Stephen Fry opens up about growing up gay: ‘My sexuality was a secret horror’
Stephen Fry is without doubt a national treasure. But while we know him as an erudite actor, writer and podcaster, the 67-year-old has recently written about his experience grappling with his sexuality as a teenager, and it’s something that many queer people will recognise.
Writing in The Times, Fry explained that growing up 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,” he explained.
Fry went on to say that he understood the humiliation and disgrace gay people experienced because of his affinity for Oscar Wilde. Fry would later go on to play the writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the 1997 biopic Wilde.
“I was so excited by my work that I forgot to have sex” – Stephen Fry
“Oscar Wilde had taught me that it would be a life of mockery, exile and secrecy,” Fry wrote in The Times.
“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.”
Elsewhere in the article, Fry said that during the 1980s he was known as “Celibate Stephen”.
“I was so excited by my work that I forgot to have sex,” he wrote. “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.”
He added: “In some ways, though, I was lucky: I lost many friends to Aids.”
Fry, who married his partner, the comedian and writer Elliott Spencer, in 2015, also wrote about how about how the couple’s age difference had taught him important lessons.
“Oscar Wilde once said that he loved the young because they have so much more experience,” he wrote. “I agree. Young people know more about the world than we do.”
Meanwhile, Fry will publish the final book in his bestselling Greek myths series, Odyssey, on 26 September.
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