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Tim Gunn gets personal with Larry King
Tim Gunn just breaks my heart a little bit.
I’m so happy for his success on Project Runaway and beyond and about the fact that he won the Emmy on Sunday.
But he’s had so much pain in his past connected with being gay.
During his recent appearance on Larry King Now, Tim said he never discussed being gay with his family and that he has such ‘respect and admiration’ for young people these days who are ready to declare themselves as out.
It’s something he never even considered in his younger years.
‘It was a very different time. It was a very different era,’ he said. ‘And I had a lot of fears about being gay, about what that actually meant.’
Tim once attempted suicide as a teen and says he had ‘already presented my family with a lot of disappointments.’
‘I didn’t feel that I wanted to present them with yet this,’ he said. ‘It’s very funny, though. My mother died two years ago. And I think she eventually figured out my sexuality, but we never talked about it. And my father was gone long before. We never once talked about it.’
Tim says his ‘moment of reckoning’ for even accepting himself as being gay came when he entered into his first relationship as a grown man.
That nine-year relationship ended in the early 80s and Tim had previously shared that he has been celibate since then. He told King he does not miss sex.
Comments
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Joe says:
Tim is a terrific guy. So glad you mentioned that he won the Emmy since I hadn’t read that anywhere else. For people Tim’s (and my) age, it most certainly was a different time and era back in those days. When I sit back and see how far things have progressed for gay people in my lifetime, I am happy and proud to have been a part of the generaton that really got the ball rolling. :-]
bandanajack says:
i admire and respect tim gunn as a talented artist and decent human being, but i have to address his statement “it was a different time then”. i am a full ten years older than mr gunn, and it was not at all as impossible to come out, especially by the time he was in the fashion industry. while i may have been an early outlier, i was out as “bisexual” in the mid 60’s (my apologies to real bisexuals, i was one of those that had to touch that base first before acknowledging that my membership in that group was stretching a point to its extremes thus creating the meme that a bisexual is just a timid queer.)
mr gunn’s denial and then refusal to acknowledge that he was gay was a product of his own fears rather than a product of his times. i was far from alone by the 70’s and not coincidentally, the sexual revolution.