Opinion: Outing Doogie

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Poor Neil Patrick Harris. The talented actor who once played Doogie Howser, M.D. — the teenage doctor who confided his thoughts to a computer — will discover if he logs on to the Internet that everyone is talking about one of his real-life observations.

“Neil Patrick Harris Calls [Anderson] Cooper ‘Dreamy’” is the headline on an Access Hollywood story picked up on the MSNBC site.

Talk about your misleading sound bites (or bytes). The jocular mash note to the silver-haired CNN anchor was an aside in an interview with a gay magazine that shows Harris to be articulate and introspective. Referring to complaints that he took too long to announce that “I am a very content gay man,” Harris argues that “you can’t fault someone for going through the [coming-out] process at their own time.”

A decade ago I was dispatched to Los Angeles by the Arts and Leisure Section of The New York Times to interview Harris about the re-launch of his career as an adult actor. I enjoyed the interview and found that the 24-year-old Harris lived up, or down, to the description of him offered by Michael Greif, who directed Harris in “Rent”: ‘In some ways he’s wise beyond his years and very mature for his age, and at other times he’s not.”

I was pleased by the resulting article. But I never heard back from Harris or his publicist, making me wonder if I had included too many mildly critical comments like Greif’s. Then a friend at The New York Times asked me, obviously expecting an affirmative answer, if Harris was gay. I was taken aback; the subject of sexual orientation never came up in the interview. Re-reading the piece, I found one passage that conceivably could have played to stereotypical notions about gays: Harris’ recollection that, when he was 9 or 10, “I loved movies, I loved plays and musicals.’ ‘ But inferring sexual orientation from that autobiographical factoid seemed a stretch.

So why did at least one reader assume from my article that Harris was gay, something I never meant to imply? I may have solved the mystery. The other day I exhumed the article from my clippings file and read all the way to the last sentence, which was meant as a play on the fact that Harris was leaving Doogie Howser behind. “The doctor,” I had written, “is definitely out.”