Out British television personality
Stephen Fry revealed this week that he attempted suicide after
interviewing an anti-gay politician from Uganda.
Fry interviewed Simon Lokodo, Uganda's
minister for Ethics and Integrity, in 2013 as part of the BBC
documentary series Stephen Fry: Out There. Lokodo is a vocal
opponent of gay rights and a proponent of the country's efforts to
make homosexuality a capital offense. Fry described him as a
“foaming frothing homophobe of the worst kind.”
In The Not So Secret Life of a Manic
Depressive: 10 Years On, a BBC follow up to its 2006 The Not
So Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, Fry explains how he was
affected by the meeting.
“I knew I had a bottle of vodka in my
room and a whole sponge bag full of Ambien. I paced around trying to
analyze what it was that disappeared from me and it seemed that the
whole essence of me had disappeared,” Fry
said. “Everything that was me wasn’t there. Some feeling
came over me that this was the end. I just carefully lined up I don’t
know how many of those damn pills and drank all the vodka with them.”
The Not So Secret Life of a Manic
Depressive: 10 Years On premieres Monday on BBC One.