Believe Me by Eddie Izzard

Author:Eddie Izzard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-30T14:16:53+00:00

THE ART OF SELF-ANALYSIS

Coming out didn’t happen overnight. It was a process.

I have found this a few times in life: Someone says a thing to you that is pertinent and you absolutely resist it in that moment. Then later you decide that that was absolutely right.

After thinking for some time about the unthinkable idea of telling everyone about my sexuality, I decided I had to act on it. I was living at 37 Calabria Road in Islington, London, just by Highbury Corner. I was living with a bunch of medical students, one of whom was Gary, who became Dr. Gary, my doctor friend who came with me to South Africa in March 2016 to help me with my twenty-seven marathons in twenty-seven days.

I was living on the top floor of the house, and my room was shared with a big water tank. Half the room was a water tank, and the other half was me.

It was 1984 and I was trying to get my career going, but nothing was happening. I had no work, no prospect of work, and no job. I’d dropped out of university three years earlier, I’d done a number of projects and shows at Sheffield University* and at the Edinburgh Fringe, but now I was in London. It had to work in London. But I had no clue of where to begin.

When I looked at my calendar then, it was so empty that all I was doing was breathing—compared with when I look at my calendar now and it is so busy that I can hardly breathe.

A distinct part of starting out as a freelancer, or doing any kind of job or thing you set up on your own, is listing work, or for us “gigs,” in diaries.* And also saying to bookers that your diary is really full but you could squeeze them in. A lot of my early days of gigs involved me staring at completely blank pages and saying to bookers, “I don’t know. This Tuesday? Yeah, okay, I’ll move things around and let’s do Tuesday.”

Empty, empty—months of emptiness. Just empty, blank pages of no work at all.

Much later, I managed to do my first tour when I found that my diary was quite full with individual gigs that I had gotten in different ways. So I realized that if I wrote all those gigs out on a poster—that would be a tour. And then people would say, “Wow, he’s doing a tour,” and then I would be doing a tour. It was the active use of confidence. It was the first time since Edinburgh Fringe of 1981 that I had used this logic.

My first tour in the early ’90s was called “Loose Connection of Dates Tour.” But in ’84, going into ’85, I don’t think I even had a diary.

• • •

BUT BACK TO COMING OUT.

The process started with self-analysis. Which meant lying on my bed to see if I could work out why I felt different: why I felt like I had boy genetics and girl genetics instead of just boy genetics.

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