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Lesbian Life: What would you say to a teenager or anyone, really, whose parents don’t accept them for being gay?

Tabatha Coffey: I think it’s ludicrous. I don’t want to say stupid, because that makes people feel bad, and stupid isn’t the right word. You know what, being gay is really like saying I have blue eyes, I have brown hair, I’m 5’6”. It’s a fact. It has been proven enough that it is something physiological that happens to us.

I think when people don’t accept others because they are gay, it really does come down to like me saying, “I can’t accept you because you have blue eyes and I don’t like blue eyed people.” That’s just insanity to me.
Look, I’m not a parent and I’m sure it’s a journey that they have to go through. I know that I had to be comfortable with myself before I could share it with everybody else. When I felt that, it truly didn’t matter to me what other people thought. I knew I was gay, I was comfortable with it, so to me that was the only thing mattered. But that’s who I am. I think for parents you need to realize that it doesn’t change the fact that this is your child, this is your flesh and blood. This is still the same person, it’s just that their sexual orientation is different. It doesn’t make it bad, it doesn’t make it wrong. It just makes it different.

Although you are a lesbian, it doesn’t really define who you are. Aside from your mother, has it ever been an issue for you in your career?

It really hasn’t been an issue.

I think the honest thing is, it doesn’t define who I am. It is a part of who I am. I think it’s interesting when people find out because I get comments like, “You don’t look like a lesbian!” “You’re a lesbian? Wow! I never would have guessed that.” I don’t understand that because I don’t know what a lesbian is meant to look like. But it hasn’t held me back and it hasn’t inhibited me from anything and I think part of that is because of my acceptance of it.

Even before you were on TV, you led a pretty exciting life, traveling all over and training other stylists, what do you think is the one most important thing for making your dreams come true?

Really just passion and drive. For me I always wanted to push the boundary a little more and try something new so I didn’t become complacent. So I always felt like my career and my job was exciting and fresh. I love hairdressing. I wanted to do as many things as I could that was in the hairdressing world, not just stand behind a chair. And working for a product company and traveling to different countries was a way for me to do the craft that I loved and still really push myself and learn new things. I think that is what it is. I think people get in a rut and don’t think of other ways that they can expand on their job. There are different avenues that you can still do your job and keep it fresh and exciting for you.

Of all the things that you’ve done in your life is there any one experience that stands out from the rest?

No. They all really stand out. Obviously my days where I traveled were amazing because I got to see so much of the world and I got to meet so many different people and I was lucky enough to be able to do that. Having a television show is a true privilege and has been a great adventure as well. But I can’t say that there’s really one thing that stands out more than the others because I really have been lucky. I really love all the things that I have been lucky to do and a lot of them for different reasons.

You seem like such a confident person, yet you went and had a boob job, which you admit turned out to be a terrible mistake. Why did you do that and what lessons did you learn from it?

I think it has a lot to do with peer pressure. There was a lot of change in my life at that time. I was moving to America and trying to fit in with a different culture, a different environment, a different perception of what beauty is. You can just look at American and a British soap opera. In American soap operas, everyone is put together and polished. In English soap operas they kind of look like they just rolled out of bed. There was this shininess to Americans. People put themselves together so well and I don’t think I fit into that.
I think with all the changes that I was going through, external pressure and the perception of what beauty was, I had a thing about my boobs. I had been heavy when I was a kid. I’d lost weight and I didn’t think they were proportioned to my bottom half of my body. I thought having boobs would change everything. And boy was I wrong.

So I think the lesson I learned, it was really about self-acceptance. Statistically I was one in a thousand that has a complication from the surgery, because it’s such an easy surgery, I was that one in a thousand that had the complication and it was a life-threatening complication. It was an awful experience. I think what it taught me was, the boobs don’t matter. I have to accept myself. I have to accept that even with a bigger chest I still had an ample derriere and that’s fine. That’s the way my body was built. I still didn’t look like Heidi Klum just because I had a bigger chest. I wasn’t going to be a Victoria Secret model. I wasn’t six foot three. I wasn’t 100 pounds. It really just taught me to accept myself and realize you can make some changes, but you can’t expect them to make you into whatever this ideal of perfection is.