Craig Revel Horwood is a judge on the hit British dance competition Strictly Come Dancing. In a new interview, the 56-year-old is opening up about the time an older gentlemen took him under his wing very, very early in his career.
“It was a sugar daddy sort of thing,” he recalls to The Daily Mail. “I knew exactly what I was doing.”
Horwood says he was 17 and working as a dancer at a drag bar when he met 43-year-old “Mr. X.”
The older man took Horwood on a six-week world tour, which included seeing shows like Cats and other Broadway productions, and paid for him to go to dance school in exchange for sex.
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“My family couldn’t afford it. I thought, ‘OK, let’s take this opportunity.’ It wasn’t horrific, you know?” he recalls.
Horwood, who identified as bisexual at the time but now identifies as gay, says the relationship “transformed” his life, and that Mr. X provided him with “opportunities I never would have had.”
“The tabloids have called it prostitution, but it really is no different to a younger woman marrying an older man then divorcing him for half the money,” he says. “At least I wasn’t doing that.”
In the same interview, Horwood also talks about his current relationship with 35-year-old horticulturist, Jonathan Myring. He says the two have been discussing getting married and possibly having kids.
“I don’t have any plans yet,” he says. “I would definitely adopt because there are so many kids out there who need secure homes.”
cuteguy
He is no different than Erika Jayne, except he never stole money from orphans and widows and burn victims like she and her sugar daddy did.
Gadfeal
It’s about time that society gets honest about adult work; it’s not the activity that’s wrong, it’s the misplaced moral treatment of the phenomenon.
In 19th Century London, if you were female without a solvent husband, a good employer, or inherited money, you would live a short life in squalor and adult services may have been the only option. Official data from the Metropolitan police recorded some 6,500 prostitutes when London’s population was about 1 M. Unofficial estimates suggest many more (20k) were engaged in adult activity.
Then, there were the umpteen “mistresses” and financially-motivated marriages, including Downton Abbey phenomena where rapidly diminishing aristocratic assets led to pairing of rich American heiresses with insolvent English aristocrats, one example of which could be the marriage of Winston Churchill’s parents with a New York heiress marrying Lord Randolph Churchill when she was 20, only a year after a first meeting. Winston was born 8 months after the marriage, with a biographer suggested that she had conceived before marriage.
Not all gay children have a loving, nurturing, wise family. So, when a young gay man, often ostracized from an intolerant working class background, meets an “older, wiser, solvent” person who takes an interest in him, is it so “wrong” for a relationship to occur, when the alternative would be priesthood, depression, destitution, and/or violence?
Although prostitution is “legal” in some countries, with Germany’s Eros Houses providing a safe place of work (credit cards, security, medical care), there is still a “furtive”, “immoral” connotation. In some countries, the age of sexual consent is 15 years, but even there (as in the case of Pr. Macron), if the partner is much older, there is an attitude of immorality.
Chrisk
Yes. I don’t think they meant it to be a 15 yo with say a 55 yo. Something within a reasonable age like a 15 you with a 18 yo.
I would still think it’s weird to see a 43 yo with a 17 yo. Those are the types that obsess on the under aged and sometimes end up on shows like to catch a predator.
Gadfeal
When I was a confused teenager in the 1980’s in Europe, it was still taboo and shameful to openly discuss one’s homosexuality, and I felt that no-one in the family would be able to comprehend. I had no self-confidence and felt, having had no intimate experience, at age 18 that I was ugly and unlovable. It was only my first contacts in gay milieu that I was surprised that some didn’t find me repulsive, and in a few years, I received spontaneous invitation by older men (10 to 20 years i.e. up to late 30s) from across Europe
I was invited to Rome, to Florence, to Berlin, too Spain when I was studying in Paris. I even had an older Italian (35 yrs) head-over-heels in love sending me poems and taking me all over Italy over about 3 years of long-distance affair.
At one point I had a 32 year old Parisian, a 28th year old blond Frenchman, a 30 year old Spaniard, and a Briton of mixed English/Indian origin declaring love. Even a French gay couple of means invited me to be a “kept boy”.
I never took money but, under the logic that the other was a successful, older partner, and that I was a “poor” student, my offer to pay was declined over and over.
I was reveling in this attraction when I had though the first 18 years of life that I was “repulsive”, as it boosted, for the first time, my view of myself from a physical viewpoint. No matter what people say about personality and smarts as key appeal, the reality is that you don’t fell those in short-term sexual encounters.
I did, once, hook up with a suburban Frenchman who, I later discovered, had a wife and was “closeted”. After the deed, he placed several hundred francs in my hand to my surprise.
As I got older, more solvent, and less physically attractive, I have, especially when traveling, had recourse to paying for the convenience of intimate company. Only in about half of cases there was sexual complicity, and all but two “providers” have been repeated if the opportunity arose, one in France (with a North African immigrant – Arabic) and one in Spain (with an East European).
I don’t have the energy, time, or desire to spend hours in a gay bar or setting when I have an “urge”, and I find the immediacy and convenience of paid company both acceptable and pleasrable.
BenBenXR
My experience was not so different from your’s. Religious, uneducated family, I thought I was hideous (in reality I just some ethnic features in a town that was very small and very white and when I looked in the mirror I looked nothing like all the conventionally handsome white boys around me.
When I made it to college in a bigger city, I realized to my outright shock that some found me very attractive. I did have a thing for older guys though… they were always easier to converse with. I had no social life growing up, so in high school I took a job working with the public and learned how to interact with all kinds of people.
Later on, I did late guys take me out, and I was genuinely attracted to them. While in school full time I also worked 32 hours/wk, so I was busy all the time… but was able to support myself (in a tenement apartment, though, with roomies). But older men took me out to dinner, for weekends away, they paid for everything, and almost all of them were very sexually generous. Some rented a room to me for verrry under market rates (really just a “token” rent) – this in an expensive city. I learned a lot from them and had some nice benefits. Some even provided me with good job leads as I was graduating. I regret nothing, and still keep in touch with some of them. They were all good guys and were genuine friends. I never felt cheap or used. Sometimes I was offered $ for sex, and a couple of times I accepted it. The guys never meant it to insult me. It was a transaction that we both entered into willingly.
These days I’m happily married, in my 50s, and still turn heads in public (I never truly came to believe I was handsome though). My partner tells me all the time, “that guy over there was totally just scanning your barcode – didn’t you notice?” We have kids now, one a son who is very sweet and talented (I’m not the bio-dad, my partner is). I would never relay to him – not while he’s young, anyway – some of my college-age and twenties experiences and “methods” (such as they were – maybe it was just more of a relaxed, pragmatic attitude of a frisky young gay man). He’ll have to live his own life. He’s innocent, and thankfully… is going to go out into the world with a lot more parental support and advantages than I ever had.
Jim
Nothing wrong with an older adult taking a younger adult under their wing. Is it love? Is it business ? Doesn’t matter if it is consensual.
curiobi
Yes it matters. I don’t care he thinks it is acceptable for someone in their 40s to pay a teenager for sex. It is not. This adult could have mentored him without taking advantage of the disparity in their socio-economic status and that should be expected. What happened to him was abuse, plain and simple, and it is fundamentally wrong for him to suggest a teenager is in any way mature enough to be in a sexual relationship with someone old enough to be their father. No. Just no.
Winsocki
Why do people accept the musical/film, “Gigi”…. and she was groomed as a child for older men.