After nearly 10-years now that his contract with telephone company Verizon Wireless is almost up Verizon’s “Can You Hear Me Now” guy Paul Marcarelli is speaking out and revealing among other things that he is gay and has been harassed but refused to speak out because it may have affected his job.  Here’s a snippet from an intersting The Atlantic piece on the actor who’s remained low key all this time:

At first, Marcarelli was embarrassed about his role as Test Man, but over time he made his peace with it. “The reality was, it was a job,” he says. His contract obligated him to work a couple hundred days a year, which amounted to between 20 and 40 commercials and a steady flow of live events. He offered his catchphrase in front of 85,000 football fans during the halftime show of the Buffalo Bills’ 2002 season opener. “Up to that point,” Marcarelli says, “I hadn’t played to a house larger than 99 seats.”

This peculiar brand of fame was frequently awkward, however. At a cousin’s wedding, he wore “the grayest of gray suits,” but still wound up feeling “like a cafone—Italian for “oaf”—when more people lined up to take pictures with him than with the bride. A few months ago, he attended his grandmother’s funeral. As her body was being lowered into the ground, he heard the hushed voice of a family friend: “Can you hear me now?”

Tagged as: Can You Hear Me Now, Contract, Gay, Gay Slur, Grandmother Funeral, Paul Marcarelli, Test Man, The Atlantic, Verizon Wireless