Was Kurt Cobain Gay?

Jason St. Amand READ TIME: 2 MIN.

A never before released 20-year-old PBS interview has surfaced with iconic Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who confesses that he wondered if he was gay when he was a teen, the British newspaper the Independent reports.

In July 1993 British music journalist Jon Savage interviewed Cobain in New York City and the audio of that interviewed has been discovered and put on PBS' YouTube channel for the animated series "Blank on Blank." In the interview, the rock legend, who committed suicide at age 27 in 1994, talked about his high school days when he was just a teenager, saying he felt "different" and "alienated." Savage asked the singer if he thought people would have a problem with him if he were to come out as gay.

"Yeah. Yeah. I even thought that I was gay," Cobain said. "I thought that might be the solution to my problem. Although I never experimented with it, I had a gay friend, and then my mother wouldn't allow me to be friends with him anymore because... well, she's homophobic. It was real devastating because finally I found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate too, and we talked about a lot of things... I couldn't hang out with him anymore."

The interview took place shortly before Nirvana released its final album "In Utero," which was reissued this year.

Though Cobain sounds positive and somewhat cheerful in the clip, the last months of Cobain's life were reportedly some of his darkest as depression and drugs surrounded him.

The Huffington Post reports that this wasn't the first time Cobain had discussed his sexuality. In 1993, he spoke with the Advocate and said how he is "gay in spirit" and "probably could be bisexual."

"I've always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn't find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all," he told the Advocate, according to Gay Stars News. "They had really awful haircuts and fucked-up attitudes. So I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something."

Cobain was married to Courtney Love, who found the rocker dead at his home in Seattle on April 8, 1994, after shooting himself in the head.

Listen to the interview below:


by Jason St. Amand , National News Editor

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