"And, The Truth Shall Set You Free..."

"You can hear me now..."

As reported in an article in The Atlantic, Verizon's famous pitchman, actor Paul Marcarelli is finally free to talk about himself and the role he played in Verizon's advertisements for the last nine years...  Although it was a great opportunity, it wasn't without its pitfalls, especially when he had to confront homophobia:

Then there were the drive-bys. Marcarelli has a home in Guilford, Connecticut, and five summers ago, kids in an SUV began driving past at night, yelling, “Can you hear me now?” Later, says Marcarelli, “they started screaming ‘faggot’ up at my house. It got progressively more profane as the years went by.” One night, it happened while some friends were over, and he decided to call the police. “As soon as I hung up the phone,” he says, “I realized that in order for them to do anything about it, it would have to become a report that would go into a police log.” Worried about the publicity—and the questions that might ensue if it came out that the actor playing Test Man was gay—he declined to file a report.

In retrospect, Marcarelli thinks his silence during the Test Man years was largely self-imposed. “I definitely think that my reticence to have any kind of persona outside of this job was that I didn’t want to be put in a position to have to answer any uncomfortable question that would affect my income stream. And I never tested it, so I don’t know.”

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"Fear Eats the Soul"