Stephen Fry

For a long time one of the few openly gay public figures in the UK, asked when he first acknowledged his sexuality, Stephen joked:

​

"I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, 'That's the last time I'm going up one of those'."

​

In 2009, Stephen published ‘a letter to his younger self’ in the Guardian, in which he wrote of how easy he found it to be out at Cambridge, in stark contrast to the experience of many other young people at that time:

​

“Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths: expulsion, crime and prison - nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the Regency rakes used to say, "make a recover" and find yourself at university, where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick, for the university is Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy-petting and homo hysteria. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being "out" is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. Before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department, as in so many, you are, young Stephen.

​

But don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds (the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will).”