Prisoners actress Maria Bello comes out as gay and reveals she has a long-term girlfriend



Coming out: Maria Bello, pictured last month, has revealed she has a long-term girlfriend

Maria Bello has come out as gay and revealed she has a long-term girlfriend.



The Prisoners actress has written an article in which she recalls when she first told her son Jackson about her love life.



The piece, published in the New York Times on Friday, is titled Coming Out As A Modern Family.



Maria, 46, remembered the day when she told Jackson, now 12, about her relationship with a woman named Clare.



‘This was the moment I had been anticipating and dreading for months,’ Maria wrote. ‘I took a deep breath, knowing that my answer, and his response, would have an impact on our lives for a very long time.’



‘I was with someone romantically and I hadn't told him. I had become involved with a woman who was my best friend, and, as it happens, a person who is like a godmother to my son.’



Maria had been looking at old journals a year earlier when she realised her feelings for Clare went beyond a friendship.



‘I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst,’ the Coyote Ugly star wrote.



‘It seemed when I was physically attracted to someone, I would put them in the box of being my 'soul mate' and then be crushed when things didn't turn out as I had hoped.



‘As I continued to look through photos, I came across a black-and-white one of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve. We looked so happy, I couldn’t help but smile.’



She added: ‘It didn't occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.’



The actress expressed her feelings to Clare the next time they saw each other, and recalled how they then ‘began the long, painful, wonderful process of trying to figure out what our relationship was supposed to be.’



She added: ‘What had I been waiting for all of these years? She is the person I like being with the most, the one with whom I am most myself.’



Even after she knew she wanted to be with Claire, Maria was worried about how people would react.



Supportive son: The Prisoners actress recalled when she first told her son Jackson, who she is seen with in September of last year, about her relationship with a woman named Clare

‘First, how would it affect my son?’ she wrote. ‘He trusted Clare. He loved her. He had never met most of the men I had been in love with and had no idea I had been with a woman as well.



‘Second, how would it affect my career? I have never defined myself by whom I slept with, but I know others have and would.’



But after she told her little boy, whose father is her ex-boyfriend Dan McDermott, he replied sweetly: ‘Mom, love is love, whatever you are.’



And her parents were equally supportive of her relationship, with her mother agreeing with her father’s touching reaction to the news.



‘My father's response came between puffs of his cigar while we sat on the roof of a casino in Atlantic City,’ Maria remembered. ‘“She's a good girl, good for you”.’