James Kavanagh has opened up about the moment he came out as gay to his family.
The TV presenter came out to his mother Margaret when he was a young teenager.
Speaking on Doireann Garrihy’s The Laughs Of Your Life podcast, James said: “So I came out when I was in second year. I just wanted to say it to move on.”
“It felt like I was living a lie, it really did feel like I was living this lie,” he explained.
“I went down and my mum was watching Coronation Street Omnibus. I was like, ‘Pause the TV. I have something to tell you’.
“I think because coming out in movies and soaps was a big deal, I felt like I had to do a big deal as well.”
“I kind of threw myself on the couch and I was like, ‘Turn the TV off’. My mum was like, ‘Right’ and she just muted it.”
“I was like, ‘I have something to tell you, I’m gay’. and she just goes, ‘We know’, and turned Coronation Street back on,” the 31-year-old recalled.
“I was half devastated it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t going to be this big thing but I was actually really delighted in later times of how she handled it.”
“It was nothing and I think that was premeditated obviously because she didn’t want to make it a big deal, it was like talking about the weather.”
“My dad was told the next day. Everyone knew,” he said. “Everything got easier from then.”
James also opened up about the struggles he faced in secondary school, as he tried to hide his sexuality from his classmates.
He said: “I always think about this. I am so close now to what I was like in primary school. I am not what I was like in secondary school. Secondary school was kind of oppressive for me.”
“When I was in primary school, yeah, I knew I was gay but it was never really discussed. I don’t think sexuality was a thing.”
“Whereas when I went into secondary school, it was like, ‘Are you gay?’. It was the first thing someone asks you.”
“I would’ve never stood up in the middle of secondary school and wanted that attention on me because I went insular,” he explained.
“I was like a hedgehog I wanted to be anonymous in secondary school because I didn’t want that attention on me. I didn’t want to be found out.”
“I think it took me a while to get over that and kind of, weirdly, go back to the way I was in primary school.”
The Dublin native continued: “I think everything just changes when you graduate [primary school]. It becomes about everything else.”
“It becomes about who you’re dating, who you’re seeing, who you want to be seen with or whatever.”
“I found it quite isolating as well as the only, I thought I was anyway, the only gay in secondary school… No one wanted to be seen with me either really, to a point.”
“Now I did make really good friends but at that point, the first couple of years it was like, ‘Oh if you’re standing near the gay then you’re gay as well’, kind of thing.”
Despite his struggles, James doesn’t hold a grudge against his old classmates.
The 31-year-old explained: “I went to three different schools.”
“The first school was an all boys school and again when I’m talking about this, I’m not blaming the people I was in the class with or anything.”
“It was an overall atmosphere that was just [there] back then…”
“It was a societal thing so I never blame the people I was at school with. There was just this homophobic air anyway.”
