R&B singer Tevin Campbell, known for hits including “Can We Talk” and “I’m Ready,” has confirmed that he is gay.Campbell discussed his identity on an episode of the People Every Day podcast that dropped Thursday.
The performer, now 45, had been out to his family and friends since he was 19 or 20, but he didn’t go public until this year.
He hinted at his sexuality earlier in the year by writing “Tevin is” with a rainbow emoji on Twitter. “It was a casual thing for me,” he said on the podcast, which is affiliated with People magazine.After coming out to his loved ones and stepping away from his recording career in the late 1990s, “I went on the road of discovering myself,” he said. “I didn’t know who I was.”A stint on Broadway helped him figure that out.
He joined the cast of Hairspray in 2004 and stayed six years. “Being around people who were like me, LGBTQ+ people that were living normal lives and had partners, I had never seen that,” he said. “That was a great time in my life.”When he was at the height of his music fame in the early 1990s, it wasn’t a good time to be gay in R&B, he said.