Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry (born 24 August 1957), or Sir Stephen John Fry in full, is an English actor and broadcaster. In December 2006, he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award. A year later in May 2007, The Independent on Sunday Pink List named him the second most influential gay person in Britain. That same year, Broadcast magazine listed Fry at number four in its "Hot 100" list of influential on-screen performers, describing him as a polymath and a "national treasure".

Among many other acting credits, Fry was the original host of the comedy panel show QI (2003–2016), for which he was nominated for six British Academy Television Awards. In 2006, the British public ranked Fry number 9 in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.

As a public figure who appears regularly on British national television, Stephen Fry is a particularly significant figure in the LGBTQ+ community; most notably for having been an openly gay man since the 1980s when homosexuality was highly stigmatized regardless of age. As Fry has explained in own words:

By the time I was 13, my sexuality was a secret horror swelling inside me and I was desperately trying to find out who I was, what future there was for me.

I knew the disgrace and humiliation of gay people. Oscar Wilde had taught me that it would be a life of mockery, exile, and secrecy. And then there were those writers, like EM Forster or Somerset Maugham, who held their heads up high and made me feel that it wasn’t all slime and grim mackintosh people in a terrible world of darkness,” Fry continued.

Stephen Fry and Age-Gap Sex

Stephen Fry's very first public production was a play called Latin! or Tobacco and Boys (1979), about the love affair of a boy of thirteen and a schoolmaster at a prep school. Written in 1979 and first produced at Cambridge, where Fry was then an undergraduate aged twenty-two, his play went on to win first prize at the next Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the early 2000s, there was minor backlash over a theater company's revival of the play, led by then a local Conservative councillor James Gilchrist who branded it "smut". Activated Image, the company behind the revival, was reportedly "so amused by the furore that it has posted Mr Gilchrist's criticisms on its website."

What Stephen Fry pulls off so brilliantly is to cover this topic in a way which is not in any way shocking," said artistic director Adam Barnard. "People have said things like, 'You shouldn't have paedophilia on stage because it encourages people to do that.' Well, people don't say, 'You mustn't have Hamlet on stage because it encourages people to commit murder.'

In his autobiography Moab is My Washpot (1997), Fry wrote openly about his own sexual feelings and experiences in childhood. As a teenager, Fry attended the boys' boarding school of Uppingham in Rutland. He described both the lust for pretty junior boys commonly expressed by their seniors, and his own seduction and defloration by an older prefect during his first year there, at age 13. At Uppingham, he explained:

You could openly admire a pretty boy, and all the middle and senior boys did. It was a sign of manliness indeed to do so.

'Just ten minutes alone, me and that arse...' a sixth former might say as a cute junior walked past. ‘That’s all I ask,’ he would add looking skywards in prayer.

‘Oh no!’ One senior would clutch another as they caught sight of a comely new boy, ‘I’m in love. Save me from myself.’

I think that the logic of it was that new boys, pretty boys, were the closest approximation Uppingham offered to girls. They were hairless in the right places and sweet and cute and comely like girls, they had fluffy hair and kissable lips like girls, they had cute little bottoms like ... well, they had cute little bottoms like boys, but hell, any port in a storm, and there’s no storm like pubescence and no port like a pretty boy’s bum. All that public swooning however, was no more than macho posture. It proved their heterosexuality.

Some boys however had the most definite reputation for being queer, in the fully snarled out, spat out sense of the word as it was then used — before, that is to say, its triumphant reclamation by the proud homosexuals of today.

Later, in July 2014, Fry faced backlash in news media after criticizing Operation Yewtree at a Labour Party conference. Reportedly, he urged the crowd to remember some of "the essential values which the Labour Party stands for," including that "people are innocent until proven guilty." He pointed out that fewer than half of those accused at the time had been found guilty, and called for tougher laws to prevent false allegations. After citing Magna Carta, the 799-year-old foundation of British constitutional rights, Fry said that "fewer than half" of the people held under Yewtree had been found guilty – before identifying Sir Keir Starmer in the audience for criticism. From the vantage point of 2025, singling out Kier Starmer was arguably correct. He would later become the Prime Minister of the UK in 2024, becoming infamous and widely reviled for overseeing the passage of the "Online Safety Act" (OSA) - one of the most sweeping and authoritarian pieces of legislation ever passed in world history.

In 2016, Fry faced backlash after appearing on the Rubin Report, hosted by conservative talk-show host Dave Rubin. In the final segment of his appearance, Fry criticized the hypersensitivity of educational institutions towards past works of literature and art dealing with currently taboo or sensitive subjects - e.g. rape, killing, and racism - suggesting that such people should "grow up" and stop pitying themselves.

He argued:

One fears that the advances of the enlightenment are being systematically and deliberately pushed back on. [...]

Life is complicated, and nobody wants to believe that life is complicated. [...] I suppose you might call it the infantilism of our culture. [...] They want to be told [what to think] ... This is 'good', this is 'bad'. [...]

And on student campuses... There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape. It has in an interesting Latin root. [... Of course,] they're terrible things, [but] they have to be thought about clearly.

But if you say you can't watch this play, you can't watch Titus Andronichus - you can't read it in a Shakespeare class - you can't read Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, and it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because your uncle touched you in a nasty place.

Well, I'm sorry. It's a great shame, and we're all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place. You get some of my sympathy. But your self pity gets none of my sympathy, because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one's going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself.

Rubin replied "I love that!", before ending the show. After a media frenzy ensued, Fry publicly "apologized unreservedly" for his comments.

From Oscar Wilde to other 'classic' writers in the gay canon, it is clear that many of Fry's stated inspirational figures are those who also happened to write sympathetically on - and in some cases participated in - pederasty. This is unsurprising since, as historians such as Kadji Amin and Rachel Hope Cleves have argued, pederasty was the dominant form of male same-sex practice until the 1950s. Fry's own intimate knowledge of classic literature on these themes can be gleamed from an anecdote involving Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita, appearing in the acknowledgements section of historian Nicholas Basannavar's 2019 PhD thesis. While Basannavar's specious arguments about PIE have received critique from the organization's most well-known Chairperson Tom O'Carroll, on Lolita and Stephen Fry Basannavar wrote that,

A snatched ten minute chat with Stephen Fry (during which we recited the opening lines of Lolita to each other) gave the project a strange but compelling impetus at a key moment. (p. 4).