Glee

The short answer: No, he’s not.

The long answer: He’s not gay — but Darren says he’s very excited for the chance to play a strong and confident gay character like Blaine on TV. He grew up around the gay community and does enjoy some stereotypically girly things like musical theater, but Darren is totally straight.

Also worth noting: We’re pretty sure he also has a girlfriend. Sigh.

Since Darren Criss is playing a gay teen on Glee, it stands to reason that some people might think he himself is gay. Even though the Glee heartthrob is not gay, Darren doesn't seem to be concerned about labels.

"It’s a subject that’s very near and dear to my heart, simply because I grew up in such an open community—doing theater in San Francisco. I mean, it doesn’t get much, stereotypically, 'gayer.' I was inadvertently raised in the 'gay community.' I had straight parents, but I spent massive amounts of time at a very early age with gay, theater-hopeful thirty-somethings. And those were the people I spent time with early on, so my whole perception of 'sexuality' just wasn’t there. It just...was," Darren told Vanity Fair.

Still, the company he kept did cause some people to make assumptions. "It even got to the point where, later in life... I had all the components in place. I was, well, not super effeminate, but I was into girly things—I liked musical theater, all the stereotypical things. I had to come out and say, well, I’m sorry, but I think I’m straight. And people were like, say it ain’t so! And I would say, 'It’s been a secret too long, but I’m actually a straight male.'" Talk about coming out of the closet.

It's that attitude that causes Darren to be so protective of his Glee character, Blaine. "And so for the longest time when people asked me about Blaine, I wanted to say it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t. But I don’t want to devalue it, because it’s a very earnest question, and I can see why people would want to know. And I realized that if I said, It doesn’t matter, that immediately means that I’m gay. So I do define myself as a straight male, but it really doesn’t come into play with me in this role. As an actor, your objective is always to play the scene. And in this case, he happens to be a gay teen."

Source: Vanity Fair

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