Coronation street star Charlie Condou talks about his 'Life as a gay dad'

Charlie Condou, Coronation Street star, has always wanted to become a dad and has now become a well known 'gay celebrity dad'. But, he says, what's important is the parenting, not the fact that his daughter has three parents.
I left the Granada studios in Manchester after work one day and jumped into a cab, heading for the station and then a London train and home. The cab driver looked at me in the mirror, gave a little smile and said: "So, when's the baby due?" Not "Hello" or "I know you", or even "I read in the Sun today …" but I'm getting used to the surrealness that sometimes accompanies being part of Coronation Street. It is, after all, the world's longest-running soap opera. And I'm a friendly, polite sort of bloke.

Me: "January, still a while to go."

Cabbie: "Right, so that's, what, a two-year gap between this one and your daughter?" OK, so the driver is clearly a Corrie fan but, even so, that's some detail he has retained.

Me: "Yes, that's right, she'll be two-and-a-bit when the new one comes along."

Cabbie: "So, how does it work then?"

I get this a lot – people are curious about the logistics of my child-rearing arrangements, I understand that. While not the rarity it once was, gay parenting is still something that few people have direct experience of, and it is only natural that they ask questions.

Me: "Well, our daughter spends half her time at her mother's house and half her time with me and my partner. We co-parent; it works pretty well."

Cabbie: "And did you and the mum have sex?"

Me: "Er …"

Thankfully, I am released from having to respond as the station hoves into view, but it is not the first time, nor I imagine will it be the last, that a total stranger has asked me about my sex life. Such is the life of a "gay celebrity dad".

Gay celebrity dad. It's funny because those first two words seem to dictate everything about the way the world reacts to me these days, and yet they are in many ways meaningless to me. I don't feel like a gay dad, any more than I feel like a celebrity dad. When I'm with my family, caring for my daughter, watching the little bean jump around on the ultrasound screen, I just feel like a "dad". My day-to-day experience of the ups and downs of parenting are the same as everyone else's. I feel the same frustration as any other parent when my daughter fills her nappy just as we're heading out of the door, and the same ridiculous pride when she lisps her way through Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Even our shared residence arrangements with her mother are not really any different from those of millions of divorced and separated parents. Perhaps because my own upbringing is a far-from-unusual 21st-century jumble of step-parents and half-siblings, the quirkiness of my current situation feels unremarkable.

And yet, at least to the wider world, it is remarkable. And, because of that, I feel that maybe I do have some responsibility to open up, to talk about my life, and to let strangers ask personal questions.

When I was a teenager, coming out and coming to terms with being gay, one of the hardest parts of that process was dealing with the fear that I would never have kids. I'd wanted to be a dad for as long as I could remember – aged four, coming home from nursery in tears because they always picked girls to bath the dollies at the end of the day. Gay parenting didn't exist then, at least not in any public way. There were men, often estranged from their kids, who had tried marriage in their 20s before coming out and leaving their families. It was easier for lesbians, of course, though still never spoken about, but gay men and kids? Unheard of. I know what it would have meant to me then to have had role models to look up to. To see gay men in loving relationships, raising children together and building families would have removed so much fear from my teenage years and made my path to self-acceptance smoother.

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