Stephen Fry Reveals He Was Called 'Celibate Stephen' as Teenager

Actor Stephen Fry, 67, came out in the '80s, but he said his road to feeling comfortable accepting himself has been long and hard-won.

According to him, as a teenager he was known as "celibate Stephen" because he always felt being gay meant there was a "horror" inside him.

"I was so excited by my work that I forgot to have sex. It was also fear: I always felt rejected in gay bars," he told The Times. "I couldn't dance; I didn't look cool. All I wanted was to sit and talk. In some ways, though, I was lucky: I lost many friends to AIDS."

Fry also at times felt "rejected," he said.

"Being gay gave me years of misery but an education in literature," he 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."

According to Fry, writer Oscar Wilde showed him that being gay could lead to 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," he said.

Fry shared earlier this year that he has no plans to live to 100 because he would "hate to be that lonely."

"If everybody – my family and friends – lived into their 120s, then maybe I'd be quite happy to pass 100," he said. "But as it is, I would hate to be that lonely Flying Dutchman figure so beloved of history."

Fry married his partner Elliott, who is 30 years his junior, in January, 2015. However, they haven't been spotted together in nearly five years.

Read Fry's full interview is in The Times.