I’m From Carnoustie, Scotland, UK – Video Story.

by Alan Cumming

I’m Alan Cumming and I grew up near Carnoustie in Scotland, the north east of Scotland. I grew up on a country estate where my dad was the head forester. I grew up in the middle of nowhere actually. I’m Alan Cumming and I’m from the middle of nowhere.  I don’t know why actually, I don’t really understand this but I never really felt any shame about my sexuality, about the idea that I found boys attractive as well as girls – that’s when I was becoming – having sexual thoughts. I remember kind of thinking of Elton John, Elton John in the 70’s, when he was all skinny and a coke head, before he went kind of more – big glasses. I remember thinking – “Cool, I think he’s hot.” I wouldn’t have used that word in those days, but – and I remember wondering if Elton John was gay and I probably wouldn’t have used that word either – don’t know what I would have thought it was, you know, but – would find me attractive? It’s so hilarious now, 30 years later – I run into Elton John at things, I’ve never told him. You know there’s a certain time when you’re famous that people, obviously are interested in you and your work and then it kind of transcends into the really interested in you as a person and your personally life as much, if not more, than your work – and so, it wasn’t until I came to America and started doing lots of big – you know, when you’re a new person, you’re fresh meat for the media and you get all these in depth probes and it became a big deal about my sexuality. And I never really talked about it in that way in public before. It just was never was a thing, anyways, so eventually I came to America and I did this – I came out on the cover of OUT magazine, so it was pretty splashy. Why I did this was cause there was so much speculation about my sexuality in the media here, which I find hilarious and also very American – you know, quite prurient and weird. So I decided I would talk about it finally, but in a forum that I thought it could be discussed properly and non sensationally and also deal with the whole kind of sexuality as a gray area, and not necessarily so black and white – you know what I mean? And my particular path being not quite so – I didn’t just always think I was gay and that was it. That’s why I did this. My coming out is this. And I went naked on the thing, cause I thought that would be – I was baring my soul, I was baring – but nobody got that. I remember going on talk shows and they’d have it up and go, “What?” And they thought this was my testicle. Conan O’Brien was fascinated by that. So my coming out is this in an official famous way, but I sort of, I dribbled into it in my real life.

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