Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images
You probably know Tim Gunn as the former Project Runway judge and inventor of the loving directive “Make it work.” But outside of his onscreen mentoring and ineffable taste in archival designs, the 72-year-old has largely kept his personal life private. Last week, however, Gunn spoke about his 43-year celibacy journey and the ex that jumpstarted it during an episode of Chelsea Handler’s podcast, Dear Chelsea.
“I had a very serious nine-year relationship in Washington, D.C., and I loved this person deeply and would have done anything for him,” Gunn told Handler. “And I still remember the night that it all ended.” Apparently, Gunn and his then-partner, who’d been living together for years, were cuddling in bed watching M*A*S*H when his ex said suddenly: “I have no patience for you any longer. I want you to leave.” Gunn said that his partner then revealed that he’d been “sleeping with just about everything that walked by,” while Gunn had only ever been “loyal and faithful.” “He was the only person I’d ever been with,” he remembered.
Gunn recalled fleeing the apartment to drive to his own house, only to pull off the road because he was “hyperventilating.” “I was beside myself with self-flagellation and self-pity, and it was awful,” he recalled. “This is the advent of AIDS. It’s 1982. The self-pity then turned into completely unbridled anger because I thought he may have given me a death sentence.” For ten years following the breakup, Gunn said, he got tested for HIV every six months.
After the incident, Gunn got used to being “someone who lives alone” and, later, someone who no longer has sex. Whenever he was “tempted to engage in something that could become serious with someone,” he said, the traumatic memories of the breakup would “come back like Niagara Falls, and it would just take the desire away.” He called his eventual celibacy “a bit of an adjustment” at first. But now? He “wouldn’t have it any other way.” Surely he and Julia Fox would have a lot of fun at brunch.
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