David Hyde Pierce, Frasier‘s Niles, of course, long known to be gay by the show business community but not a fact publicly proclaimed by the star, was off-handedly outed in a longish CNN.com piece on him yesterday:

Pierce got to Los Angeles in the early 1990s when his partner, actor-writer-producer Brian Hargrove, wanted to write for television. A short-lived Norman Lear series, “The Powers That Be” led to “Frasier.” And the rest is, well …

The folks at AfterElton checked the partner reference for accuracy with Pierce’s people and it was confirmed that Hargrove was and is in fact the actor’s life parther. “It’s interesting,” says the website, “that this quiet yet enormous step was taken shortly after Pierce was essentially outed by Michael Musto in his ‘Glass Closet‘ article that accompanied Out magazine’s controversial ‘Gay Power List’ piece. Is this another situation where a gay celeb was pushed out before he was ready (see also: Lance Bass, T.R. Knight, Neil Patrick Harris)?”