Derren Brown responds to 'homophobic troll' with complete style

The illusionist offers a lesson in the handling of Twitter trolls

The illusionist believes hypnotism helped him to deal with the lack of control he felt growing up (Rex)

Derren Brown first came out as gay in 2007, but the news appears to have passed by one angry Twitter user.

@HossamAlyyy was terribly aggrieved by the discovery and thus shared a series of ‘homophobic’ tweets to illustrate his view. They have since been deleted, but here they are via a screen grab:

Then came Brown’s measured, yet witty, response:

Growing up, the illusionist tried to train himself out of being gay, partly due to his then belief in Christianity and once went to a religious camp to be “cured”. He is now an atheist.

Brown dated a man for a month, before telling anyone of his sexuality, aged 31.

"The process of coming out is normally very disappointing," he said. "It’s not that people react badly to it - they really don’t care."

Brown told The Metro in November that there is too much hype and pressure around sexuality revelations.

"You walk around with something for years that you build into this huge secret but it isn’t reflected to how it is in other people’s eyes," said Brown. "It’s so important to defuse that because it becomes a huge misery needlessly.

"There’s a nice quote by David Foster Wallace: 'We’d worry a lot less about what other people think about us if we realised how seldom they do.'"