After six months of digging through storage, Who’s the Boss? star Danny Pintauro has found the 1997 National Enquirer story that outed him.
He was 21 and at Stanford when the tabloid called. The paper was going to write about his sexuality whether he helped or not, so he decided he’d rather be quoted than talked about.
Almost 30 years later he has the clipping back in his hands, and he says it’s kinder than he remembered. His TV mom Judith Light is in it, and so is Tony Danza. There’s a sidebar from Chaz Bono, who had been through his own tabloid outing a few years earlier. And near the end, 21-year-old Danny gives a piece of advice that reads very differently now.
The Phone Call From The Enquirer
If you watched ABC in the ’80s, you know the face. Danny played Jonathan Bower, Judith Light’s son, for all eight seasons of Who’s the Boss?, from 1984 to 1992. When the show ended he stepped away from acting, and a few years later he was a drama student at Stanford.
That’s where the Enquirer found him. In a 1999 interview with Metro Weekly, he said the paper called to tell him it was doing the story whether he liked it or not, and asked if he wanted to talk.
He freaked out, then started phoning people. One of them was Judith. Her advice, as he remembered it: if they’re writing about you anyway, you might as well make sure they quote you correctly.
So he cooperated. His family and friends already knew, but he lost the chance to decide when everyone else would find out. “I’m trying to study, and suddenly I’m having to deal with this,” he told People in 2022.
For context, 1997 was the year Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time, and an actor saying “I’m gay” in print could still sell papers. As Danny put it this week, “It’s wild to think how short the list of openly gay public figures still was in 1997.”
“I Finally Found It”
Danny shared the find on Instagram and Facebook, in a post that opens in all caps: “I FINALLY FOUND IT.”
The headline, he admits, is “enormous and very 1997.” Across the top of the page, in giant white letters on black: “TV sitcom star reveals: I’m gay.”
What surprised him was the rest of it. “Here’s something I had forgotten: all things considered, it’s actually pretty heartfelt,” he wrote.
He doesn’t pretend it was easy. Having something so personal become national news before he was ready was complicated, he wrote. But rereading it, he said, “I can also see a 21-year-old me trying to take control of a situation I hadn’t chosen and say, ‘If this story is going to be told, I want my voice in it.'”
“And I’m kind of proud of him for that.”
Here’s the post, with the full page:
What The Enquirer Actually Printed
For a tabloid outing, it’s gentle. Danny talks about years of denial: dating girls all through high school, then getting so serious with a college girlfriend that he started planning to marry her after graduation. He couldn’t go through with it. (She took it well, he said. They ended up better friends than before.)
He’d come out to his parents a year and a half earlier, at Christmas, with five words: “Mom and Dad, I’m gay.” They were surprised and a little awkward about it, and then, by his account, wonderful.
Then there’s his TV family. “Tony is like a second father to me,” he told the paper. Judith, he said, phoned to tell him she was happy that he was happy.
The Enquirer version is the tidy one. Two years later, Danny gave Metro Weekly the fuller story. Tony reacted “very much like my father,” he said: not happy at first, awkward for a short while, then supportive. Judith, who was already a vocal ally of the gay community, was on his side from the start.
She still is. In May, she walked unannounced into the middle of his Entertainment Tonight interview and greeted him with “How’s my boy?” We covered that reunion here.
One more very ’90s detail: right below Danny’s story, the same page runs a box offering readers up to $500 for news tips.
A Note From Chaz Bono
The part Danny says means the most to him now sits in a sidebar in the bottom corner of the page. It’s a short message from Chaz Bono, who was GLAAD’s entertainment media director at the time.
Chaz had good reason to write it. The son of Sonny and Cher had been outed by the tabloid press himself, years before he came out publicly in a 1995 cover story for The Advocate. (He came out as transgender in 2009, so the clipping uses his old name.)
His message was that coming out takes courage and honesty, and that it’s worth it for the freedom of being open with the people you love.
Danny tagged him in the post with a thank-you. “Seeing those words of support sitting beside my story nearly 30 years later means more to me now than I probably understood at the time,” he wrote.
The Advice He Gave At 21
Near the end of the article, Danny speaks to readers who are struggling with their own sexuality. Follow your heart, he tells them. “If it’s not an appropriate time, there will be one later.” Don’t rush it, he adds. Do it in your own time.
He was saying it in a story that ran on the Enquirer‘s schedule.
The years that followed weren’t easy, and Danny has been open about them. He has talked about his past addiction, and in 2015 he told Oprah he is HIV-positive. In that 2022 People interview, he said he’d been angry about the outing at first. He calmed down once fans started writing to tell him how much the story meant to them, and he still has a box of their letters.
Going by the replies to this week’s post, they haven’t stopped coming. Fans thanked him for making it easier for the people who came after, and one wrote that reading about him as a scared teenager made them feel a little less alone.
Danny married his husband, Wil Tabares, in 2014, and he’s acting again. His post ends like this:
“Still gay. Still here. And very grateful that today, I get to decide how my story is told.”