Alan Carr: ISIS was responsible for my gay wedding
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Alan Carr has said that ISIS’s deadly homophobic spree played a large part in making him decide to get married.
The British comedian wed his long-term partner Paul Drayton earlier this year in a “small, private ceremony,” after 10 years together.
The 41-year-old performer has been more outspoken about gay rights lately, and admitted last year that he still has guilt about being gay.
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He said this change in attitude was down to various ways in which international regimes – including ISIS, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – have delighted in attacking and even killing LGBT people in recent times.
Speaking to The Times, he said: “I think over the last two years there has been a real nastiness with Trump, with Isis throwing gays off roofs, with Russia saying gay people are mentally ill.
“You can sort of see the enemy now,” he added.
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It was because of this realisation, Carr said, that he said yes when Drayton proposed to him while the pair were on holiday in Indonesia.
“I was never going to get married,” he said, “but now there are people out there who hate you, so [I thought] f*** it — I’m going to get married.”
Carr, who said he and his husband still didn’t want to have children, also said that he felt “sorry for people who are camp. It gets looked down upon, it’s seen as very frivolous and throw-away.”
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He continued: “British people do love camp, but when it is incorporated into a male persona, they are like, ‘Oh have a day off,’” adding that when someone is simply flamboyant, “people think you are a moron.”
The comedian said that he was “always, always, always camp” growing up.
This was made clear to him when he saw a recording of himself performing in school play when he was nine.
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“I had never seen myself before and I was basically voguing my way through Macbeth,” he recalled.
“It was like a punch in the stomach. I thought: ‘That’s why people are calling me ‘bender’.’”
But eventually, Carr decided to turn this feature of his personality into a strength.
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“People laughed at me, not with me,” he explained. “When you look like this and have this voice, you have to turn a negative into a positive; you sort of make the jokes before anyone else does.”
He said that his father, who played football for Northampton Town, “definitely wasn’t homophobic. He just really wanted me to be a footballer.”
