“I feel like there are a lot of people who still aren’t comfortable with gay characters on television,” Ferguson tells The Advocate. But what I admire about our show is that it has a plethora of characters for people to attach to, and slowly those people are becoming attached to Mitchell and Cameron as well. It’s kind of like a Trojan horse. We sneak into a lot of people’s living rooms when they aren’t expecting it and maybe change some minds through the back door.”
Despite the progress that Modern Family has made in bringing gay families to the mainstream, Ferguson says he’s received complaints that the show’s gay couple isn’t a positive representation of LGBT people. “We’re always coming up against the criticism that our characters are stereotypical and don’t represent what it is to be gay,” Ferguson says. “But my argument has always been, I know so many people who are just like Mitchell and Cam, and so many people who are nothing like them. We’re representing a very specific couple in gay America and do not represent the entire gay community with those characters.”
Ferguson’s Modern Family character has become a positive pop culture icon for millions of young gay men to admire. Growing up in Albuquerque, however, Ferguson, now 37, thought any positive depictions of gays in pop culture seemed like fiction. By the time he entered high school he turned to the only representation of his sexuality he could find.
“I was caught stealing gay porn when I was 14,” Ferguson remembers with laughter in his voice. “I walked through the metal detector, the buzzers went off, and when they asked me if I had anything, I lifted up my shirt and there was [an issue of] Black Inches.” After a deep breath he strikes a more serious tone and says, “It was handled in a completely inappropriate way, with no tact from the store. They called up my parents and then showed them the nature of the material I’d stolen. I was horrified! I look back and think, How did I survive that humiliation?”
Today, however, that memory serves as a reminder that his work on Modern Family is about far more than entertainment. “[Mitchell] is a character that I play with dignity and one that I think has helped change the landscape of what it means to be gay in America right now,” he says. “Certainly, it’s provided a dialogue and a pop culture touchstone for a lot of people.”
