Morrissey has always toyed with preconceptions about gender and sexuality, and despite an unusual degree of openness in his new memoir, he’s not about to let himself get pinned down now.
The former Smiths leader’s Autobiography, just released across the pond, reveals Moz had an intimate two-year relationship with photographer Jake Walters. Although the book never specifies whether the two men were lovers, the detail still led to reports of a “gay” relationship.
As Slicing Up Eyeballs notes, the singer has since addressed his sexuality in a statement via unofficial mouthpiece True to You: “Unfortunately, I am not homosexual,” he writes from Sweden. “In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course … not many.” (Italics his. Of course.)
Morrissey once described himself as celibate and is famously close-lipped about his personal life. In Autobiography, he writes of meeting Walter in the ’90s, “For the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, as, finally, I can get on with someone.” He also writes, “Jake and I neither sought nor needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come.” Another passage has Moz quipping, to a woman who says he and Jake must be either lovers or tightknit brothers, “Can’t brothers be lovers?”
The recently ailing artist stoked controversy with remarks on sexuality earlier this year. “If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars because homosexual men would never kill other men,” he told Rookie. “Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.”
