Stephen Fry, who publicly came out as gay in the 1980s, has opened up on being gay as a teenager, saying there was “a horror swelling inside me”.
In an interview with The Times, the actor said: “In the 1980s, 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.
“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. I knew the disgrace and humiliation of gay people.”
He added: “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.”
Earlier this year, Stephen revealed that he does not want to live past 100 because he would “hate to be that lonely”.
Speaking about longevity to Evgeny Lebedev on his podcast Brave New World, Stephen admitted that he ‘likes the idea of death’, and it is the ‘idea of decay’ that shakes his boots.
He explained: “Personally, I’m not particularly interested in longevity for myself. I’m interested, as I think most people are, in the idea of an old age that is as pain-free as possible and where there isn’t too much cognitive loss…
“But I am not someone who wants to live longer than the rest of my friends.”
