James Longman on losing his father before coming out as gay: ‘I might have found my life easier’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Armed guards stood by James Longman as he grasped the hand of the head of the Chechen police and placed it on his own chest. “Can you understand why I’m scared to be here with you?” he asked. They were standing in an empty prison cell on the outskirts of Grozny, in the middle of the night.

The head of the police force, sanctioned for his part in a campaign to disappear gay men, had brought the ABC News team in to show them there was nothing to worry about. While covering the story in 2019, Longman had agreed with his team that he would tell no one in Chechnya he was gay but felt compelled to come out on the spot. “It wasn’t a plan. I had no intention,” he says. “But in that moment, it felt right, because I could sense it in my heart; my heart was beating.” He returned to his hotel that night and propped a chair against the door, wondering what the next 24 hours might bring before his flight out.

A publicly gay correspondent in the world’s most dangerous places

It is for reporting of this kind, carried out as an openly gay correspondent in some of the most dangerous places in the world to be LGBTQ+, that Longman is being honoured at the 2026 PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe, supported by British Airways.

Born in west London in 1986 into an “eclectic household”, with a part-Lebanese mother and an extended Arab family, Longman grew up around his father’s schizophrenia, which forced his father to move out of the family home soon after Longman was born. An only child, he was sent to boarding school at eight. “Just after I started there, my father ended his life. No one really explained to me why he had died or what had been wrong with him,” he says. The two halves of his upbringing pulled him in opposite directions. “I had my life at school, which was really ordered and structured, and I loved it. And then I had life at home, which was quite chaotic. I was quite lonely, to be honest,” he explains, jokingly casting his mother as Edina Monsoon and himself as Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous.

Coming out in a single-parent household

The resemblance to his father had been remarked on all his life. “Relatives would say… you look like him, you sound like him. My grandmother would call me John, and then correct herself and say, ‘Sorry, James.’” In his father, an artist who left the legal profession to live with a Maharishi and become a Buddhist, Longman sees the one person who might have made things easier. Despite having gay friends, including Longman’s godfather, who has now married his same-sex partner of many decades, his mother would take years to accept her son’s sexuality. But his father, he believes, wouldn’t have hesitated. “I lost someone who I know now would have been completely OK with a gay son. He believed in freedom. Had I had him earlier in my life, I might have found my life easier as a gay person.”

With an Arab family, a Catholic upbringing and attending an all-boys boarding school, “the idea that I was going to come out was a complete joke. I was basically hiding for a long time.” At 24, he emailed his mother to say he was gay. “She replied, saying, well, it’s probably a phase and you should just marry a lesbian because then I can have children.” She took longer than he hoped to come round, though she would later walk him into his wedding with his gay godfather on her other arm.

From Syria to Beirut

Longman later set about understanding his lineage in his 2025 book The Inherited Mind. He had hit his first serious depression at 19, and others followed. “After I came out of the second one, I decided I actually wanted to understand what was going on, to figure out in what way I might have inherited whatever sadness I get,” he says. What he uncovered ran through the family: his father’s brother also had schizophrenia, and his grandfather had also ended his life.
Longman’s journalism career began after a degree in Arabic took him to live in Syria, where he later reported undercover for the British press during the protest movement of 2011, “until it grew too dangerous”. The BBC needed someone who could explain the country, and his role grew until he became its Beirut correspondent. He joined ABC News in 2017 and is now its chief international correspondent, covering, in his words, all manner of things across the whole world.

---

James Longman‘s full interview appears in issue 371 of Attitude magazine, on sale in print and digital now. Order Attitude magazine issue 371 in print now, or in digital on the links below on Apple News+ and the Attitude app.