Sexual Ambiguity by Design
Few aspects of Morrissey’s public life have generated more speculation than his sexuality. Throughout his career, the press variously portrayed him as celibate, a closeted homosexual, a frustrated heterosexual, or a bisexual who simply refused to come out. The fascination was understandable. At a time when pop music reveled in overt sexuality, Morrissey presented himself as its antithesis: emotionally expressive yet sexually elusive, at least to a point.
The cover of the Smiths’ 1983 debut single, “Hand in Glove,” left little to the imagination. Its photograph showed a nude male reclining against a wall, his buttocks fully exposed. To say that Morrissey’s choice of cover art was a bold opening move for a largely unknown band would be an understatement, particularly because the image could reasonably be construed as homoerotic. This provocative approach continued with the band’s eponymous debut album, which featured a cropped photograph of a shirtless Joe Dallesandro1, a prominent sex symbol within gay subculture during the 1960s and 1970s. Although best known for his appearances in underground films associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, Dallesandro had begun his career posing for homoerotic photographs.
Fans with more than a passing knowledge of the band are aware that Morrissey and Johnny Marr consciously sought to avoid presenting the Smiths as just another rock group, although the suggestion that they specifically intended to position themselves as a “gay” band stems primarily from former bassist Dale Hibbert, who later claimed that the pair discussed doing so. What is clear, however, is that the Smiths’ aesthetic deliberately drew upon elements of queer subculture, camp, and homoeroticism, creating an ambiguity that stood in conspicuous opposition to the rigid heterosexual conventions of much early 1980s rock.
Nor did these influences exist only within Morrissey’s songs and sleeve designs. His cultural affinities repeatedly drew him toward writers, performers, filmmakers, and actors associated with homosexual or queer culture. Oscar Wilde was a longstanding idol, while the influence of gay playwright Joe Orton2 has frequently been detected in Morrissey’s wit, language, and fascination with sexual outsiders. Indeed, one profile memorably described the young Morrissey as “channelling the spirits of Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton.”3
Actor and comedian Kenneth Williams4 was another object of admiration. Following Williams’s death, Morrissey praised his “touch-me-not wit” and described his persona as “stylishly non-sexual,” an interesting choice of words given Morrissey’s own public image.5 The Smiths also worked with openly gay filmmaker Derek Jarman6, whose visual sensibility proved particularly well suited to the band. None of these affinities establishes anything about Morrissey’s own sexuality. They do, however, demonstrate how comfortably he moved within a cultural universe populated by gay artists, queer iconography, sexual outsiders, and men whose lives challenged conventional definitions of masculinity and sexuality.
Before the Smiths, Morrissey was already cultivating a decidedly ambiguous persona. In a 1981 letter to a pen pal, he wrote, “I have a girlfriend called Annalisa. We’re both bisexual. Real hip, huh? I hate sex.” The contradiction is striking. Even while casually describing himself as bisexual, Morrissey immediately qualified the declaration with the far more emphatic “I hate sex.” The following year he teamed up with Johnny Marr and formed the Smiths, whose songs were soon laced with the language and sensibilities of gay subculture. As journalist Liz Hoggard later observed, “Only 15 years after homosexuality had been decriminalised,”7 Morrissey’s lyrics “flirted with every kind of gay subculture.”8 Even the Encyclopædia Britannica would later characterize the persona he cultivated as one of compellingly conflicted celibacy tempered by coy suggestions of homosexuality.9
A qualification is necessary before proceeding. The examples cited here are intentionally selective. Morrissey’s catalogue, interviews, sleeve imagery, literary references, public statements, and visual iconography contain far more material relevant to questions of sexuality than could reasonably be examined in a single essay. What follows should therefore not be mistaken for a comprehensive inventory. Instead, I have chosen a limited number of particularly revealing examples that illustrate patterns recurring throughout his career. There are many more that might reasonably have been included. The purpose here is not to prove the thesis through sheer accumulation, but to consider whether a smaller body of representative evidence points toward an interpretation that has largely escaped notice.
The Square Peg Interview
In a remarkably candid 1984 interview with Square Peg, Morrissey offered perhaps his clearest contemporary explanation of the sexual ambiguity surrounding the Smiths. He confirmed that the band’s use of male imagery was entirely deliberate, conceived partly as an inversion of the stylized female imagery employed by groups such as Roxy Music, among many others. “I wanted to do exactly the same thing with male images,” he explained, adding that he wanted to accomplish this in a manner that would “compliment rather than slur.”
The same intention extended to his songwriting. Morrissey described “This Charming Man” as deliberately “sexually advanced” and, more explicitly still, as being “about male relationships.” Yet rather than present those relationships through the flamboyant sexual imagery associated with supposedly adventurous or sexually ambiguous pop stars of the period, Morrissey wanted them to appear natural, frank, and unremarkable. In much the same way, the progression from the nude male figure on “Hand in Glove” to the image derived from Andy Warhol’s film Flesh on the debut album placed imagery associated with gay and homoerotic culture directly into the commercial mainstream, something Morrissey admitted gave him a “smug sense of satisfaction” when he saw the Smiths’ album displayed alongside conventional pop releases.
Crucially, however, Morrissey resisted interpreting any of this through the conventional categories of homosexuality or heterosexuality. He argued that terms such as heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual imposed artificial distinctions upon something fundamentally human, even suggesting that their use encouraged the very sexual segregation and oppression they purported to describe. His position therefore contained a distinction that would remain central to discussions of his sexuality for decades: Morrissey could deliberately celebrate male beauty, write about intimacy and attraction between men, and draw freely upon gay cultural imagery without regarding any of those things as declarations of a fixed homosexual identity.
Indeed, he told Square Peg that he scarcely recognized gender boundaries when dealing with people at all. The apparent contradiction, therefore, was no contradiction to Morrissey. The Smiths’ work could be unmistakably homoerotic while its author simultaneously rejected the labels by which audiences sought to define both the work and the man who created it.10
The Refusal to Be Defined
During the Smiths’ career, Morrissey repeatedly professed to be celibate. Johnny Marr remarked in a 1984 interview that Morrissey “doesn’t participate in sex at the moment and hasn’t done so for a while.”11 Such claims only intensified the media’s curiosity. Interview after interview attempted to determine whether he was gay, a suggestion Morrissey consistently resisted. When pressed on the matter in 1985, he offered one of his most revealing responses:
“I don’t recognise such terms as heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and I think it’s important that there’s someone in pop music who’s like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy, so I want to do away with them.”12
In January 1989, he again rejected the premise that he could be fitted neatly into one of the available categories:
“I don’t fit into any sexual category at all, so I don’t feel people see it as being sexual, but as being intimate.”13
That distinction between the sexual and the intimate is easily overlooked, but it may be among the most revealing things Morrissey has ever said about himself.
The following year, in a lengthy interview with Nick Kent for The Face, the subject arose yet again. When Kent suggested that Morrissey wrote frequently about homosexual “longing,” Morrissey replied, “I’ve always said I leave things very open and that I sing about people. Without limitation. And I don’t think that automatically makes me a homosexual.” Asked why he objected to the word itself, Morrissey answered simply: “Because it’s... limiting and restrictive.”
More revealing still was the discussion that followed. Morrissey said that he had no relationships and explained that he had “always [been] attracted to men or women who were never attracted to me,” while those who were attracted to him inspired no reciprocal response. “I’ve never met the right person,” he concluded. When Kent finally asked whether Morrissey ever felt like taking “one mad plunge,” his response was curious: “I’d like to, yeah, but not just with anybody. It... uh... just doesn’t come naturally to me.”14
The importance of that exchange may lie less in Morrissey’s admission of attraction to both men and women than in the peculiar absence surrounding it. Once again, intimacy, attraction, and the possibility of relationships are present, but sex itself seems strangely remote. Even when directly invited to describe sexual action or impulse, Morrissey retreats toward qualification: perhaps, with the right person, under the right circumstances, but it simply does not “come naturally.”
In Autobiography, Morrissey disclosed a relationship with a Cockney boxer named Jake Walters. The two were together from 1994 to circa 1996. He also recounts his relationship with a woman named Tina Dehghani, whom he described as his “first experience of uncluttered commitment” and with whom he contemplated having a child.15 He likewise refers to a younger Italian man known only as “Gelato,” with whom he spent considerable time while living in Rome.16
These relationships complicate any simplistic portrait of Morrissey as someone incapable of attachment. They demonstrate, at a minimum, his capacity for affection, intimacy, companionship, and commitment with both men and women. But none of those things necessarily resolves the question of sexual attraction. Romantic attachment and sexual attraction, although commonly assumed to travel together, need not be identical.
Then, in 2013, Morrissey once again declined to adopt a conventional label:
“Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course... not many.”17
This typical Morrisseyan joke is easy to appreciate, but the qualification is worth lingering over: “not many.” After three decades of being asked whether he preferred men or women, Morrissey once again answered by resisting the premise of the question itself.
The Question Beneath the Question
For decades, journalists approached Morrissey’s sexuality as a puzzle to be solved, assuming that the answer must lie somewhere between heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Yet that assumption may itself have been the mistake. The more revealing question is not simply whether Morrissey was attracted to men or women, but whether sexual attraction occupied the same place in his inner life that others simply assumed it did.
His interviews, his public persona, and perhaps most strikingly his songs reveal a man deeply preoccupied with intimacy, companionship, longing, rejection, beauty, isolation, and emotional connection, while unequivocal expressions of physical sexual desire are remarkably scarce. This distinction may help explain an apparent contradiction running throughout his work. The male nude on the sleeve of “Hand in Glove,” the same-sex intimacy of “This Charming Man,” the homosexual underworld of “Piccadilly Palare,” and numerous other examples demonstrate a sustained fascination with homoerotic subjects. Yet these coexist with women, heterosexual relationships, celibacy, and Morrissey’s repeated refusal to identify himself as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.
Perhaps they were never contradictions at all.
The Major Reveal: A Different Possibility
This essay proposes a different possibility: that asexuality provides a more coherent framework through which to understand Morrissey’s seemingly contradictory history of sexual self-description. Asexuality is generally understood not as an inability to love, form relationships, experience arousal, appreciate physical beauty, or even engage in sexual activity, but as experiencing little or no sexual attraction to other people. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists recognizes asexuality as a sexual orientation and emphasizes that an asexual identity is not, in itself, a sexual or psychological disorder.18
Seen from this perspective, Morrissey’s professed celibacy assumes a different significance. Celebrity presumably provided him with opportunities for sexual relationships with either men or women that would have been unavailable to most people. Yet Morrissey repeatedly portrayed sex not as an overwhelming temptation heroically resisted, but as something curiously peripheral to his existence. His fascination with men, women, bodies, beauty, romance, desire, and rejection could therefore coexist with an absence, scarcity, or highly atypical experience of sexual attraction itself.
The homoeroticism of his art need no more prove homosexuality than his relationships with or attraction to women prove heterosexuality. A person may recognize beauty without wanting sexual possession of it; experience romantic or emotional attachment without experiencing corresponding sexual attraction; or find the cultural language of homosexuality compelling without personally inhabiting that sexual identity. What appears to fluctuate throughout Morrissey’s life and work is the object of his artistic, aesthetic, and emotional fascination, not necessarily the presence of sexual attraction itself.
Modern research provides a vocabulary that was largely unavailable when Morrissey first began attempting to explain himself. A widely cited national probability study of more than 18,000 British residents found that approximately one percent reported having experienced no sexual attraction toward either sex.19 Contemporary sexual-health authorities now explicitly distinguish asexuality from sexual dysfunction and recognize that little or no sexual attraction can represent a legitimate sexual orientation rather than a pathology requiring correction.
None of this can establish Morrissey’s orientation retrospectively, particularly when Morrissey himself has never publicly adopted the term asexual. Nor is it the purpose of this essay to diagnose him from afar or to replace one unwanted label with another. The evidence permits interpretation, not certainty. But asexuality does offer a framework in which many elements of Morrissey’s otherwise contradictory public record can coexist: homoerotic imagery without a homosexual identity; relationships with men and women without a settled bisexual identity; an intense fascination with beauty and intimacy alongside decades of professed celibacy; and a lifelong insistence that the conventional vocabulary of sexual orientation somehow failed to describe him.
The Question No One Asked
Morrissey’s career is filled with evidence of attraction, broadly understood, but surprisingly little unequivocal evidence of sexual attraction. He has written endlessly about longing, intimacy, loneliness, rejection, companionship, bodies, beauty, men, and women, yet spent decades resisting every conventional sexual category offered to him.
Perhaps the mistake was assuming that one of those categories had to fit.
For more than forty years, interviewers kept asking Morrissey essentially the same question: Which sex do you desire? The question no one asked was whether he experienced sexual desire for either sex in the conventional sense at all.
If asexuality does provide the missing piece, there is something almost cruelly ironic about Morrissey’s predicament. Few songwriters have written so obsessively about wanting and being wanted, about the agony of unreturned affection and the hope of finally finding another person, yet sexual attraction itself may have remained curiously beyond his reach. What others experienced instinctively, Morrissey may have encountered primarily as longing, fascination, intimacy, imagination, or abstraction. Nature, in other words, may have supplied him with an extraordinary capacity to contemplate desire while withholding some essential part of the experience everyone around him assumed he shared.
And perhaps that lends an unexpected resonance to a question Morrissey once put into song: “Will Nature make a man of me yet?” Read in this light, it becomes more than adolescent uncertainty about masculinity. It might almost stand as the unanswered question running beneath his entire public life. Not which man or woman would finally unlock the mystery, but whether the sexual impulse so effortlessly taken for granted by others would ever arrive at all.
Joseph Angelo D’Allesandro III (b. 31 December 1948), known professionally as Joe Dallesandro, is an American actor and model who became closely associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory and underground cinema.
John Kingsley “Joe” Orton (1933 – 1967), was an English playwright, author, and diarist.
Fiona Sturges, “‘If You Want to Know About Me and Morrissey, Google It’: Ex-Smiths Guitarist Johnny Marr Talks Relationships and Reunions,” The Independent, 23 May 2013.
Kenneth Charles Williams (1926–1988) was a British actor, comedian, raconteur, and diarist, best known for his work in radio and television and for appearing in 26 of the 31 Carry On films.
Ryan Gilbey, “‘He Loved Showing His Bum. Loved It’: The Subversive Genius of Kenneth Williams,” The Guardian, 20 February 2026.
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (1942–1994) was an English filmmaker, artist, writer, stage designer, and prominent gay-rights activist, regarded as an influential figure in the development of New Queer Cinema. Jarman directed four promotional films for the Smiths in 1986: “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” “Panic,” and “Ask.”
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalized homosexual acts in England and Wales, provided they were consensual, conducted in private, and involved men aged twenty-one or older.
Liz Hoggard, “Morrissey: The Alan Bennett of Pop,” The Independent, 4 June 2006.
“The Smiths,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 25 June 2026, Britannica.
Morrissey, interview, Square Peg, no. 6 (August 1984).
Simon Mills, interview with Johnny Marr, Record Mirror, 9 June 1984.
“Morrissey Answers Twenty Questions,” Star Hits, December 1985.
James Brown, interview with Morrissey, NME, 28 January 1989.
Nick Kent, “The Deep End,” interview with Morrissey, The Face, March 1990.
Morrissey, Autobiography (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 355.
Ibid., 418.
Morrissey, “Statement,” True To You, October 19, 2013.
American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, “Position on the Dignity and Rights of Asexual Individuals,” AASECT.
Anthony F. Bogaert, “Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample,” Journal of Sex Research (August 2004).
The question he posed and primed in Handsome Devil, a bold and outrageous sexual declaration.