1985. Kenny Everett ‘comes out’
Kenny Everett was a much-loved British comedian and DJ who courted controversy throughout his career.
He was sacked from his job at the BBC for suggesting on-air that the wife of the then Transport Minister had passed her driving test by bribing the examiner: he was (understandably) condemned when he told Young Conservatives, ‘Let’s Bomb Russia’; and he used blatant sexual innuendo in his TV programmes.
But despite this apparent ‘devil-may-care’ attitude he was seriously screwed up when it came to his own sexuality.
Despite being homosexually active from at least the 1970’s, he relentlessly pursued a woman – Lee Middleton – until she married him. Yet, even then, he continued to have male lovers and this caused the eventual breakdown of his marriage in the 1980’s.
He remained reluctant to come out, in spite of the fact that his homosexuality was one of the worst kept secrets around. When he finally did, in 1985, it was in such a self-loathing manner that he managed to get a lot of gay people – myself included – seriously offside.
At some stage he gave an interview to a gay magazine (Gay Times, I think) and his homophobia was so intense that the journalist who interviewed him actually put a disclaimer at the beginning of the interview! By that point he had been homosexually active for many years and yet he still seemed determined to see anything positive about this. In consequence, his ‘coming out’ merely showed homosexuals as sad and self-loathing.
It’s unfortunate that it seems to have taken a diagnosis of HIV and then, subsequently, AIDS to trigger a more self-assured stance. Hopefully people will remember him for this positivity and assertiveness in the face of real adversity.
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