Adamo Ruggiero has revealed that, like his “Degrassi” character, he is gay.

In an interview with eTalk that aired last night, 21-year-old Ruggiero said that it was “just time to talk.”

“Some people say ‘I knew from the beginning’ and in that sense I think I very much did,” Ruggiero said.

Of coming out to his family, Ruggiero said he was nervous, but they were supportive. “I come from a fantastic family but it was very scary.”

Ruggiero has previously struggled with answering direct questions about his sexuality, as he didn’t want to interfere with how fans viewed his character. “I completely understand people’s curiosity about the question,” Ruggiero said in a 2004 interview with The Advocate.

“When you’re watching a character on television every week, you believe in that person as you see him on the screen. But my answer to that question is, I don’t want to say, because I don’t want to relate myself to a character and get people more interested in me than in Marco. But at the same time, I don’t want to say that I’m the opposite of Marco, because I don’t want people to think I’m disconnected from my character. So, I think I’ll leave it up to the individual to decide, and hope they just focus on Marco.”

Ruggiero speaks more about his sexuality and his character in next weeks issue of fab magazine.

“Degrassi: The Next Generation” airs Mondays at 7:30 ET on CTV.

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“Canadian Idol” cupid has struck again.

Brian Melo, winner of Season Five, recently confirmed the rumours that he is dating finalist Tara Oram to eTalk.

In the exclusive interview, airing tonight at 7 p.m., Melo concedes, “I’ll set it straight. We are together, we are a couple. I feel like we have something very special.”

Melo reportedly met Oram’s family on a recent stop on the “Canadian Idol” Top 3 tour in Newfoundland.

The show also brought together Melissa O’Neil and Rex Goudie from Season Three, as well as Season Four’s Eva Avila and Chad Doucette.

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A new blog, launched just last month, seems bent on destroying CTV’s eTalk Daily by taking a close look at reporting accuracy on the popular entertainment news show.

eTalkeSucks (etalkesucks.blogspot.com) is attracting a rapidly growing audience by picking apart every episode of the show and identifying misleading statements, exaggerations, and outright errors.

“This is a brand new blog that will dig through the crap that is eTalk Daily,” wrote the blog’s anonymous author, ePatrolman, in the introductory post. “Hosted by the network’s ubiquitous Ben Mulroney and TV’s worst TelePrompTer reader Tanya Kim, the show is infamous for two things: a) Blowing its own horn and b) Frequently reporting things that are misleading, inaccurate or just plain wrong.”

One of the blog’s main targets thus far is eTalk’s overuse of the term “exclusive.” In one example from the June 30 show, the blog quotes eTalk’s coverage of Tori Spelling: “eTalk broke the Dean McDermott and Tori Spelling story first. And now only we can show you exclusive photos and tell you what’s behind the Spelling family feud.”

The photos, however, were irrelevant shots of Spelling and McDermott from a week earlier. And according to the blog, the rest of eTalk’s report consisted of a near word-for-word regurgitation of Us Weekly’s coverage — without even identifying the source.

Another brow-raising incident (among dozens) came with the July 6 show. eTalk reported on “fresh mini-series casting news” about Shirley Douglas, saying the actress “will help bring a dramatized version of the 9/11 Commission report to life” in The Path to 9/11. As the blog notes, however, the mini-series was shot last summer in Toronto and Hamilton and is completely finished.

Though such lazy reporting is wholly depressing, eTalkeSucks turns it into a daily dose of comedic ranting. But if the popularity of the blog keeps spreading, eTalk’s producers definitely won’t be laughing.

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