This Thursday, December 28, 2023, Christophe Willem was invited on the set of the show C to you, broadcast on France 5 and presented by Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine. The 40-year-old singer, who has fully embraced his homosexuality for several years, looked back on the complicated years during which he was the victim of school harassment.
“The most difficult thing is loneliness, there are supervisors who told me: ‘Yeah but it’s true that you’re a little effeminate. What do you want someone to say to you, if you get hit? there’s a bit of truth in all that!’. It’s super hard, you come home at night and you don’t tell. I didn’t want my parents to know that I was being called a faggot so sometimes I said I had fallen…” he said.
Just before this confidence, Patrick Cohen read the lyrics of the song I advancewritten by Christophe Willem and which says: “I saw friends betray me, I saw the worst, I saw people, lots of people, judge me, label me, call me a faggot…”. The columnist then invited the singer to comment on this piece of the song which is inspired by his own life. The opportunity to see that the harassment and mockery continued even at an advanced age, at the start of his career.
“There are a lot of people for whom queer is a classic insult. […] As soon as we are not a mold, there are often these kinds of attacks. When I started, I often implied that it didn’t matter whether it was a girl or a boy, I was totally open. And that wasn’t what we wanted to hear. People told me no, you’re saying that because you don’t want to say you’re gay…” he confided.
“When you are harassed, the hardest part is not the hits, the insults, it’s the loneliness. I had supervisors who told me “well yes you get hit but you’re effeminate too!” it was very violent!”School harassment: the testimony of @cwillem In #CàVouspic.twitter.com/O1z6tvOM7y
— C to you (@cavousf5) December 28, 2023
ES