Tim Gunn explains why he’s been celibate for 43 years

Tim Gunn he is aware of what he needs—and he does not need.

The trend maven and Project Runway alum has been celibate for 43 years, a life-style alternative he opened up about on a latest episode of the Dear Chelsea podcast.

Joking that the complete story would “keep a psychiatrist very busy,” Gunn defined that his celibacy stems from “a very serious nine-year relationship in Washington, DC,” that he had from the mid-Seventies 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.”

But extra factored into Gunn’s resolution to take away himself completely from the relationship 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 he walked by,” he defined. “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 preliminary “self-pity” he felt remodeled, because of 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 got here 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 have been true “kindred spirits,” as she doesn’t plan on getting married.

“Imagine the funds we could co-mingle,” Handler exclaimed, imagining the 2 of them as roommates.

But Gunn stated that whereas “being celibate and being someone who lives alone was a bit of an adjustment,” now a long time into it, he “wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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Gunn is in good firm within the Hollywood celibacy membership. Lenny Kravitz revealed in 2024 that he hadn’t been in a critical relationship in 9 years, and whereas he waits for the appropriate individual, he’s remaining celibate.

“It’s a spiritual thing,” he defined. “I have become very set in my ways, in the way I live.”

You can take heed to Gunn’s full interview on Dear Chelsea above.

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