Honourary Gay Award: Lorraine Kelly

Television presenter and journalist Lorraine Kelly continues to enjoy a successful career that already spans thirty years. Her daytime talkshow, Lorraine, has provided a platform for LGBT people to share their stories – and it’s for that reason we’re giving her our Honourary Gay Award at the 2015 Attitude Awards in association with Virgin Holidays.

It might be clichéd to call Lorraine the Queen of Daytime TV, but she is. Undisputed. And after 30 years in the business, she’s also become one of Britain’s cult gay icons. “It’s funny,” she chuckles, “my friends think it’s fantastic!” She’s always had gay friends but for her “they were just pals who happened to be gay.” Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that her show has always been a broad church and, oftentimes, one of the campest things on telly. “I’ve always said, whoever comes on my show, everybody gets treated the same. I don’t understand why anybody would get treated differently just because of their sexuality or their religion or their colour or whatever.”

“I don’t know, I think my show is quite gay sometimes.” Really, Lozza? “I think it’s quite gay every day. Who have we got on? Oh, we’ve got Judge Rinder on – he’s quite gay. And Dan Wootton’s on talking about showbiz. We’ve got Will Young on the day after that.” Has anyone ever called her a fag hag before? “Oh god, yeah, loads!”

She much prefers ‘Honorary Gay’, though: “I can retire now. My life is complete”.

You can read Paris Lees’ fantastic full interview with Lorraine in the new issue of Attitude, available to download from 11pm tonight (Wed October 14) from attitudedigital.co.uk and in shops from tomorrow morning.