Ian Johnson, Out Now
November 18, 2007
TOPICS: Lesbian and gay media market. Graham Norton. Out gay celebrity. GLBT market celebrities. Gay community marketing. Lesbian and gay market. Graham Norton article in The Observer UK media newspaper. Graham Norton is one of those people that seems to have been around forever but in fact has been a celebrity for just on ten years.
He is funny, intelligent, successful, single -- and gay.
His TV shows in the UK market have generally been very successful market place hits including So Graham Norton and V Graham Norton, The Big Picture on BBC TV and his tonight show chat program The Graham Norton Show currently running to great acclaim on BBC-2 on Thursday nights. That plus his regular outings as host of light entertainment programs have made Norton into a very versatile celebrity.
He is very family-friendly in the early evenings and very wicked and camp in his evening shows.
But more than any of that -- he is very funny. And certainly very gay.
In past years, gay celebrities such as Norton have often found it hard to cross-over to the mainstream, and certainly to do so with the level of success Norton has enjoyed. His current closest gay media market comparitor in terms of simultaneous market success in gay and non-gay markets would likely be Ellen DeGeneres in the US market.
DeGeneres however enjoyed significant market success in the mainstream market first -- as a closeted gay celebrity -- for some years, whereas Norton seems to have burst forth from his closet from the very outset of his TV career.
Learning what makes him tick is a worthwhile thing, as his success in the UK market as an out gay celebrity has been impressive from the very beginning. Graham Norton has successfully positioned himself as an icon of both the gay market and the non-gay market.
And his stock-in-trade in both markets is talent.
Today's UK newspaper The Observer has a terrific magazine bio feature on Norton. For some relaxed and fun Sunday reading into what makes a successful out gay star like Norton tick, here's an extract:
The name's Norton. Graham Norton.
Norton's childhood, though not unhappy, did seem to suffer from 'small-town' malaise.
'Hurrah for telly, movies and magazines,' he says with feeling. Joking apart, he did sound a bit sad and isolated - how much of it does he think was to do with his sexuality? He shrugs: 'I've heard other gay people say when they were growing up they felt "foreign". Growing up, I was able to label these feelings as: I'm a Protestant [living in a staunchly Catholic Irish neighborhood]. It wasn't until I left, I thought: Oh, those weren't Protestant feelings.'
There was an adolescent encounter with a male foreign-exchange student, but Norton found he couldn't tell his parents he was gay and eventually ended up more or less 'coming out' on TV, simply because his behaviour was so obvious. 'Which I don't recommend to anyone.'
His mother's reaction was: 'It's such a lonely life,' and his family, whom he describes as 'quite Fifties', were to prove more relaxed than he could have hoped.
In those early years, was it that Norton didn't want to be gay? There was a fling with an older woman, a tutor, and another year-long relationship with an American girl.
'I don't think anyone wants to be gay,' says Norton.
'For a cosmopolitan child living in London, on the right side of town, maybe it wouldn't cost them a second thought. But when I was growing up, it did cost me a second thought. I thought I'd be a social pariah. Back then, if you saw a gay man in a film, he was the baddie, or he was going to be killed, or he'd kill himself.'
He smiles wryly. 'You knew it wasn't going to end well for the gay character 100 per cent of the time.'
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