‘Ugly Betty’ star Mark Indelicato on having his sexuality scrutinized as a teen: “It wasn’t anyone’s business”

On a positive note, I will say that our journeys [Mark and his character Justin Suarez] intersected at the same time.

Similarly to the ways in which people talk to me about how Justin helped them on their own journey of coming out or whether or not watching that on television helped them be allies to their friends and family that were maybe going through the same thing.

There were all of these struggles that he was going through that I felt gave me a lot of power to deal with in my own life.

Looking back, while I’m extremely grateful, it’s also really tough to be a teenager and be going through the same thing but also having to be the poster child for anything. It’s a big banner to carry. I mean, I was in 10th grade.

We were walking down the red carpets in 2009-10 and they are asking me, ‘Well, you’re gay.’  And you know, you’re 15 or 14, however old I was. And, yes, of course, that was true. But I was also still going through it. It wasn’t anyone’s business. One’s sexuality isn’t pertinent to the work that we’re making even if I was playing myself–or a version of myself, which I was.

But what I will say about that, in paving the way in a certain capacity, there’s no journalist that can ever talk to kids like that, ever, ever, now, because of what happened with me and what
happened with so many others before me and directly after.

Like, you would be fired, diva.

Mark Indelicato, 29, speaking to Johnny Sibilly about playing the gay teen character Justin Suarez on ‘Ugly Betty‘ while still figuring out his own sexuality IRL.