|
Evan Davis
|
Have you always been open about your sexuality in regards to your career and your public profile?
I never really mentioned being gay for the first two years after joining the BBC. It was around the time I joined Newsnight in 1997/1998 that I decided I should definitely be publicly gay. It wasn't a courageous choice, it just felt to me that it was going to be slightly better for me to control the process of coming out by being up-front about it. Around this time Gay Times asked me if I wanted to do an interview and I jumped at the chance. The climate was always going to be very favourable for me. I never expected any kind of backlash.
"I've never had any negative reactions to being gay at work. |
The fact that I am gay comes up in interviews with magazines and newspapers pretty much all the time. However, I'm always very keen that I don't want it to be the main feature. I have said before that I want to be a seen as a journalist who happens to be gay rather than a gay journalist. I'm not at all embarrassed about being gay, it's just that I don't particularly want the first or only thing that people associate me with to be that I'm gay. I think most people know and I'm very happy with that. I've never made a big issue of it. It was already really out there before I became better known on Today or Dragon's Den, therefore I never really had that big moment where I had to sit down and say, "I'm gay and I've been hiding it for the past 15 years", or anything like that. I don't think that I've ever been famous enough for any tabloid to be really interested in me, so I've never had the public coming out moment. The fact that it has always been out there means that the fact I'm gay has never been a revelation. "The tabloids actually seem more interested in |
When did you first realise that you were gay? Was it a particularly difficult or easy time for you?
"I agonised over coming out to myself. I was pretty tortured by it." I had a feeling that I might be gay just around and after puberty. For a couple of years I was tortured by that and tried hard to suppress any such desires I had. Then around the time I was doing my O-levels at about 15 or 16 I spoke to someone about the feelings I was having and he said that I should just enjoy them and shouldn't deny them anymore. I realised that when you do that and let yourself think about them, they're nice rather than horrible. That conversation was really helpful. I suddenly decided not to fight it anymore and decided that I was going to allow myself to welcome and enjoy the gay feelings I was having. It was like the flicking of a switch - I was no longer tortured. It was that quick for me - I simply decided not to fight the feelings any longer. For a year or so after that, I assumed I was bisexual because I had some feelings for women while I was struggling to suppress the homosexual feelings I was also having. But by the time I had gone to university I realised the feelings I had for women had been completely overtaken by those I had for men. So the final stage was when I was able to feel comfortable self-identifying as gay. |
How long after that point of self-realisation did you start to come out to those close to you?
At university some people knew I was gay and I think a lot of people suspected, however I wasn't out at all. After university when I was working in London I had a boyfriend but we weren't out with our relationship. It wasn't until I went to college in America that I came out and told everybody. In the States I had a friend, he was my best friend, and he was gay. We had been friends for about three months and we had never had 'that' conversation. When he came out to me, as a measure of how secretive I was about being gay, I still didn't come out to him. I did subsequently tell him though! I spent a summer in Los Angeles after this and had a boyfriend there who introduced me to his friends and parents and after that I was basically very open.
"Once I had come out to everyone in the States I decided that I needed to tell my parents." |
I returned home from America in September and said to myself that I would tell my family by Christmas. Lunchtime arrived on Christmas Day and I still hadn't done the deed, so to stay true to my self-imposed deadline I told them. I had already broken the news to one of my brothers during the drive to my parents the day before. In the car I told him that I was going to tell Mum and Dad something very important about myself and asked him if he could guess what it was. Without much hesitation he said, "You're gay." I told him that he was right and he suggested that I tell my parents in exactly the same way that I'd just told him and I took his advice.
"So as we were all sat around after lunch on Christmas afternoon, I told my parents that I |
My parents didn't guess, but my brother who I had told the previous day in the car did. He pretended he didn't already know and said, 'You're gay' - the second time he's guessed in as many days! It turned out to be a very helpful intervention because it meant that I didn't actually have to say those words. It certainly made things a bit easier for me. My other brother, who I'm convinced had already been told, managed to lighten the mood with the wry quip 'Thank God you're not black!'
I wouldn't say that my parents were negative in their reaction; it was more that they were shocked that they hadn't guessed. It obviously came completely out of the blue to them. They were clearly taken aback but the next morning they were totally supportive, very lovely about it and have been ever since.
Looking back on your experiences of coming out, would you have done anything differently?
I didn't come out until I was in my mid-twenties which meant that my parents missed out on the opportunity to meet boyfriends and to be part of that aspect of my life for all of those years. If I had managed to tell them when I was 18 they could have been a part of it too. "Looking at it now I think it would have been better if I'd have levelled with my parents when I was thinking I might be gay. It would have invited them to be part of the journey that I was on." The longer that you leave telling people, the harder it gets. You end up having to break two bits of news if you leave it too late; the first being that you're gay and the second that you have been leading a double life for quite some time. If you can tell people earlier then they're never going to feel that they've missed out on something that has been important to you for some years. Obviously it depends on the reaction you think you're going to get from people, but I'd say that if you're pretty certain that you'll tell them one day, you may as well make it sooner rather than later. It doesn't get any easier to do the more time you leave it. |
What other advice would you have for people who are considering coming out?
I personally think it's important to avoid jumping on people who might say something tactless. Clearly, bullying and intimidation is a completely different kettle of fish and should never be simply ignored, but you don't want to become the language police or anything like that. You want people to feel relaxed and not to feel that they need to tread on egg shells.
I think that the more casual you are when you come out the better the reaction will, particularly in regards to coming out to colleagues at work. When you start a new job, speak and act as though everybody already knows. So you don't necessarily tell people, you just say, "My boyfriend and I went to a movie on Saturday." People will be relaxed about it if you're relaxed about it. When you're too heavy about these things or too sensitive, you can create a vibe that makes others more self-conscious about it than they ought to really be. If you project an expectation that there may be some negativity you will create the negativity that you're afraid of.
"If you just expect that everyone will be cool with it, then it's much more likely that this will be the outcome. Obviously this isn't an absolute fixed rule of thumb but it is generally how I've found it to be." |
RUComingOut.com © March 2013
HTML Comment Box is loading comments...