Rupert Everett: Why do ‘queens’ want to go and get married in churches?
Rupert Everett has told the Guardian – in another substantial rant – that he remains mystified on why same-sex couples would like to have religious marriage ceremonies.
“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.”
Everett also said that he lived in “absolute terror” of contracting HIV during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Everett revealed to the Guardian that he once had a meltdown after mistaking a red mosquito bite for an HIV-associated lesion.
“Having been such a shag and a slut in the 1970s, then AIDS came along and I spent six years in sheer terror… That was part of my landscape then, this terror that was always there. Nearly everyone I slept with was dying, you couldn’t test until about 1986, and that was really the big period of my life.
The 53-year-old continued: “That’s what all queens went through who’d been in those days beforehand, when everyone fucked everyone just as a matter of course… Terror makes you behave very strangely. People have forgotten about that. It was absolute terror.”
Everett told the Telegraph, at the recent launch of his new autobiography, that his controversial remarks about same-sex parenting means: “All the queens out there now have it in for me. I’m loathed by them. I’m having to take evasive action”.
The actor has received a number of death threats since saying last month that he couldn’t think of “anything worse” than having two gay dads.
