My Coming Out: Robert Best

October 11, 2006

Robert Best is an alumni of "Project Runway 3." Before the show he was Principal Designer at Mattel working for Barbie Collectibles. After being auf’ed he returned to home to Los Angeles and to his job at Mattel, only with a hell of a lot more fans.

It's not like I didn't know. It's just that at one point, I realized how much fun the sex was.

I'd been living with my sister in New York (the very same -- my gorgeous sister -- who was featured on an episode of “Project Runway”). So I finally was like, "Oh God, I gotta tell her." And I did, and she was like ,"Duh."

There was this acute sense of relief. I wasn't really nervous about telling her, it was more emotional than anything else. That's all I remember. She said, "Do you think something like that would effect ... I love you for who you are."

It was very "Lifetime Television." And it took me a longer time to come out to my older brothers, just because I wasn't really as close to them as I was with my sister.

They're both straight and they were living very different lives than I was. One was a park ranger, and one was like, a ranch hand. I remember growing up they were more stereotypically "boy" and they had that whole machismo thing. So they were living that kind of life in the Midwest, and I was worried that maybe their reaction would be more the kind that you fear. I distinctly remember my second oldest brother using the word "fag" as a derogatory term. And he didn't mean it that way and certainly not about me, but hearing that stuck with me.

So I think I wrote him a letter, and he was incredible and cool about the whole thing. I was awed by it. He had a daughter who at that point was two or three, and he said, "I think about my kid, and I want her to be whatever she wants, and the thought of somebody hating her or judging her for something that's not a choice for her -- I feel the same way about you."