British chat show host Graham Norton has opened up about his marriage — and his mother’s joy at seeing him tie the knot.
Despite his reputation for pushing the envelope with guests and encouraging them to tell candid stories, Norton, 61, has kept fairly quiet about his own relationship.
He married Scottish filmmaker Jonathan ‘Jono’ McLeod in July 2022. They met around six years before. They got hitched at the historic Bantry House in West Cork. Norton was born in Dublin but grew up in the town.
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Same-sex marriage became legal in Ireland following a referendum in 2015.
Norton was a guest yesterday on the Queerphonia podcast with Jack Guinness. Growing up in predominantly Catholic Ireland in the 1970s and 80s, gay marriage was something Norton probably never imagined happening.
“I grew up in West Cork and now here I am and my mother’s there,” he said. Norton’s mom, Rhoda Walker, attended his wedding.
“No matter how accepting parents are and how much they love you and how much they don’t care that you’re gay and they support you in all your gay relationships they are being robbed.
“As parents they had an expectation that they one day might dance at your wedding. Obviously, it’s great for us, we get to get married.
“But it’s great for all the people who love you, that they get to share in that stuff that for decades they believed could never happen.”
Norton makes a valid point. There will be many gay couples whose parents were never able to see them wed because they died before same-sex marriage became legal. The majority of the world’s population still does not have access to same-sex marriage. It’s an inequality not only for the LGBTQ+ individuals concerned but also for loved ones who want to see them tie the knot.
“Till death us do part”
This is not the first time Norton has opened up about his wedding. He told The Guardian in 2023 that he’d joked at the ceremony about his age (59 at the time).
“I had a joke in my speech: the vows are much more manageable. ‘Till death do us part’ seems more achievable at our age.
“If you get married at 23, that’s a big ask. We only have to put up with each other for a couple of decades. And then I’ll be out of here.”
San Francisco and AIDS
Elsewhere on the Queerphonia podcast, Norton talked about his early life. He dropped out of university after suffering a mental breakdown. Instead, aged 20, he spent a year in San Francisco in 1983 living in a hippie commune.
He remembered it as a “frightening” time. The city was in the grip of the early AIDS epidemic and had just closed down its bathhouses.
“The fear of AIDS had sort of taken over San Francisco. So for me, that was a much more frightening place (than London) oddly. And then when I came to London, it was only starting to appear.”
He remembers people vanishing from his social circle. It really hit home when a friend fell ill.
“I remember mutual friends sort of sitting me down and telling me Sid was sick,” Graham said.
“He was the big loss for me and for our little circle, he was the one who really made you think ‘Oh my god’.
“And it all came back to us when we got into Covid, that thing of that you’ve got to take responsibility of yourself and in doing that, you take responsibility for other people.”
Besides his work on TV, Norton has pivoted into books in recent years. His most recent novel, Frankie, dropped earlier this year.
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