Coldplay's Chris Martin Considered That He Might Be Gay as a Teen

Chris Martin has opened up to Rolling Stone about being homophobic when he was growing up, and how, for awhile, he thought he might have been gay.

The Coldplay frontman shared that he went to boarding school when he was younger, and encountered a certain subset of classmates that always called him gay because of the way he walked.

“When I went to boarding school, I walked a bit funny and I bounced a bit, and I was also very homophobic because I was like, ‘If I’m gay, I’m completely fucked for eternity,’” Martin said, referring to his religious upbringing.

“I was a kid discovering sexuality,” he added. “‘Maybe I’m gay, maybe I’m this, maybe I’m that, I can’t be this,’ so I was terrified.”

He said that as he was figuring out his sexuality for himself, classmates would “quite aggressively” call him “definitely gay,” and that that when on for a few years.

The homophobia of his classmates ultimately made him confront his own internal homophobia, coming to the conclusion at age 15 that if he was gay himself, that was okay.

“Just growing up a bit and having a bit more exposure to the world, thinking, ‘A lot of my heroes are gay,’ or whatever. Whatever they are, it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “So what that did was ease a big pressure.” He added that the experience, in turn, made him question the religion that had taught him being gay was wrong as well.

While Martin seems to have ultimately realized he’s not gay (or at least, he’s always exclusively been romantically linked to women in the public eye), the journey of coming to terms with internalized homophobia is something a lot of queers can relate to. And there’s always something refreshing about people discussing their willingness to have frank and honest conversations with themselves about their sexuality, even if they do end up on the heterosexual end of the scale.