Karen Dunbar talks career, awards and homophobia

Last year, Karen Dunbar picked up the award for Role Model of the Year. 

However, the Ayr-born actress/comedienne reveals the celebration had a quite unimaginable impact upon her. 

“I’ve been nominated for quite a few awards over the years, including the Best Actress Golden Rose in Montreaux,” she recalls. 

“I didn’t win, but one year I really expected to get the Best Actress for the Karen Dunbar Show and when I didn’t I was absolutely gutted. 

“That’s perhaps why when I was nominated for the Icon Award I thought it fantastic but was unsure about going because I figured I just wouldn’t win it.”

The actress was persuaded to attend the awards ceremony by her partner, Linda. 

“Then on the night, when the judges began their winner profile I actually muttered to myself ‘Oh, it’s me!’ And it was because I was so overwhelmed. I’m not a greeter. I’m not a Sally Field at all, but it took me all my time to catch my breath to speak.” 

Karen wondered why she deserved to win, an untrained actress who had come to Glasgow in the late 80s to work as a karaoke entertainer.

“I arrived with nothing but a plastic bag with a stereo in it, and now I was an award winner of such a prize.  I just couldn’t take it all in.”

She adds, smiling: “It was at this point I turned into Sally Field.”
Some of the tears produced were related to the difficult time Karen had growing up in Ayr, a community that certainly didn’t fly the rainbow flag. 

“In the late 80s, homophobia in Ayr was rife. It doesn’t mean everyone was homophobic. But it was a small town, and judgement will still be the same in small towns. 

“I only knew one lassie who was gay, the only gay in the village, and I got to be friends with her. Then I discovered another couple of lassies, and that was it for the ‘out’ gay community.”

Karen, however, had been doing her best not to be gay, and certainly not look gay.

“It’s not as if I walked about with shaved heid and wore dungarees. I looked a very typical school lassie, the blazer with the collar turned up, the eye liner, the lot.  

“Then later on I became a Goth. Again, it was about trying to fit in with the tribe.”

She adds, in soft voice: “I even got engaged. And it was because I didn’t want to be different, because different is dangerous. 

“And not only that, there was me with a group of pals all talking about who they fancied, and what they would wear when they got married, and who’d be the bridesmaid. 

“So you face a massive loss of that connection. Sure, it eventually gets replaced by another connection, but first you have to go through that transitional period, which is really, really hard.”

When Karen did come out, her friends were stunned. 

“They had no idea of course and they all said ‘You are kidding me on!’”
She adds, with relief in her voice. “But none of my pals were any different to me overall and thankfully, my school friendships remain.”

Karen didn’t come out to her parents. Her mother was ill at the time. “We didn’t sit down and talk about it as a family, although my sisters knew and they were fantastic. Just brilliant.

“But I never told my dad because we didn’t have that sort of relationship at the time. It wasn’t until my mum died, and my dad was in bits, that things changed. 

“What happened was my girlfriend at the time visited him every day, and she was a great person and a great cook, and she looked after him. Yet, we never ever said, ‘This is the relationship, and this is what’s happening’.”

It was implicit? “It was about family,” she says. “It was just raw, unquestionable family love.”

But love wasn’t all around in Ayr. When Karen did come out her pet cat was killed in an act of homophobic horror, drowned and left in a bag in her garden with a note saying ‘You F****** lesbian’. She knew it was time to leave town. 

Thankfully, working on the Glasgow gay scene, fronting karaoke nights in clubs, she discovered a world of acceptance. 

“I dressed more butch,” she says, grinning of the time. “It wasn’t so much about a choice. Again, it was more about fitting in.”

When Karen broke into television, sexuality was never an issue. 
“No one at the Comedy Unit ever asked me about it perhaps because I’d say things like, ‘I’m going out with my girlfriend,’ and by now I’d been talking like that for seven years.”

Her talent saw her join cult sketch comedy Chewin’ The Fat and then she landed the Karen Dunbar Show.  Her popularity soared. She was recognised as a major Scots talent and became a panto star. 

Yet, homophobia still reared its very ugly head. She had bricks thrown through the window of her flat. 

That assault was a direct contrast to an incredibly positive experience she enjoyed in 2014 fronting the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in 2014, an immense flag waver for LBGTI.

“My dad had died a couple of months before it and I’d been working in Belfast just before it.  But when the camera came to me on the day I was calm as a mill pond. And it’s because there wasn’t enough worry in me to worry about it. It was too big. I can’t even find the words to describe the experience.”

Karen Dunbar appreciates there are many positive changes in society. 
Women are better represented. This week she has been filming and editing work by the women’s comedy collective Witserface, creating a sampler tape for the BBC.  

In September, she’s off to London’s Donmar Theatre where she will appear in three 

Shakespeare productions, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Henry IV. All of the cast are women. 

“My work gives me a freedom to be whatever I have to be,” she says, in a delighted voice of her changing roles. But did she ever think about becoming a mother? 

“Oh, yes, I thought about it,” she declares. “I always wanted children. I’ve always been a bit of a big wean myself so there was a part of me who wanted to wait ‘till I grew up before I had one. 

“But then I met my partner Linda, and she has two kids, who were 13 and 16 when we got together. And at that point, there was something about this desire to have my own kids that was quenched because I realised these two are my lassies. That need to give love was satisfied by the love given to me by the girls.”

She adds: “I’m 45 now, and now we have a granddaughter, so we’ve got three weans. It’s fantastic.” 

Life isn’t really about being gay or not. Thankfully. “My sexuality doesn’t really come into my head. It’s not that I’m not saying I’m gay, it’s just that I’m not defined by my sexuality or my job.

“But I’m so glad to have won the Icon award. And celebrations like this suggest we’re moving forward.”