In 2001, actor Matt Bomer took a role in “Guiding Light.” He had resisted it at first. The graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s vaunted musical theater program felt a soap opera was beneath him. But a few theater jobs hadn’t gone anywhere, and he had recently lost a bellhop gig at a hotel, so when the chance came up to play Ben Reade, a trust-fund baby turned sex worker, he signed on.

Bomer had been afraid of being on camera. “I was terrified of anybody seeing that close to my soul,” he said. On the soap, he learned to say his lines, hit his marks, make a choice and stick to it. The camera left his soul alone.

In 2002, he asked the producers to write him off. He had been told that he was the director’s choice for a major new superhero movie. Then, he believes, the movie’s producers discovered that he is gay. That movie was never made.

Bomer has never been sure if that’s why the project fell apart. Like marriages and dishwashers, movies in preproduction have many ways to fail. Still, he took from the experience a painful lesson. He couldn’t be himself and have the career he wanted. Around the same time, a producer told him that if he came out publicly, he would never play leads.

It took 20 years, but Bomer, 46, has proved that producer wrong. He can now be seen in two major projects: the Netflix film “Maestro,” now streaming on the platform, and the Showtime romantic drama “Fellow Travelers,” set during and after the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, in which gay men and women were denied and purged from government jobs.

In the series, which recently concluded, Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a State Department operative with a promising career, a loving wife and a passionate entanglement with a man, played by Jonathan Bailey. Driven, magnetic, emotionally opaque, Fuller — “Hawk” to his intimates — has all the signifiers of a prestige drama antihero. His is a leading role. Bomer, playing him, is a leading man.

“Before this I was like, why can’t we have our Don Draper? Why can’t we have our Walter White?” Bomer said. “I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t worked on all the projects leading up to it.”

Bomer grew up in Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston. His family went to church several times a week; that church considered homosexuality an abomination, so Bomer spent much of his childhood and adolescence running from himself. In high school, he acted, landing his first professional job at 18. In theater, inside the skin of a character, he felt free.

A decade into his career, once he had recurred on several series, co-starred in a Jodie Foster movie (“Flightplan”) and was firmly ensconced as the breezy lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar,” he came out in 2012 while receiving a humanitarian award. He was already married then, to publicist Simon Halls, and a father of three young boys.

Bomer isn’t sure that it was an ideal time to come out. “White Collar” was still airing, and the first “Magic Mike” film, in which he plays one of the exotic dancers, would soon premiere. But he was tired of running. And he was happy. “I just thought, I don’t want to hide this,” he recalled recently. “Love is more important to me than anything that being my true self cost me.”

Coming out altered Bomer’s professional trajectory, although it didn’t necessarily diminish it. “I mean, there are certain rooms that I haven’t been in since,” he said. “But I think my career became so much richer.”

As “White Collar” wound down, he took on several gay roles. He appeared in Dustin Lance Black’s “8,” a play about the overturning of the amendment banning same-sex marriage in California. He followed that with turns in Ryan Murphy’s film adaptations of “The Normal Heart” and “The Boys in the Band,” both seminal works of gay theater.

In casting Bomer in “The Normal Heart,” Murphy recalled thinking: “Maybe this is the role that can show the world what Matt can do. I remember saying to him, ‘I can tell you can do this because you have a lot to prove.’ ” He also perceived that Bomer, an actor who had always relied on technique and charm, who had seen performance as one more way to hide, had a deep emotional well from which to draw.

“He knows what it’s like to struggle, and he knows what it’s like to be afraid, and he knows what it’s like to have people not believe in you,” Murphy said.

Even as he played these gay roles, Bomer continued with straight ones, building a resume that would not have been available to an out actor even a decade before. Murphy cast him in a season of “American Horror Story,” and he appeared as a Hollywood producer in a miniseries version of “The Last Tycoon.” He also filmed a second “Magic Mike” movie.

Three and a half years ago, he read “Fellow Travelers,” the Thomas Mallon novel on which the series is based, with an eye toward starring in the adaptation. He was interested, but he didn’t really expect it to go forward. “There was a central part of me that has been in the business since I was 18, thinking, ‘Are the gatekeepers really going to give this the budget that it needs?’ ” he recalled.

But the gatekeepers did. Ron Nyswaner, the showrunner of the series, wanted Bomer for the lead, intuiting that he could play both what Hawk shows to the world (charisma, ambition) and what he conceals (heart, desire, anguish).

“Matt, for all his physical attractiveness and charm, he understands emotional pain,” Nyswaner said.

When asked what of himself he had given to Hawk, in terms of effort and personal experience, Bomer’s answer was simple: “Everything.” Finally, he is letting the camera see into his soul.

In most scenes, Bomer plays two or three emotions simultaneously, some across the surface of his face and others roiling underneath. The show includes several unusually intimate sex scenes, and Bomer gave himself to these, too. With the consent of his co-star and an intimacy coordinator, he even improvised a few unscripted moments, as when Hawk licks a lover’s armpit.

“I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience on screen.”

If Bomer has his way, there will be more to watch. He appears in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” as clarinetist and producer David Oppenheim, a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. And there are plans for other series: a queer espionage drama and an adaptation of another novel.

His life has taken him, Bomer said, from an industry suspicious of queer storytelling to one more receptive; from running from himself to settling down with a family and faith rooted in love and acceptance. Another man might discount the earlier years — the division, the prejudice, the pain — but Bomer doesn’t. It has made him who he is: a leading man and a man now able to take the lead in his own life.

“I’m grateful, ultimately, that I got to see both sides,” he said.