Sean Maher—best known for his role as Dr. Simon Tan (sic) on the cult TV series Firefly and who is currently playing a closeted homosexual on NBC’s The Playboy Club—has revealed he’s gay in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The 36-year-old actor told the magazine, “This is my coming out ball. I’ve been dying to do this.”
Maher, who lives in Los Angeles’ trendy Los Feliz neighborhood with his partner of nearly nine years and their two children, described how he was advised to stay in the closet at the beginning of his career in 1997.
“I had my manager tell me: ‘You need to get a girl on your arm or people will start talking.’ I remember telling him: ‘I’m gay.’ He had no idea. And he said: ‘All the more reason to get a girl on your arm.’ My agent was also like, ‘It’s best if you keep your options open. Maybe bisexual?’”
Maher decided to stay in the closet, but it took its toll. “It was so exhausting, and I was so miserable,” he remembers. “I didn’t really have any life other than work and this façade I was putting on. So I kept my friends from college [where he was out] separate from my work friends, and that was very confusing. And you just don’t realize that it’s eating away at your soul.”
Maher ultimately chose to come out over concerns about what his 4-year-old daughter’s reaction might be when she realized he was closeted professionally. “I have these beautiful children and this extraordinary family, and to think in any way shape or form that that’s wrong or that there’s shame in that or that there’s something to hide actually turns my stomach,” he said. “What would [my daughter] think if I said, ‘Oh honey, you can’t come with me to work because they don’t know I have an adopted daughter and they don’t know that I’m gay.’”
The actor admitted he used his role as a closeted gay man engaged to a lesbian Playboy bunny on The Playboy Club as his opportunity to go public with his sexual orientation. “This role came up, which was like a light bulb going off,” Maher remembers. “I was like, This is perfect. I want to do this, and I want to use it as a platform to come out.”
“I was nervous coming here today because I’ve just never talked about it,” he confessed to Entertainment Weekly. “But, it’s so liberating. It was interesting to be coming to have a conversation that I was always afraid to have.”
