Divine (performer) - Personal Life

Personal Life

"I think I've always been respectable. What I do onstage is not what I do in my private life… It's an act… It's how I make my living. People laugh, and it's not hurting anyone."

Despite some claims made to the contrary, Divine always considered himself to be male, and was not transgender or transsexual. During his entire childhood and adolescence, he was called "Glenn" by his friends and family. During his adult career, he used the term "Divine" as his personal name, telling one interviewer that both "Divine" and "Glenn Milstead" were "both just names. Glenn is the name I was brought up with, Divine is the name I've been using for the past 23 years. I guess it's always Glenn and it's always Divine. Do you mean the character Divine or the person Divine? You see, it gets very complicated. There's the Divine you're talking to now and there's the character Divine, which is just something I do to make a living. She doesn't really exist at all." At one point he had the name "Divine" officially recognized, as it appeared on his passport, and in keeping with his personal use of the name, his close friends nicknamed him "Divy".

Divine was gay, and during the 1980s had an extended relationship with a married man named Lee, who accompanied him almost everywhere that he went. They later separated, and Divine would go on to have a brief affair with the gay porn star Leo Ford, something that was widely written and gossiped about in the gay press. According to his manager Bernard Jay, Divine would also regularly engage in sexual activities with young men that he would meet while performing, sometimes becoming infatuated with them. In one case, he met a young man in Israel with whom he slept and subsequently wanted to bring back to the United States, something that his manager prevented him from doing. This image of promiscuity was however disputed by his friend Anne Cersosimo, who claimed that Divine never exhibited such behavior when on tour. Divine initially avoided informing the media about his sexuality, even when questioned by interviewers, and would sometimes hint that he was bisexual, but in the latter part of the 1980s decided to change this attitude and began being open about his homosexuality. Nonetheless, he avoided getting into discussions regarding gay rights, partially at the advice of his manager, realizing that it would have had a negative effect on his career.

"Underneath all this cockeyed glamour lives a serious actor who wants nothing more than to work every day. If getting publicity can result in a job offer, Divine is certainly game. If hired, he will give you his all without any moral objections to the script. He's eaten dog turds, crawled through pigshit, mainlined eyeliner, eaten guts, and risked arrest by appearing in my films, but I've never once seen him throw a star fit."

Divine's mother, Frances Milstead, remarked that whilst Divine "was blessed with many talents and abilities, he could be very moody and demanding." She went on to note that while he was "incredibly kind and generous", he always wanted to get things done the way that he wanted, and would "tune you out if you displeased him." She also noted that in most interviews, he came across as "a very shy and private person".

Divine had suffered from problems with obesity ever since he was a child, for the reason that he "liked to eat... and eat... and eat... and drink gallons of Coca-Cola", with his hunger being increased by his smoking marijuana daily, an addiction that he would later publicly admit to. According to Bernard Jay, in the last few years of his life, when Divine began to realize that his career in disco was coming to an end and he was struggling to find acting jobs, he began to feel suicidal and threatened to kill himself on a number of occasions. Meanwhile, Dutch friends of Divine gave him two bulldogs in the early 1980s, on which he doted and named Beatrix and Klaus after the Queen Beatrix and her husband Prince Claus of the Netherlands. On numerous occasions he would have his photograph taken with them and sometimes use these images for record covers and posters.