Robbie Williams: The straight pop star who made space for my queer identity

While Williams is not gay, he notes that many of his musical influences have been

By Chris Azzopardi

I had already agreed to an interview with Robbie Williams before realizing he wasn’t queer at all. That’s on me. As a teenager who was fond of his anthemic ballad “Angel” and then saw him strip down to his briefs (and much less) in the “Rock DJ” video, I couldn’t help but hope he was.

Our pop idols have limited control over how we perceive them and their sexual identity (just ask Shawn Mendes, Harry Styles and even Taylor Swift), and in my wishful thinking as a gay kid growing up in the 1990s without much representation, I missed the part where Williams sued a British tabloid in 2005 for claiming he had a “secret gay lover” and performed a sex act on a man in a Manchester club bathroom. (The tabloid ultimately apologized and paid “substantial” damages to the pop star.)
Then I lost track of him for a while. Now, he’s the subject of an entire biopic, “Better Man,” where he’s portrayed by a CGI chimpanzee. Though human actors surround him in “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey’s film, this animal version of Williams serves as a symbol of his complex feelings about fame, as he contemplates how he sees himself in a world that often dictates the roles we’re supposed to play. For a time, Williams became something he wasn’t for me.

Our idols can only control their narrative to a certain extent, and when I finally connected with him during our video call and realized only hours before while researching that he is, in fact, completely straight, I learned that Williams is the kind of guy who, even if he wasn’t the representation I once hoped for as a struggling gay teen, would be proud to have your back.

“Look, if I fancied noshing some bloke off by the canal, I’d have noshed some bloke off by the canal,” he tells me, in response to my ask about the lawsuit, which he said he appreciated having the opportunity to respond to. “The visual of that, I am perfectly OK with; it was important for me to be me at the time. Just like it’s important for you to be you in every aspect and to be seen and to be heard.”

“I’m not disrespecting anybody or getting my handbag and going, ‘Heaven forbid that people think of this disgusting thing [about] me,’” he continues. If someone were to create an AI-imagined version of Williams engaged in a same-sex encounter (his exact words: “AI me doing it”), “I’ll watch it myself,” he says.

Williams’ honesty extends into “Better Man,” where we see a version of him that’s raw and vulnerable. It’s a portrayal grounded in his truth, not ours — or mine.

The film delves into the psychological toll of his fame and his constant struggle to escape the shadow of his father, Pete Conway, a beloved entertainer in the U.K. It’s a reminder that, for all his charisma, Williams is still just a man who grew up in a working-class town, trying to navigate a life that skyrocketed him to stardom in 1990 at just 16 years old, as the youngest member of the British boy band that would eventually become known as Take That. The film captures the group’s meteoric rise to fame, particularly within queer spaces. Williams recalls, “For the first 18 months, all we played were gay clubs.”

Williams quickly formed a deep connection with the queer community. When I ask him about his memories of performing at gay clubs while preparing for those scenes in “Better Man,” his laugh prompts me to delve further.

“OK, the laugh’s about this: It’s my first memory of being in a gay club when I’m 16,” he starts, amused by what he’s about to say but also acknowledging uncertainty about telling a story that “may not land.”

“I’m sat in a banquette in this part of the club where a curtain is pulled in front of it and it’s a makeshift dressing room. And I am sat by myself and there’s a man in the corner and he appears to be masturbating. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god. What?’ And I’m sort of frozen and I’m thinking, ‘But what do I do in this? I’m cool. Just be cool.” And it turns out it was a stripper and he was blowing his penis up for his performance. He wasn’t masturbating at all. And so that was sort of a memory flashback that I got.”

The film stops short of exploring that memory. Biographical movies, of course, often face limitations in delving into deeply personal stories. Williams offers “many different reasons” for this restraint.
“Lots of them being that a lot of people are still alive and will sue me and I can’t prove it in a court of law that it actually happened,” he says.

But Williams’ childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, a city in Staffordshire, England, gets plenty of attention. He tells me it’s “considered the hood in modern parlance or thereabouts,” and recalls that “‘gay’ was a slur and something to be feared and ridiculed.”

Life took a dramatic turn for him at 15, after his audition led him to Take That. Soon thereafter, he found himself being admired by half-naked gay men in clubs, a stark contrast that he vividly described as transformative: “I went from being in a place where I used to wonder which shoes to put on by how much violence was going to be at the place that I was going to — steel toe cap boots if it was going to be really bad — and then, all of a sudden, I was in this place of acceptance and warmth and silliness.”

It’s a place that Williams, who is now 50, is familiar with, and since his teen rise, he has come to understand his place in gay culture even, as he says, “I don’t understand the queer lifestyle, I’m not of it.”

“But,” he goes on, “I understand that I am accepted there and I’m loved and I’m wanted and I am needed. And from that moment on I know what my response to and of it is, which is gratitude.”
From an early age, Williams says he latched onto the queer community’s sense of playfulness and lightheartedness. “I have been mainly inspired by Black culture and gay culture,” he says. “And they are two things that I am incredibly grateful for to this day.

“As British people, we’re camp. We put on dresses. We go to these theater shows where women play guys and guys play women. And the people that are on the TV as you’re growing up are camp and are warm and silly. I’ll go back to that word ‘silly’ that means so much to me: I take silly very seriously,” he says.

He speaks highly of the “warmth of people” like Larry Grayson, a popular British comedian and TV presenter who was rumored to be gay, but only hinted at it toward the end of his life. “No one had a clue that he was gay, but it’s just so obvious now,” Williams says.

“And Freddie Mercury, who is an angel, and every time I see him represented on screen and in documentaries I just am gobsmacked of his very presence and his very being,” he adds. “And then, of course, you’ve got Elton. Boy George changed the world with one appearance on ‘Top of the Pops,’ which is our TV show. So you are surrounded and also influenced and informed — well, I was anyway, of how to act, how behave, and how to be gentle and warm and arch.”

During our interview, it became clear that Williams holds a deep respect for the LGBTQ+ community, offering insights that go beyond surface-level understanding. His connection to the queer community extends beyond performing at gay clubs; he actively seeks to understand the people who’ve been following him for decades.

“I suppose that there is a certain set of self-examination that has to be done because it’s forced upon you, that people in the straight community aren’t forced to do,” he says. “So I’m sure that that self-examination elevates you to a place that people wouldn’t normally have to have had done because you are forced to. There’s an elevation in thought because of the process that you’ve had to go through.”

He likens his journey of being understood by the public to mine, as a gay man, and says that the rumors surrounding him stem from his desire for his true self to be represented accurately and authentically. “I am bothered about being authentic, and so are you. You are bothered about being authentically you in a world that has told you you can’t be you. The world was telling me I couldn’t be me. And it was really important for me to say, ‘No, I’m going to be me and I’m going to be me 100%.’”
In 2013, the rumors he debunked were met with a quote from Williams, as expressed to The Daily Star, that acknowledged that he was “49 percent homosexual,” a remark that led The Guardian to criticize his reliance on stereotypes.

“I love musical theater and a lot of the other things that are often associated with gays. I am 49 percent homosexual and sometimes as far as 50 percent. However, that would imply that I enjoy having a particular sort of fun, which I don’t,” he said at the time.

And recently, while speaking to journalist Michael Cragg at The Guardian, Williams explained his reasoning for challenging the gay rumors made by a British tabloid via a lawsuit: “I was more sad. Not about gay accusations because look, I’ve done everything but suck a cock. Honestly, you’ve never met somebody that wants to be gay as much as me.”

“I was maligned, belittled, disrespected, hated, followed, harangued, phone-tapped,” he shares with me about his experiences with the British tabloids. “People on the payroll being told to give rumors about me, tell them where I was, people who were in the credit card companies. And my only way of representing myself at the time was to do a book, and the book would say everything about who I was. So I released this book as a way of going, ‘If you hate me, at least hate me for the right reasons.’”

“The same week that comes out,” he continues, “there’s a story in a newspaper about how I sucked some bloke’s dick by a canal. And now the only thing about that was I’d gone to great pains to tell everybody who I was, and here was this story saying I’m actually not telling people who I am and what I was. And that, not the fact that I’m by a canal on my knees, noshing off some bloke, I’m not bothered; the thing that pained me was, yet again, I’m telling my truth and I’m exposing myself so much, but there’s this thing representing me that isn’t true.”

However Williams chooses to identify, it’s clear he might not have been the man I thought he was when I was a teenager desperate for queer representation, but he is, at least, the first to admit that the truth, messy and imperfect as it may be, is the only thing that matters. And in a world that often demands we fit into predefined boxes, his journey is a reminder that we’re all just trying to be seen for who we truly are — no matter who that is.

Chris Azzopardi is the Editorial Director of Pride Source Media Group and Q Syndicate, the national LGBTQ+ wire service. He has interviewed a multitude of superstars, including Cher, Meryl Streep, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ and Billboard. Reach him via Twitter @chrisazzopardi.

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