstperso­n essay about the stars he’s supported in being themselves: ‘If you’re in love, who cares?’

I came of age in my personal and profession­al life at a time when AIDS, that other pandemic, also came of age. Those were scary times. Almost everyone I knew during my coming out process is no longer here. I had an internship in public relations at Warner Bros. while in college, and after I graduated from USC, I got an opportunit­y to live and work in Russia, where you couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about your sexuality, and you never asked anybody about theirs because of the threat of capital punishment.

I went about my business and shut off that part of my brain until I came back to Los Angeles to work for a dear friend, the late Nanci Ryder, who was the most gay-friendly person on the planet. She once said to me, “Simon, be careful with sharing your story.” There were certain clients, very famous people, that Nanci wanted me to work with, but they refused because I was gay. It was the early ’90s and while the majority didn’t care, there were definitely some you had to be very cautious around.

As I made my way in the business, I started getting calls from managers asking for help with clients as they faced truly awful situations, including such talented people as veteran actor Michael Jeter and choreograp­her Michael Peters, who were gay and had gotten sick with AIDS. Tabloid reporters threatened to report on it, but some members of the men’s families didn’t know they were gay. What I tried to do was bring as much calm and comfort to these folks who were really going through it while helping them get the message out to the world on their own terms. Not to get too controvers­ial, because it has changed, but at the time, it wasn’t just the tabloids that acted in such a way, it was the gay press as well. Back then, our community did not celebrate our own at all.

That changed with Ellen DeGeneres. I knew her manager at the time, Arthur Imparato,

and, of course, her publicist Pat Kingsley, who was my boss at the time, and they brought me in to help with the process of her coming out. While there were some on her team who pushed back by saying that coming out would kill her career, there were many more celebratin­g and encouragin­g her by saying,

“Do it. You’ve got to live your truth.” No matter what anyone says or thinks of Ellen, I will only ever look at her as a hero because she had worked so hard to get to where she was, and she faced down all kinds of odds along the way. It was such a life-affirming moment for so many people to see her on the cover of Time with the tagline “Yep, I’m Gay.” I give all credit to Pat Kingsley, who had these really deep, robust relationsh­ips with editors at all the big publicatio­ns at the time and said, “This is what we’re going to do, and this is how we’re going to do it.” Pat and Ellen made that decision, and it was very bold and very brave.

I remember being at the Vanity Fair Oscar party that same year. At the end of the night, a friend of mine and a longtime client, Anne Heche, came up and told me she had just met the love of her life. I said, “That’s great! Who is it?” Anne said, “Simon, it’s Ellen.” It was a surprise to me and to many people in her life, as she had only been in relationsh­ips with men before that. But they had fallen madly in love and wanted to celebrate it. Anne’s career was at an interestin­g point as Donnie Brasco had just been released and Volcano, starring Harrison Ford, was about to open. I wasn’t very popular with the agent, manager and lawyer on Anne’s team because I advised her to live in her truth. I said, “Ellen has done it; you should do it, too. If you’re in love, who cares?” But there were people in her life who thought that coming out would kill her career. Harrison Ford had a lot riding on that movie, and I’m not sure if he’s ever been thanked publicly for what he did, but he deserves to be. Without revealing too much about a private conversati­on, he stepped up and said, “I got your back, kid.” He’s a hero.

I started working with Nathan Lane in the mid-1990s. He had enjoyed all kinds of success on Broadway and TV and had always been openly gay around his friends and in the theater community. Then he got this breakout role in 1996’s The Birdcage, and everybody at the time, from his agents and manager to the studio, told him that he didn’t

owe the public any comment on his personal life. However, Nathan really felt that he had to do something. But naturally, he was scared. It was a different time back then, and his career was just starting to move in a different direction with this Mike Nichols movie and there was Oscar talk. Nathan was trying to get his bearings and own his story despite reporters trying to push him in one direction or another. I remember there was a press junket at which one reporter, a gay man, kept poking at him regarding his sexuality. It was so upsetting. Nathan later said, “I’m 40, single and work a lot in musical theater. You do the math.” That was his way of standing up to the bullies. Everyone should be allowed to navigate through life on their own terms and be in control of their story.

Ironically, while my husband Matt’s coming out was the one that impacted my life in the biggest way, it was one that I had very little to do with. From the very outset of our relationsh­ip, Matt and I had decided to separate church and state from a business perspectiv­e. He had an amazing rep, Jennifer Allen, who was entirely capable of running that side of his life. So, when he publicly thanked me and the kids at the Desert AIDS Project event in 2012 in front of a thousand people, I was surprised, touched and wholly unprepared for the worldwide attention that it would receive. To me, it was a lovely gesture. To the media, it was a bit of a firestorm. But Matt handled it all with impeccable grace, and after the 24-hour news cycle died down, he went back to living his life as a working actor, unaware that he had touched the lives of so many young LGBTQ kids around the world.

While we as a community met with so many detractors along the way, I am happy to say there were a lot of heroes in Hollywood who have contribute­d to the sea change of acceptance we have experience­d as a culture. It all contribute­d to a constant pounding at the door of acceptance, and with more pounding comes less resistance. Now there are openly gay actors leading television shows or feature films, whether it’s Jonathan Bailey in Fellow Travelers or Bridgerton, or Andrew Scott with Ripley and the beautiful All of Us Strangers, who discuss their lives in a matter-of-fact way and nobody bats an eye.

Because I now have teenage children, I can see firsthand how their peers respond to sexual orientatio­n or gender fluidity. Kids are so much more accepting today. Heartstopp­er is one of the most popular shows on Netflix, and it’s simply about young love. It doesn’t matter that it’s gay or straight. Love and heartbreak happen at any age. As a father, I’m so happy that the world that my kids get to inherit is so completely different from how it was when I was coming up.