Being gay gave me years of misery but an education in literature. By the time I was 13 my sexuality was a secret horror swelling inside me and I was desperately trying to find out who I was, what future there was for me.
English actor Stephen Fry, 67, speaking to The Times about growing up gay and abstaining from sex during his twenties.
I knew the disgrace and humiliation of gay people. Oscar Wilde had taught me that it would be a life of mockery, exile and secrecy. And then there were those writers, like EM Forster or Somerset Maugham, who held their heads up high and made me feel that it wasn’t all slime and grim mackintosh people in a terrible world of darkness.
In the ’80s, I was known as ‘Celibate Stephen.’ I was so excited by my work that I forgot to have sex. It was also fear: I always felt rejected in gay bars. I couldn’t dance; I didn’t look cool. All I wanted was to sit and talk. In some ways, though, I was lucky: I lost many friends to AIDS.
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Stephen Fry recalls his very crotch-grabbing audition for ‘Gladiator’
Spoiler alert: he didn’t get the role.
