British actor Rupert Everett, who stunned the LGBT community two weeks ago when he told London’s Sunday Times that he could not “think of anything worse” for children than being raised by two gay fathers, has more to say on that subject, and same-sex marriage, as he peddles his new memoir, “Vanished Years.”
In his latest interview, appearing in The Guardian this past week, Everett speaks with Decca Aitkenhead to “explain what he meant.”
“For me, being gay was about wanting to do the opposite of the straight world, so I think that’s where my problems in this particular area come from.
“For me, personally, the last thing I would like in the entire world would be to go through cocktailing my sperm with my boyfriend and finding some grim couple in Ohio who are gluten-free and who you pay $75,000 to have your baby. To me it feels absolutely hideous. But that’s me, just me. I’m not having a go at gay couples who do.
“I think if Elton and David want to have babies, that’s wonderful. I think we should all do what we want. Isn’t there a middle way, where you can just say, ‘Not for me, but it doesn’t matter’? But no, everything’s sort of turned into al-Qaida. I’m sure I’m going to be nail-bombed. David Furnish is probably going to send Patrick Cox with a bomb and blow up the theatre.”
Aitkenhead writes that “Everett has always blamed all his false starts and failures on Hollywood’s prejudice against an openly gay leading man.”
Any suggestion that self-sabotage might have played a part has made Everett terribly indignant in the past, she writes, referring to when Everett — at the very height of his “My Best Friend’s Wedding” renaissance — scandalized America by telling a tabloid about his days as a “rent boy.”
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And on the subject of marriage, Everett, 53, has this:
“Why do queens want to go and get married in churches? Obviously this crusty old pathetic, Anglican church – the most joke-ish church of all jokey churches – of course they don’t want to have queens getting married. It’s kind of understandable that they don’t; they’re crusty old calcified freaks.
“But why do we want to get married in churches? I don’t understand that, myself, personally. I loathe heterosexual weddings; I would never go to a wedding in my life. I loathe the flowers, I loathe the fucking wedding dress, the little bridal tiara. It’s grotesque. It’s just hideous. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later.
“It’s just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster.”
Since his first interview, Everett said he has received hate mail and death threats.
“All the queens out there now have it in for me. I’m loathed by them,” he told the Telegraph.
