Gok Wan reveals his bullying hell while at Midland school

Jul 19 2011 by Anuji Varma, Sunday Mercury

GOK Wan has revealed how cruel school bullies made his childhood a misery by calling him a “fat, ugly, greedy queer”.

The TV star suffered the hurtful jibes while growing up in Leicester because of his severely obese frame and mixed race background.

At the age of 13, he was nearly 6ft and weighed a whopping 12 stone and soon became a ripe target for his playground tormentors.

The presenter, who fronts his own show Gok’s Fashion Fix, reveals his teenage hell in his autobiography Through Thick and Thin, published this week.

The 36 year-old, also host of How to Look Good Naked, wrote: “I tried to endure the taunts, which included queer, fatty, bender, batty boy, faggot, stupid. But they wore me down, destroying my confidence and making me hate myself.

“Life became an endless trial as I put up with the awful treatment meted out to me by the kids who didn’t know how lucky they were to be normal.

“It didn’t even come from one or two loudmouths. It was more insidious and clever than that. It was a constant drip-drip of whispered insults, of quiet little sneers, a stream of mockery and name-calling, and it seemed that everyone was at it.

“The teachers appeared to notice nothing. It was as though only I could hear the secret voices filling the classrooms, the corridors, and the dining hall with an endless litany of derision.

“And while there weren’t the theatrical punches, comedy bag snatchings or fat-boy sprawlings of bullying cliché, there were the tiny pinches, pokes, kicks that came from everywhere – as I stood in the dinner queue or outside a classroom waiting for lessons.

‘‘They were miniature attacks, too small to report or complain about, but cumulatively painful and demoralising.

“It was teenage psychological warfare and I was powerless against it, with no way to respond.

‘‘All I could do was listen until the words echoed constantly in my mind and I began to believe they were right: I was stupid, worthless, fat, ugly, greedy, and gay.”

Gok grew up helping out at his dad’s restaurant The Panda in the Fosse Park area of Leicester, where his love of food stemmed from.

But being born to a Chinese father and white mother made his appearance stand out, especially when he started to pile on the pounds at the age of just 12. That’s when school became a living nightmare.

“My cheeks were round and full, making my eyes sink into my face and almost disappear and I had a wonky-fringed pudding-bowl haircut that was too young for me,” he recalled.