Graham Norton: 'It's harder to find love if you are a gay man'

The presenter said men are more resentful of his success than women would be

Graham Norton has said it is harder to find love if you are a gay man (PA)

Graham Norton has said it would be easier to find a long term partner if he were a straight man.

The presenter said his ex-boyfriends often resented the role they had to play in the public eye as his partner, adding that women would do a better job because they are less “alpha”.

“This will sound sexist but that doesn’t mean it’s any less true,” he said.

“If I were a straight man, my female partner would have a role in the eyes of society. She would be the mother of my children, my hostess, the person on my arm at red carpet events. She would have a defined function,” he told The Sunday Mirror.

“But that’s not the case if your partner is male. Every man – no matter how young or fey – has something of the alpha in him.”

He added that many of his ex-boyfriends ended up “loathing” being seen on his arm at events because they hadn’t “earned it for themselves”.

“Increasingly, that puts a strain on the relationship”, he said.

The 51-year-old admitted that he also “regretted” putting his job above other aspects of his life.

Norton split up from Trevor Patterson, his boyfriend of two years, in 2013.

In an interview with The Independent in 2012, he said he did not want to have children.

“It’s weird because you can do it now…so now you have to decide not to. And I guess I have decided not to. If it was possible for me to adopt, I probably would, but no one’s going to let me adopt,” he said.

Norton almost became a rent boy in the early Eighties when living with a group of hippies in San Francisco after dropping out of university.

He said he never officially "came out" to his friends, but his sexuality was decided for him when working as a waiter while applying to drama schools in London.

“I was working in this restaurant and everyone who started work there assumed I was gay and in the end there was nobody to come out to. So, it was very easy,” he said.

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