When Noah Galvin casually referred to himself as a gay man in front of 200 TV journalists in January, he thought nothing of it. The 21-year-old actor spoke at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, on how his friends reacted to his being cast as gay teen lead Kenny O'Neal on ABC’s The Real O’Neals — his first small-screen gig — and mentioned his own sexual orientation almost in passing.



“I have found that there is a very clear distinction between how young people view the show as opposed to older people who have gone through this,” he said at the time about the family comedy. “I’m gay myself, and I haven’t gone through a lot of the things that Kenny goes through in the series. I felt a little disconnected from it because I was experiencing these things again but I was like, ‘Is this … crazy new and groundbreaking?’”

Noah Galvin didn’t think much of saying those three words —“I’m gay myself” — two months ago. “I've been out since I was 14 years old,” he recently told BuzzFeed News over coffee at a sunny cafe in Studio City, California.



But when he left the press conference that day, Galvin was quickly reminded that, for many people, the idea of an openly gay actor playing a proudly out teenager on a network TV show is still something noteworthy. “I came off the stage and Twitter was ablaze with ‘Noah Galvin comes out at TCAs’ stories," he recalled with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I didn't come out to anybody. It was just new information to you.’”