Colton Underwood From The Bachelor Comes Out as Gay

The Bachelor’s Colton Underwood has come out as gay.

The reality TV star shared his truth with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.

“This year has been a lot for a lot of people, and it’s probably made a lot of people look themselves in the mirror and figure out who they are and what they’ve been running from or putting off in their lives,” he said. “And for me, I’ve ran from myself for a long time. I’ve hated myself for a long time. I’m gay, and I came to terms with that earlier this year, and I’ve been processing it. The next step in all of this is letting people know. I’m still nervous, but it’s been a journey, for sure.”

He continued, “I’m emotional, but I’m emotional in such a good, happy, positive way. I’m the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been in my life, and that means the world to me.”

Underwood opened up about the moment that gave him the courage to speak his truth. “I got into a place for me in my personal life that was dark and bad,” he said. “I can list a bunch of different things, but they’d all be excuses. I think overall the reason why now is because I got to a place where I didn’t think I was ever going to share this. I would’ve rather died than say, ‘I’m gay.’ And I think that was sort of my wakeup call.”

He says he’s thought about harming himself. “There was a moment in L.A. when I woke up and I didn’t think I was gonna wake up,” he said. “I didn’t have the intentions of waking up, and I did. I think, for me, that was my wake-up call of like, ‘This is your life. Take back control.’ I think looking back even beyond that, even just suicidal thoughts, driving my car close to a cliff, like ‘If this goes off the cliff, it’s not that big of a deal.’ I don’t feel that anymore.”

Colton Underwood led season 23 of The Bachelor, which aired in January 2019. To the people who may feel like he “misled” them, as Roberts put it, Underwood said, “I would understand why they would think that way. I’ve thought a lot about this too. Do I regret being the Bachelor? Do I regret handling it the way I did? I do. I do think I could’ve handled it better, I’ll say that. I just wish I wouldn’t have dragged people into my own mess of figuring out who I was. I genuinely mean that. But at the same time, I can sit here and say I’m sorry to all those women. I can also say thank you, because without them and without the Bachelor franchise, I don’t know if this would’ve ever came out.”

And to Cassie Randolph, the woman he picked on the show who later filed (and then dropped) a restraining order against him, Underwood says, “I’d like to say sorry for how things ended. I messed up. I made a lot of bad choices.”

Underwood says he was “in love” with Randolph, which only made his sexuality “harder and more confusing” for him. “If I’m being very honest, I loved everything about her,” he said. “And it’s hard for me to articulate what exactly my emotions were…. I, obviously, had an internal fight going on. I would just say that I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart…. I wish that I would’ve been courageous enough to fix myself before I broke anybody else.”

The morning he found out he was the Bachelor, he prayed to God and thanked him “for making me straight.” “I remember that vividly, saying, ‘Finally, you’re letting me be straight,’” Underwood recalled. “I’ve known that I’ve been different since the age of six, and I couldn’t process it and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until high school, my freshman year, when I knew I was gay. And by that time I’d already grown up in the Catholic church, I’d gone to Catholic grade school, I’d learned in the Bible that gay is a sin. I had made mistakes in my sports and my athletic career, and when you make mistakes, ‘That play was gay.’ Gay was always affiliated with a connotation of negativity.”

Describing the reactions of the people he’s come out to, Underwood says, “I’ve had a range of responses, and the underlying, most common one is, ‘I wish you would’ve told me sooner.’ When I hear that, I wish I would’ve had faith in my friends and my family a little bit more. My dad, I told him, his reaction was, ‘I wish you would’ve trusted me sooner.’ But then he followed it up with, ‘How can I help you? How can I help take this off your plate? Who can I tell?’ To me, that was more meaningful than ‘I love you.’”

In the second part of his interview with Roberts, Underwood opened up about his “virgin Bachelor” label in the franchise. “The truth is I was a virgin Bachelor because I was gay,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to handle it.”

Underwood says he’s “gotten closer to God” this year. “I know even saying that as a gay man, people are gonna be like, ‘How is that even possible?’ I used to wake up in the morning and pray for him to take the gay away. I used to pray for him to change me. I can now wake up and pray to God, and I can actually have faith. I can go into church and be present and not have it be conditional on this topic of, ‘Take this off my plate, and I’ll still worship you. And I’ll still be there.’”

When asked what he’s looking for in a partner, Underwood says, “I still have a lot to work through. I’ll just go on record saying I still haven’t had an emotional connection with a man. I’ve never allowed myself to…. I want to, more than anything. I’m looking for someone who can push me and challenge me in all the great ways.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour