Rylan Clark-Neal hits back after homophobic encounter

Rylan Clark-Neal shared a harrowing encounter on Thursday via Twitter. The upcoming Radio 2 host and former Big Brother’s Bit on the Side host revealed that a man had shouted a homophobic slur at him in the street.

Clark-Neal wrote that a stranger ‘shouted “F*** Off You F****t” at me,” on Great Portland Street, London. And in the same tweet he called the unknown person ‘a pr***’ and included a hilarious Friends GIF along with: ‘When I shouted you what at you and you run away…. you run like phoebe in friends…’

The GIF shows the quirky Friends character Phoebe Buffay, played by Lisa Kudrow, erratically running through a park.

The television personality, who currently has over 1.5 million Twitter followers, has been widely praised by his followers for his tweet.

One user wrote: ‘I don’t care how famous you are or are not, NO ONE deserves to have this shouted at them I am utterly appalled’ while another replied with: ‘This still goes on a lot in the LBTG community. I’m sick of it.’

This is not the first time Clark-Neal has spoken about encountering homophobia. He recalled on This Morning last year that he had an interview cut during his 2018 Eurovision hosting duties because the country he was interviewing deemed him ‘too gay.’

“I did Eurovision a few weeks back and to be fair, you can’t get a gayer show than Eurovision.”

“But I did one interview out there with a country, I won’t say which country it was, and the BBC had a phone call from that channel that the interview was for, saying ‘We’re not going to use that interview because we thought it was too provocative’, or something like that,” he explained.

“I thought, ‘How could I have been provocative?’ So what they did, the BBC looked at it back, we had a representative there looking back at it as well, and all I will say is there is an issue which happened in that country in Eurovision…We believe, I believe, and I have to say it’s my words only, but it was because of my sexuality; because they knew I was gay,” he added.

Rylan Clark-Neal is set to replace Zoe Ball on her Saturday afternoon slot on Radio 2 later this month.

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