Emmy winner Mike Manning once feared that coming out would cost him everything. His life tells another story

When Mike Manning came out on television at 22, he thought he might be surrendering the life he wanted, including marriage, children, and the ordinary comforts of belonging. Seventeen years later, he is married and nominated for an Emmy for playing a man whose family embodies those possibilities.But the lesson Manning, 39, took from his time on The Real World: D.C. reaches beyond his own transformation. In Washington, during President Barack Obama’s first year as president, he learned how public policy could constrict a private life and how someone with an audience could push back. “It gave me the vocabulary to express the rage that I was feeling at the time for LGBT inequality,” Manning told The Advocate in an interview.Already a two-time Daytime Emmy winner for his work as a producer and supporting actor on The Bay, Manning heads into Friday’s 53rd annual Daytime Emmy Awards at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles with another supporting actor nomination, this time for CBS’s Beyond the Gates. He plays Bradley “Smitty” Smith, a white gay journalist married to a Black congressman, with whom he is raising two adopted children.Speaking Wednesday, Manning described acting and producing as extensions of the advocacy he discovered while cameras followed him around the capital. The work has changed. His interest in what a story can make possible has endured. Dawntavia Marrero as Shonda, Brandon Claybon as Martin Richardson, and Mike Manning as Bradley ‘Smitty’ Smith.Quantrell Colbert/CBSA political education in Obama’s WashingtonIn 2009, Washington, D.C., was both the setting for a new administration promising change and a testing ground for what that promise would mean. LGBTQ+ advocates were pressing for workplace protections, marriage equality, and an end to the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.MTV brought its decades-long experiment in young adulthood to that city. Strangers sharing a house, their arguments, attra