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Neil Patrick Harris appeared on Ellen today, the platform of choice for recently self-outed TV stars looking to get something gay-related off their chests. He explained how his pronouncement came directly out of his desire to circumvent a gathering "witch-hunt" after a gossip item about he and his boyfriend led to a huffy denial from a publicist that he was "not of that persuasion." From the People.com report:

"I'm not a very scandalous person and so I didn't want to have to respond to some story, whether it was lie or truth - so I just made a statement and sort squashed the fires."

"My life had been relatively open in my world," he tells DeGeneres. "I've been dating the same guy for three years and our families know. We go out together all the time but I just feel like as an actor part of your occupation is retaining a bit of mystery so you can be believable in many different types of roles, so I never felt it was an obligation for me to hold pinkies down the red carpet or anything."

Now that the pink elephant in the room has been addressed, Harris can feel free to skip hand-in-hand, or perform gymnastic maneuvers using his semi-longtime-companion as a tumbling partner, down any red carpet he so chooses. Sadly, however, this case merely highlights the real cause of the glass-closeted celebrity epidemic: the fear that coming out will affect their employability thanks to the limited vision of Nervous Nelly casting directors, who have trouble conceiving of comfortably out actors in anything other than roles as out gay characters, or else as flamboyant wizards and supervillains with cool powers to fill the void left by their inexistent sex lives.