And then I popped on and Angel said ‘Josh!’ in this pretty gay way. Thomas sometimes treads new ground, too, moving away from his familiar observational comedy: in one episode, he talks to a Chechnyan refugee called Angel who was kidnapped and tortured by his government. Everyone from ex-boyfriend Tom Ballard to David Sedaris, whose books Thomas used to read in his childhood bathroom, feature in short, documentary-style clips, waxing lyrical on their first loves and early brushes with sexuality. How To Be Gay is comprised of personal ruminations and sweeping interviews. And I’ve forgotten that for other people, it’s actually still really hard.” And I’ve kind of forgotten what was hard about it when I was young. “Being queer for me these days is so frothy and cute and fun – it’s just dancing and kissing.
“Where I live, it just seems like everyone’s queer … To run into a straight person in my life is so insane,” he says.
How To Be Gay is a survey of how queerness and its public perception have changed in that time, named after the words he typed into Google as a questioning teen in suburban Brisbane. Now 35 – he celebrated his birthday earlier this week, and says he’s still “feeling pretty dusty” – Thomas has spent more than half his life in the public eye. ‘I really was very nervous’: Thomas’s Audible podcast How To Be Gay took three years to make.
