Derren Brown: ‘Coming out is a let-down’
TV illusionist Derren Brown believes that people worry too much about coming out.
“You walk around with something for years that you build into this huge secret but it isn’t reflected to how it is in other people’s eyes,” said Brown to the Independent on Sunday. “It’s so important to defuse that because it becomes a huge misery needlessly.
“There’s a nice quote by David Foster Wallace: ‘We’d worry a lot less about what other people think about us if we realised how seldom they do.'”
Brown said that there are pitfalls of labelling sexual orientation.
“It can be very liberating for some people, but can also slightly detract from the subtleties of sexuality,” he told The Metro. “If you’re not vegetarian, you suddenly get frustrated with vegetarians. Can’t you just decide you are not going to eat meat without putting a label on it? What if you suddenly decide you’re going to eat meat?”
In 2011, Brown revealed he “flirted” with a church that tries to cure gay people.
The magician said that before he came out in 2008, he spent time with the Living Waters movement, which offers healing to those with “same-sex attraction”.
In a PinkNews interview earlier this year, Brown said: “It’s so important to come out, because for those of us lucky to be in this part of the world it is usually such a non-event, but feels such a disproportionately huge event when you’re not out.
“I came out really late, and it’s just not worth doing it that late, you miss a lot of time. So if you’re not, just do! It’s fine, it’s quite easy, once you start you can’t stop.”
