Straight? A gay man playing a straight role? What is going in here?

“That was most of what I did before,” Robert told me last year when we chatted about it. “It’s actually really refreshing to go back to my roots a bit that way. I just appreciate getting to expand again after having the concept of me contract somewhat. You have to deal with people’s own mind sets and people’s own limitations and, fortunately, that’s all expanded.”

Gant decided to come out publicly. several years before such young stars as T. R. Knight, Neil Patrick Harris, Lance Bass and Luke Macfarlane followed suit.

He has no regrets but it’s taken awhile for the industry to realize that he is just as capable of playing straight roles as he was before he went public. He believes “the last real frontier in Hollywood” is an openly gay leading man type actor playing a romantic straight role.

“What helps is that I know what I'm capable of and I think when you have a sense of yourself that way, the rest follows,” he says. ” The problem is when we as individuals don't know all of who we are which is really the whole issue around being gay. I think as we as a community have come into our own in terms of our recognition of who we really are and our innate equality, then the laws are following.”

It’s not that Gant has shied away from gay roles since the end of Queer as Folk. He starred opposite Chad Allen and Judith Light in the acclaimed independent film Save Me as man struggling to live by the rules at an “ex-gay” ministry. He also played the lead role in Kiss Me Deadly, a gay spy in the adventure flick co-starring Shannen Doherty.

In 2008, Robert and I had another discussion about out actors and straight role for my old Out In Hollywood site. Here is an excerpt:

“We're starting to cross the frontier in lots of different ways with Neil Patrick Harris’ (womanizing) character on ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ so we're able to go there comedically,” Robert said. “We are moving toward it. It’s exciting to see Neil play that kind of a role. I see that as part of the frontier happening“I've been crossing many of my own frontiers in my life, now I'm encountering what I believe to be the last real frontier in Hollywood which is what it means of an openly gay leading man type actor playing a romantic straight role.”

To that end, Robert has been cast as a straight man involved with a woman in He recently filmed the upcoming Lifetime movie, “Special Delivery,” in which he is involved with a woman played by Lisa Edelstein of “House.” The role involved an on-screen kiss.

Since straight actors who play gay sometimes have issues with a same-sex kiss, I wondered how Robert dealt with kissing a female.

“It was great,” he said. “Personally, I think I'm a pretty damned good kisser and I enjoy it. Lisa asked, ‘Have you kissed many women?’I said, ‘I certainly have.’ She said, ‘Do we kiss different than guys?’ it was kind of interesting to her. It was two actors kind of going there.”

More recently, Robert did guest spots on the new sitcom Hot in Cleveland and the hit drama Bones. Not sure if he played gay or straight in those!