Creativity Quote by Neil Tennant

Tennant is sketching a piece of late-70s psychic weather: not fear of sex, but fear of sameness. That distinction matters. It sidesteps the familiar coming-out narrative (shame, panic, repression) and replaces it with something more culturally specific: a young person recoiling from the limited templates available for gay life at the time. “I didn’t want to be a clone” isn’t a denial of desire; it’s a refusal of prefab identity, the sense that to be publicly gay meant adopting a single look, scene, or script.

The timing does heavy lifting. In the late 70s, gay visibility was rising in clubs, fashion, and media, but often through narrow, highly stylized images. For a smart, observant kid, that visibility could feel less like liberation and more like a new kind of pressure: you can be yourself, as long as “yourself” resembles the recognizable type. Tennant’s phrasing implies he read gayness not only as an orientation but as a cultural package, and he didn’t want the bundle.

There’s also an artist’s subtext: the dread of losing authorship over your own persona. Pop rewards legibility; subcultures can, too. By admitting he wasn’t “scared of the sexual thing,” he frames the conflict as aesthetic and existential, not moral. It’s an early hint of the Pet Shop Boys’ broader project: making space for ambiguity, irony, and individuality inside identities that the culture keeps trying to standardize.