Danny Dyer, all-round diamond geezer and basically one of our reasons for breathing, has revealed that he suffered from homophobic abuse in his youth.
Oh, Danny.
The star, who as 'Enders character Mick Carter accepted his son’s homosexuality in a scene that made actual tears well up in our eyes, has said that his friends would call him offensive names because he acted.
Danny explains: “To my mates, and some who weren’t quite as matey, being an actor is exactly the same as being homosexual. There is no difference between the two.
“The bullying I got was sometimes horrible. I got 'actress' and 'poofter' and all the rest of it.”
"It got so bad that I stopped telling people anything I was doing and used to sneak off to the acting and slide on back over the maisonettes smoking weed before anyone could even tell. It was like living two lives.
“I’m not saying it made my life hell, just difficult.”
Who’s having the last laugh though? Who is?
It’s you, Danny. National. Television. Award.That’s all we’re saying.
But Danny, displaying the heart of gold we know beats within his deep, manly chest, is not angry with his former friends (who do NOT have NTAs we assume) for their mean words.
Rather, he sees it as a product of their upbringing: from parents who were alive when homosexuality was against the law.
“Let’s be fair – people of my dad’s and grandad’s generation were pretty intolerant,” Danny says in* Life Lessons From The East End*.
“Some people won’t see that as a bad thing, but I do.
“Homophobia and racism are the modern terms, though if you’d mentioned homophobia to my dad he’d have thought it was an album by The Who."
“From the outside my dad might have looked homophobic but I don’t think it ever crossed his mind there was a problem with that. He was a bloke, of course he didn’t like gay men, poofs, as he would have called them.
"There was one sort of man who tolerated gay men and that was another gay man. And you have to remember, when they were growing up being gay was illegal.
“Even the government was saying that being gay is wrong, and you can’t blame a bunch of basically quite uneducated people in the East End for agreeing with them.”
We’re a bit in love with Double D. Can you tell?