The Reverend Richard Coles is coming out for the third time. The first, at 16, was when he told his parents he was gay, after a fashion, by playing them Tom Robinson’s Glad to Be Gay until they guessed. (Although he wasn’t glad: a year later they were visiting him in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt.) Second, after he and Jimmy Somerville enjoyed two hit singles with the Communards in the 1980s, and lived well off it, he had to tell his baffled friends that he had become a Christian. Now, having established himself fairly securely as Britain’s top media vicar, the calm voice that chips in on QI and soothingly presides over Radio 4’s Saturday Live, he has decided to make another announcement. He is not the lovable uncle we had thought. Or, at least, he hasn’t always been.
Because to open Coles’s new memoir, Fathomless Riches, is to gaze upon a past made up almost entirely of enthusiastic sinning, by no means all of it repented. The book begins with him leaving his family on Christmas day to go looking for sex in a lay-by. It covers the disintegration of his and Somerville’s principled stab at socialist pop into a travelling orgy of excess and jealousy.
There was quite a bit of casual sex, although there would have been a lot more, and perhaps some serious sex, Coles, now 52, reflects wistfully, if he’d only been less uptight and egotistical. By the early 1990s he was hammering speed and ecstasy in especially large quantities, though yea, he did administer drugs of all kinds unto himself. Most shockingly of all, at the height of the Aids panic, with friends dying every week, he told the people close to him that he too had tested HIV-positive. It was a lie.
“When I was writing it down I realised that I couldn’t do it unless I was as truthful as I could be,” he says now. We’re lunching at the Groucho Club. Membership of the Church of England does not in his book rescind your membership of London’s media elite. “I’ve prepared the parish as best I can, saying, Look, you might find some of this makes you think, ‘Too much information, vicar.’” A warning, you will notice, but not an apology. As Coles puts it: “The myth of my own niceness was something that seemed to need exploding.” When I produce an iPad and suggest we see what the internet makes of him, he’s game.
Looking pompous
The first thing we notice is a lot of photographs, which don’t make Coles very happy. “In that one I think I look ridiculous, with the vicar’s smile,” he says, pointing to himself standing in front of a tree. “Pompous vicar … pompous vicar … pompous vicar,” are his verdicts on the others, in one of which he explains he is wearing a piece of paper to take the place of the dog collar he’d not had with him on the day.
The one image he likes has a purple background. Until recently it was his Twitter avatar. “It’s me engaging with Richard Dawkins on Newsnight,” he explains, adding that the world’s most prominent atheist pointed out that they share a birthday and has become a good friend. “I like to think we’re both typical Aries.”
Twitter addict
Coles’s Twitter profile appears too. He has 66,800 followers, who he entertains with dog photographs, potted hagiographies (he has already written two books on improbable saints) and frequent reports from the front line as a celebrity parson. “There’s more of me on Twitter than there is in real life,” he sighs. “It’s certainly the thing that takes up most of my time. At first I didn’t want to do it. It was only when I got the job doing Saturday Live that they said: ‘You have to go on to Twitter.’ I didn’t get it at all. What’s so great about Twitter? 140 characters, blah, blah, blah. But within two days I think I hit the rate of tweeting that I’m on now, which is thousands a day. Because I. Just. Love it. It really, really works for me. It’s cruising, and that’s kind of fun. You bump into people that you’d probably otherwise not bump into. And you have moments of revelatory and indeed profound experience. Admittedly not that often.”
Coles says he has now reached that point on Twitter where he receives too many messages to read, though he does his best. Some parody tweeters have also begun to orbit him. “My dogs have now become so well-known that they have their own Twitter accounts,” he says. “I do follow them. It’s interesting to find out what’s going on in their minds ... I can’t believe what I’m saying!”
‘Openly gay’
We reach his Wikipedia entry, which is “accurate enough”, although Coles feels his musical abilities are rather oversold by the term “multi-instrumentalist”. Also “journalist” has never really been a true description, though he has certainly conducted many interviews over the years on Radios 3, 4 and 5 Live.
Having read his book, the two paragraphs of “Personal life” seem very short to me indeed, and one phrase in particular jumps out at both of us. “‘Openly gay’ is weird,” Coles says. “I’m not openly gay. I’m just gay.” He reads on. “Although yes, I do live with my civil partner, David. And we do have three dachshunds, Audrey, Daisy and Willy Pongo. Actually that is extremely openly gay. ‘Openly’ can come back.”
Above all, he is pleased to find that his birthday is still correct, after a spell a few years back when it inexplicably moved from spring to summer. “It was very annoying,” he says, “because I was having to acknowledge greetings in the middle of June on a birthday that didn’t belong to me at all.”
Celibate?
Coles himself corrected the birthday entry after being shown how to by a friend. Another adjustment he made was to remove a section on his celibacy, a word he feels that does not describe him. Indeed he does not address the subject in his book. “I didn’t want that to be the most eminent thing about me,” he says. “It’s not something that I think of as being that significant.” Maybe not, but plainly the internet disagrees. Alongside the other common search terms linked to his name on Google – “twitter”, “bbc”, “radio 4” and so on – we find “celibate”, presumably left by several thousand people trying to find out if he is.
In truth, Coles is not “celibate” in any avowed way, but for pragmatic reasons – a consequence, as he puts it, of “the Church of England’s completely ridiculous position [forbidding its clergy to have sex outside heterosexual marriage], which I think is daft and probably wicked, and all but intolerable”. And yet he volunteered to abide by it? “I entered the priesthood thinking I was hors de combat … I did think that I would be on my own, and not looking to stop being on my own – and also not looking in lay-bys and bushes and so on … but then I met David.”
Even so, how can you decide never to have sex again? “Partly it was a situation I found myself in … I remember going to the London Apprentice near Old Street at about 10pm and standing around on my own until 1am and then going home again thinking, Why did I do that? I didn’t miss that at all, to retire from that fray. You get lots of your time back.”
Perhaps some people just don’t believe you? “Yes, lots of people do think that. All I can say is that it is actually the truth. It hasn’t always been entirely 100% true in every way, but substantially true. Sex is not so important in lots of people’s lives as we think it might be, I would say.”
Faking HIV
We dig further. And keep digging. But, perhaps shielded by his mythical niceness, Coles is not much speculated about online. His true dark secret – faking HIV – had not leaked out before now. “I never spoke about it before,” he says. “I was too embarrassed. It was a very odd thing. Such a mad thing to do, but I think partly because it was such a mad time. Matthew, my closest friend was very angry with me, and rightly so. He didn’t speak to me for a year.”
Why did he invent such a thing? “It might seem odd, but I was in a pop band at the time and I think I wanted some attention. The other thing, which is the really difficult thing to admit, was that I was sort of drawn to it, because there was this sort of weird glamour to it. What can I say? Imagining that there’s some weird glamour to something that was killing people that I cared very much about, horribly. It gives a sense about my shallowness.” I expect his flock will absolve him, or at least hesitate before casting any stones.
• Fathomless Riches by Richard Coles in published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Buy it for £17 at bookshop.theguardian.com
