Celebrity Profiles

Cliff Richard

For over 4 decades the public have pondered the question ‘Is Cliff Richard Gay’? Analysis of his childhood provides an unambiguous answer.

Cliff Richard’s boyhood had many of the hallmarks of the classic gay upbringing: close to a strong mother and a bad relationship with an authoritarian, remote father. 

Two thirds of gay men recall bad relationships with their fathers (compared with one third of heterosexual men in over 20 studies). Cliff’s father was a religious zealot.

‘He was very stern and always believed in using the rod which he very often did. He laid down a strict code of conduct bordering on the tyrannical’ he says.

On one occasion, when Cliff returned from school and told his dad he had been beaten he beat him again, saying he must have done something wrong.

Two thirds of gay men recall being exceptionally close to their mothers who they recall as being very strong women (compared with one third of heterosexuals). This was true of Cliff.

‘She is a very forceful person’ he says and in his fifties he is still very close to her. ‘I have to face her regularly. I always have to justify everything’.

But despite this, there is one childhood sign that strongly suggests Cliff is not gay. 70% of gay men were effeminate boys (compared to 7% of heterosexual men) and more than anything this predicts which boys will become gay men.

Whilst Cliff says he was cowered by his father into being ‘a subservient son’, he was not effeminate.

'I was teased and bullied so I learnt to fight. I can remember burning a boy’s wrist to the bone by rubbing it on the playground’ he recalls.

Everyone who knows Cliff well says that he is not much interested in sex but that what libido there is focuses on women.

He is on record as having had sexual intercourse twice only, with one woman in 1962. There are three other women who he ‘heavy petted’, the last of these being tennis star Sue Barker, back in the 1970s.

That appears to be the extent of his sexual experience. The reasons are unusually clear.

His strict Christian upbringing taught him that sex outside marriage was a sin and this often creates sexual inhibition.

In 1961, when Cliff was 17 he had a year long affair with a blonde Tiller girl, Delia Wilks. His forceful mother opened a love letter from her and intervened.

Cliff’s younger sister Jacqui recalled what happened. ‘Cliff came home and was yanked off to a room. He was told what he had done was against God’s commandments’.

Already sexually inhibited, the key moment in Cliff’s sex life was when his father died in 1961.

Having hated his father’s tyranny, he now felt a need to be close to him. ‘I tried to get in touch with him through a spiritual medium but a friend told me to read the bible. So it was my father’s death that lead me to religion’.

If Cliff was already exceptionally inhibited about sex because of his childhood, he was now converted to a religion that told him his doubts about sex were justified.

Alongside this was a mother-fixation. Cliff freely admits ‘I was looking for someone like my mother. I would like to marry someone like my mother’.

The trouble is, incest is strictly prohibited. This helps to explain why Cliff always seemed to back off whenever his relationships with women became too sexual.

Attracted to women associated with his mother, subconsciously Cliff would feel he was having sex with someone who is totally forbidden fruit.

He would lose his libido and feel very anxious. Confronted by a woman’s body and all the smells and sensations of sex, he would be filled with horrified disgust at the woman and himself.

Most repulsive of all would be the sex act itself. When women became so aroused that they wanted to go all the way, his religious prohibition against premarital sex would be triggered. At such moments the woman probably became ‘fallen’, defiled and defiling.

On top of this, women may remind him of another aspect of his mother that he wants to escape - controlling, dominating interfering.

He admits he cannot stand commitment. ‘I don’t think that I can commit myself to another person. I don’t like being out of control’. Intimacy and dependency on a woman would make him feel he was back in the power of his smothering mother.

Sex is taboo for him because it activates the incest taboo. Dependent relationships and sex are too closely connected with his mother. It is a shame he has not had therapy because he could easily be freed from this trap.

If he does have sexual thoughts, they are almost certainly not about men. But in the end only Cliff knows what he thinks about at night alone in bed in his £2 million mansion.