Tim Gunn knows what he wants — and doesn’t want.
The fashion maven and Project Runway alum has been celibate for 43 years, a lifestyle choice he opened up about on a recent episode of the Dear Chelsea podcast.
Joking that the full story would “keep a psychiatrist very busy,” Gunn explained that his celibacy stems from “a very serious nine-year relationship in Washington, D.C.,” that he had from the mid-1970s into the early ’80s.
“I loved this person deeply and would have done anything for him, and I still remember the night that it all ended. We were in bed watching M*A*S*H. It was the first run, and he said to me, ‘I have no patience for you any longer. I want you to leave,'” Gunn recalled. “I had my own apartment, but I had been living with him for years. And I left. I drove to my apartment on Rock Creek Parkway. And I had to pull off, because I was hyperventilating. I was beside myself with self-flagellation and self-pity, and it was awful.”
Virginia Sherwood/Bravo
But more factored into Gunn’s decision to remove himself entirely from the dating market than mere heartbreak.
“One of the things that he told me that night was that he had been sleeping with just about everything that walked by,” he explained. “I had been loyal and faithful to him. He was the only person I had ever been with, and this is the advent of AIDS. It’s 1982.”
According to Gunn, the initial “self-pity” he felt transformed, due to the social context, into “completely unbridled anger, because I thought he may have given me a death sentence. I was tested every six months for 10 years for HIV, and thankfully, I had a clean slate.” But when it came to future sexual and romantic pursuits, “all this would come back like Niagara Falls, and it would just take the desire away.”
Dear Chelsea host Chelsea Handler joked that she and Gunn were true “kindred spirits,” as she doesn’t plan on getting married.
“Imagine the funds we could co-mingle,” Handler exclaimed, imagining the two of them as roommates.
But Gunn said that while “being celibate and being someone who lives alone was a bit of an adjustment,” now decades into it, he “wouldn’t have it any other way.”
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Gunn is in good company in the Hollywood celibacy club. Lenny Kravitz revealed in 2024 that he hadn’t been in a serious relationship in nine years, and while he waits for the right person, he’s remaining celibate.
“It’s a spiritual thing,” he explained. “I have become very set in my ways, in the way I live.”
You can listen to Gunn’s full interview on Dear Chelsea above.
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