Zachary Quinto didn't come out as gay until he was at college.

He said: "The question of when I knew I was gay and when I accepted I was gay are two very different conversations. I suppose I knew what was going on. I just wasn't ready to look at it.

"In college, I'd say. [When he came out]. Once I broke free of the expectations of my upbringing, my socioeconomic exposure to ....I grew up with a pretty suburban, Catholic upbringing. I feel once I was able to create my own life and explore my own path ... um ... then I started to turn my attention to fully understanding and accepting who I am."

The 39-year-old star - who has been dating model Miles McMillan for around two years - said he didn't have any gay role models while growing up.

He told the Guardian newspaper: "I feel like - I guess I don't - it's interesting. I don't know. I guess part of me feels like my sexuality is one aspect among many aspects of my personality and I've integrated it over time. It has never occupied for me a space where I needed to aspire to some other version of myself other than who I was. I denied it for so long that I didn't really allow myself to ... um ... to fully inhabit that part of my life. I just ... I don't know.

"I guess. I don't know. I didn't really ever ... My experience of myself was not about that."

Zachary also revealed how he is so pleased he had a childhood without technology.

He said: "I'm much saner and probably better adjusted than I would have been had I had the technology as a kid. We're more fractured as a society than we've ever been. We carry these devices round in our pockets and stare at them every 30 seconds. It's a slippery slope."