Morrissey: ‘Unfortunately, I Am Not Homosexual’

Morrissey felt compelled to set the record straight on his sexuality this weekend after opening up about his first relationship with a man in his recently-published memoir. “Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual,” he wrote from Sweden on Saturday in a note posted on the fansite True to You. “I am attracted to humans,” he went on to explain. “But, of course . . . not many.” 

In his hotly anticipated memoir, Autobiography, which was released by Penguin Classics earlier this week, the former Smiths frontman disclosed that he was in his mid-thirties before he entered his first serious relationship. The singer, known for his reticence regarding his personal life and his one-time identification as celibate, wrote that when he met Jake Owen Walters, “for the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we,’ as, finally, I can get on with someone,” as The Guardian reports.

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“Jake and I neither sought not needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come,” he writes. “Indulgently Jake and I test how far each of us can go before ‘being dwelt in’ causes cries of intolerable struggle, but our closeness transcends such visitations.”

Morrissey also discussed his teenage indifference to girls  in the memoir. “Girls remained mysteriously attracted to me,” he writes (as reported by The Guardian) “and I had no idea why, since although each fumbling foray hit the target, nothing electrifying took place, and I turned a thousand corners without caring … Far more exciting were the array of stylish racing bikes that my father would bring home.”

In a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone, Morrissey explained that the gender ambiguity in the subjects of his song lyrics for the Smiths was intentional. “It was very important for me to try and write for everybody,” he said. “I find when people and things are entirely revealed in an obvious way, it freezes the imagination of the observer. There is nothing to probe for, nothing to dwell on or try and unravel. With the Smiths, nothing is ever open and shut.”