Colton Underwood is opening up about navigating his sexuality before he publicly came out as gay.
“I was very careful, even when I was physically experimenting with guys and trying to, like, figure myself out,” Underwood, 34, said during the Tuesday, June 16, episode of the “We Need to Talk” podcast. “I was so careful on how I did everything.”
The former NFL player continued, “To protect myself, I would only hook up with married men. [Married] ‘straight’ men. So that was sort of my rule that I would never break. When I was in the closet, that would be the only time I would ever hook up with men was if they were married … because they had more to lose than I did.”
The way Underwood saw it, hooking up with married men meant that they couldn’t “ruin his career” because they “had a whole family that they’d be risking as well.”
“So it’s a messed up thing to think through, but like, it was a form of self-[preservation] … it was just like a way to protect myself,” he noted.
Underwood previously clarified in a 2021 interview with Variety that he did not have sex with the men.
“When I say ‘hookups,’ not sex,” he said. “I want to make that very clear that I did not have sex with a man, prior to that.”
Underwood first appeared on The Bachelorette season 14 to vie for Becca Kufrin’s heart before leading his own season of The Bachelor in 2019, when he was 26 years old. The reality star was famously labeled “The Virgin Bachelor” at the time, as his virginity was a heavily marketed story line on the show.
“I remember I always got asked why I was a virgin,” Underwood recalled on Tuesday. “So that was the story line that they wanted to run with, and I hated it ’cause I didn’t want that pressure, and then I also didn’t want people digging in, because at that time, I had hooked up with men.”
Underwood added that he wished he “would have been a little bit more vulnerable about just talking about my struggle with my sexuality.”
“I think there could have been something just interesting in that conversation,” he continued.
The Traitors alum said he didn’t intend to discuss his virginity on the show, but he ultimately brought it up on the first night of The Bachelorette.
“I opened it up immediately, and I just gave them everything which they loved,” he shared. “So that’s unfortunately how it sort of came to be, and then it became my entire story line. There were so many reasons why I was a virgin. Like, it was my faith. Obviously, the one that I didn’t tell publicly was my struggle with my sexuality.”
Underwood admitted that he convinced himself he would be able to change his identity.
“’I think I need to try this … or maybe if I have sex with a girl I will become straight,’” he recalled telling himself. “I just was so good at convincing myself that the next step I will become straight. I need to get engaged. I need to get married. I need to lose my virginity. All of these different things were sort of steps to becoming straight. What I was telling myself is, ‘This is going to force me [to be straight].’ I’m going to be so publicly straight that I will never be able to be gay again.”
Underwood publicly came out as gay in 2021. He is now married to political strategist Jordan C. Brown-Underwood, with whom he shares son Bishop, born in 2024.
“This year’s been a lot for a lot of people, and it’s probably made a lot of people look at themselves in the year and figure out who they are,” he said on Good Morning America at the time. “I’ve ran from myself for a long time, I’ve hated myself for a long time. I’m gay. I came to terms with that earlier this year, and the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know. … I’m the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been in my life. That means the world to me.”
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