Alan Carr: ‘Camp people like me are on the front line’

In the new January issue of Attitude Magazine – out in shops today – we sit down with Alan Carr backstage at Chatty Man for a hilarious, revealing chat. In this snippet, he takes on those who’ve criticised him in the past for presenting a stereotyped image of a gay man to the masses…

Gay people are traditionally very sensitive about how they’re represented on TV, and you’re one of the most prominent gay people on there. Do you feel a responsibility?

I get slagged off all the time. I think it’s sad really, I’ve had it and Graham Norton’s had it. I read this article about how we portray this grotesque idea of homosexuality, and kids are getting beaten up at school because of it, and that really hurt me because I’ve been through that, and it was really nasty. I’m not like these rugby players that come out once they’ve left the changing rooms. Camp people like me are on the front line, we’re getting beaten up, spat at, glasses nicked and smashed. So, for them to turn round and say that I’m a bad example is really insulting and wrong, so they need to back off with that. I didn’t get on the telly just because I’m camp, but everything on the telly is camp. Strictly is camp. Simon Cowell is camp. David Walliams is camp. I would like to be a rugby player, I would like to have more testosterone, but to tell a gay man to act more heterosexual is the most homophobic thing you can say. I think gays have been bullied and picked on and the self-loathing has stuck, they can’t get out of it. Other minorities stick together, but not the gays!

Do you think we worry too much about what other people think about us, as a community?

Look, you don’t want to be known as one of those minorities that don’t have a sense of humour, because people take it all underground. I keep Twitter to a minimum now because everyone is just offended by everything. We live in world where ISIS are throwing gay men off buildings and people are still moaning about how camp I am. I think the militant gays need to pick their battles a bit better.

On the flip side, do you think people look to you and Graham Norton as role models? You have great careers…

I don’t think anyone looks to me as a role model, but it must be easier now to see people on the telly. People want to be like Tom Daley or a rugby player. I get that, we’d all love to have Tom Daley’s figure. I’d love to be a bloody rugby player, but I’m not, and I’m not going to be made shit of because of what I am. It used to be ‘I am what I am’ – when did it change to ‘you’re not who I want you to be’? People have said about my stand up, ‘Oh, all he talks about is bumming and gay’, but I don’t. Yet an Irish comedian can talk for two hours about being Irish. I have to control that part or I become a gay stereotype. I deliberately don’t. I rein it in because I know people are almost waiting for me to say bumming! It’s batting perceptions.

Alan Carr, ‘Yap, Yap, Yap!’ Live is out now on Blu-ray™ and DVD. Alan Carr Chatty Man is on Friday nights, 10pm, Channel 4.

You can read our full interview with Alan, and a whole lot more, in the January issue of Attitude. It’s in shops now, available to download digitally from attitudedigital.co.uk and you can order a print copy from newsstand.co.uk/Attitude.