Ed Sheeran is opening up about his sexuality.
The 30-year-old singer has revealed that when he was growing up, he thought he was gay. In a recent interview on the Dutch podcast Man Man Man, Ed shared he never felt “hugely masculine” and he doesn’t find himself leaning towards things that are considered stereotypically masculine, such as cars”
“I’m not a car guy. I like a nice car, but I’m not a car guy.”
He talked about how he has a “definite feminine side”:
“I have a definite feminine side, to the point that when I was a kid I thought I was gay for a bit.
I definitely have a big feminine side. I love musical theatre, I love pop music, I love Britney Spears. My masculine side probably stops at drinking beer and watching football.”
Ed also spoke about how he prefers the women’s league:
“I watched it and I was like, ‘I don’t know why I watch male football, this is much better.
But then, my wife is super pro-women and femininity. And so, as soon as we started dating, my life shifted to that. She plays in a female hockey team. We hang out with all the team. It’s very much women empowerment.”
Ed also recently dished on his brand new album, revealing the special meaning behind the cover of = (Equals). Speaking to Zane Lowe during an Apple Music First Listening Event, he talked about the double meaning behind the butterflies surrounding the equals sign on the cover:
“I’ve spent a lot of my 20’s questioning who am I, why am I here, why do I do this, if I’m a singer what do I add to the world, it’s so much questioning. I’ve turned 30 and I feel like some of these questions have started to have answers but they started to have answers through two very, very massive moments in my life.”
Those two moments, he revealed, were the birth of his daughter Lyra, “which is new life,” and the passing of his friend Michael, “which is death”:
“Both hit me in a way where you appreciate tomorrow more because of each one, if that makes sense, and I saw the symbol ‘equals.’ An equals symbol is the end of a question and the start of an answer, it’s in the middle of the two. I definitely feel like being 30 I’m on either sides.”
He went on to share about an epiphany that “came to him”:
“In my 20’s there’s a lot of question, in my 30’s there’s a lot of answers, so the butterflies were essentially from a chrysalis, new life. It came to me one day, I don’t know why, but I have a lot of things come to me when I go running and I think it’s because your creative side of your brain sort of opens when you have nothing else to focus on.”
