Actress Maria Bello has come out as gay n a column that was published in the New York Times on Friday.   The 46-year-old actress revealed she’s been in a long-term relationship with her best female friend in heartfelt passage titled “Coming Out as a Modern Family,” the star shared the first time she opened up about her love life to her 12-year-old son Jackson.

Bello — known for her work in Coyote Ugly and Grown Ups — decided to give a relationship with her best friend a try. The realization happened when she was reading through her old journals in her California garden.

“I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst. It seemed when I was physically attracted to someone, I would put them in the box of being my ‘soul mate’ and then be crushed when things didn’t turn out as I had hoped,” she wrote.

“As I continued to look through photos, I came across a black-and-white one of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve. We looked so happy, I couldn’t help but smile. It didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.”

And so they did.

Good for you Maria.   Good for her living your life with truth. As opposed to so many others in Hollywood, that live with ‘beards’.