Stephen Fry says being gay felt like ‘a horror inside him’

Actor, broadcaster, and comedian Stephen Fry has opened up about what it felt like to grow up as gay at a time when it wasn’t as accepted as it is today.

He explained that literature about gay men gave him different perspectives, with some authors making him feel as if it wasn’t as “grim” as he might have thought.

Speaking to The Times, Fry said: “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. 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,” Fry continued.

He previously said that he struggled to keep his sexuality a secret during his teenage years.

The actor, known in particular for narrating the Harry Potter books on audiobook, publicly came out as gay in the 1980s and has been very open about this sexuality in the years since.

Despite coming out, he did not pursue any relationships for many years.

“In the Eighties, 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,” he said.

Fry said that being celibate during that time was “lucky” as he unfortunately lost “many friends” to the AIDS crisis.

Fry began a relationship with a man named Daniel Cohen back in 1995 and they were together until 2010, when they split up.

But, in 2012, Fry met Elliott Spencer “at a friend’s house” with Fry telling The Jonathan Ross Show that he “knew pretty much straight away that this was someone” he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Fry asked Spencer to marry him in a restaurant in London where Fry “put the rings on the prongs of a fork so he would see it as he started to eat”.

“Of course, he came back and he started chatting and he started playing with the fork and I thought, ‘For God’s sake look at the fork’ — you don’t really ever look at forks do you — and I thought, ‘He’s going to pick it up and the ring is going to fly off into that lady’s soup’,” Fry said.

Luckily, Spencer did notice the ring eventually and the couple were married in 2015 in a private ceremony in Dereham, Norfolk.

Spencer is 30 years younger than Fry but the two have said that the age gap doesn’t phase them at all.

Spencer previously said: “I don’t care what people think, Stephen is the love of my life, the light of my life.”