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 public 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. 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.

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

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.