Time & Perspective Quote by Julian Clary

Clary’s line flatters the audience and needles it at the same time. “Affection” is doing a lot of work: it evokes the long British tradition of camp as safe, lovable spectacle, a wink-and-a-nudge relationship where queer men are welcomed onstage as long as they’re contained by performance. The public, he implies, didn’t so much embrace gay people as it embraced gayness as entertainment - something consumable, decorative, and deniable.

Then comes the pivot: “The time was right for an out gay entertainer.” It’s a claim about timing, but also about bargaining power. Clary isn’t asking permission to exist; he’s describing a market shift. Once visibility becomes sellable, honesty stops being framed as a risk and starts looking like the logical next product. The subtext is slightly accusatory: you loved the act all along, so don’t pretend outrage when the performer refuses the old code of silence.

Context matters here. Clary came up in a Britain where homosexuality had been decriminalized but was still heavily policed by tabloids, and where mainstream comedy often relied on queerness as the punchline. His persona took the camp tradition and weaponized it: not “is he?” but “of course I am.” The sentence reads like a backstage memo turned into a public statement: audiences were already trained to enjoy queer style; the cultural breakthrough was insisting that the person behind the style didn’t have to disappear.