Coming out as gay on the brink of superstardom wasn’t easy for Sam Smith, but he now knows it was the right thing to do. The music artist opened up to Ellen DeGeneres about telling the world his truth before the release of his first album, “In the Lonely Hour.”
“I kind of just felt like I needed to mention it before I released the record so people knew what it was about,” Smith said during “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Monday. “And it felt like a brave thing to do as well I wanted to do it before because if I did it afterwards people probably would have thought I was lying just to sell records.”
While Smith came out to his millions of fans only recently, he’s never hid who he was from friends and family members.
“I came out when I was like 4 years old,” Smith said. “My mom said she knew when I was like three. So I didn’t have to actually properly come out.”
“So you waited a year to tell her,” DeGeneres joked.
Smith also addressed his critics who say he doesn’t speak out enough about being gay, saying: “I’m a singer and a songwriter. I get upset sometimes because I don’t talk about it too much. People say, ‘he doesn’t want to be a spokesperson for the gay community.’ I do, of course I do, but I want to be a spokesperson for everyone. Ya know straight people, gay people, bisexual. I don’t want it to be limited.”
Fresh off his AMA for Favorite Pop/Rock Male Artist, Smith was then given a gift from DeGeneres to remind him just how far he’s come – a platinum toilet bowl scrubber. Smith worked as a bathroom cleaner before hitting it big.
The silver brush was placed under glass with a plaque that read: “to commemorate the hundreds of toilets you have scrubbed and to certify that you will never have to do so again.”
Watch video from “The Ellen Show” here.
