John Gidding talked about coming out
gay in a new interview with Metro Weekly.
The 42-year-old model turned designer
married ballet dancer Damian Smith in 2013. Gidding will appear in
the upcoming season of TLC's Trading Spaces.
Gidding earned degrees from both Yale
and Harvard but grew up in Turkey until he was 15. He told Metro
Weekly that he knew he was gay in “early childhood” but
stayed closeted until graduate school.
“I was a late bloomer in that regard
partially because of my cultural background and my family being more
conservative, and [me] wanting to play a certain role specifically
for them more than myself,” Gidding
said. “I think that a lot of growing up gay in Turkey has to
do with trying to reconcile how you’re gonna fit your life in with
how your family wants you to live your life. But eventually I was
able to break out of that. It took five years of being in the states
for me to do it, but I got there.”
“Grad school is when I came out to
the world,” he continued. “I think the whole concept of pride
had finally sunk in. When it dawned on me that I was gonna come out,
I did it to everyone very quickly – within a few weeks everybody
knew. We didn’t talk, my mom and I, for about a year afterwards.
And then 9/11 happened. Nothing like a traumatic event to make you
realize what’s important in life. My mom and I actually started
talking on 9/11 because one of the planes had taken off from Boston,
and that’s where I had been at the time. 'Okay, let’s put this
petty stuff aside and reconnect.' I wouldn’t say that my mom has
fully come around, but she’s gotten much better.”
“My dad took it very well. He had
already written out a little piece of paper in his pocket. It was
waiting. So when I told him I was gay he pulled it out of his pocket
and quietly handed it over to me. This was at a time when The Lion
King was very popular. And it just said, 'Hakuna matata,'” he
added, referring to the Swahili phrase popularized by the Disney film
which translates to “no worries.”