Monkey Uncaged: Did Sean Hayes Ever Come Out?

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A Note from the Flying Monkey: Of the many emails I receive every week for my column, some are so good that they simply can’t be answered in just a few words. So from time to time, the editors have decided to let me out of the “cage” of that regular column, in a feature we’re calling Monkey Uncaged!

Q: What's the deal with Sean Hayes? Did he ever officially come out? — Michael, New York, NY

A: No.

Here at AfterElton.com, we're always yammering on about how we don't traffic in gossip, and we don't speculate about an actor's sexual orientation when it is unknown.

But Sean Hayes seems to me to be in a slightly different category. It's hard for me to imagine that there's even a single reader of this column who hasn't already heard the rumors that Hayes was openly gay before the 1998 premiere of Will & Grace, but clammed up once taking the role of Jack McFarland.

To be very clear, I have no idea if Sean Hayes is gay or not (and at this point, I really don’t care). All we know is that he's been very, very cagey since 1998.

But he does provide me with an opportunity to play a little thought experiment.

Let's create a hypothetical actor, shall we? Actor X achieved break-out fame, and received massive critical acclaim, for playing a gay character on a wildly popular, zeitgeist-y 1998 show, Phil & Trace.

Let’s assume that Actor X actor is gay, but that he and his management decided, for career reasons, to stop acknowledging that: they decided he was taking enough of a risk playing the gay character, and he didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as “gay” when the show was over.

First, let me say that I believe that this was Actor X's choice to make, and his alone.

But I personally also think Actor X and his management would have been making a really, really bad call.

The cast of a show that has nothing whatsoever to do with this post.

Their decision definitely would have made sense at that time: Actor X would be taking a risk by taking that prominent gay part. At that moment in time, given the combination of being gay and playing a major gay role, he almost certainly would’ve been type-cast as “gay,” and suffered accordingly.

(Although, to be fair, the only way he’d be typecast was if the show was a hit – and while hit shows can typecast actors, they also lavish mounds of cash and acclaim on the participants, especially these days.)

Anyway, here’s the mistake Actor X and his management would've been making: it wasn't occurring to them that the world was rapidly changing on the “gay” issue (in part, because of the success of shows like the hypothetical Phil & Trace!).

Next Page! How exactly did Actor X screw up?