Candid Cameron

Her behaviour on I'm a Celebrity irritated viewers and fellow guests alike. Now 'Rhona the Moaner' has revealed the abuse, drugs and sexual confusion that fuel her anger

Scottish stand-up comedian, gameshow host and former reality television contestant, Rhona Cameron is both exactly and nothing like I expected. Talkative, yes; frank, totally - you could tell that from her new book, Nineteen Seventy-Nine: A Big Year in a Small Town , a candid, open-hearted memoir of the year she turned 14, which intersperses her own original diary entries with vivid reminiscences of her burgeoning lesbianism and the disconcerting prevalence of sexual mistreatment she received from local boys.

However, Cameron is also petite, polite ('Don't go to any special trouble'), and while I initially consider her self-assured, she's what my grandmother might have called 'a bag of nerves', referring often to her analyst and punctuating her conversation by widening her huge, startled Judy Garland eyes.

We're doing the interview at my home and she turns up with a bottle of champagne she won't drink herself. 'I gave up drinking to write the book. And I'll probably stay stopped for two years until my fortieth birthday. I feel like all my life I've used alcohol as a way to avoid having any relationship with anyone or anything else.'

It's all a far cry from the strident, aggressive 'Rhona the Moaner' image she was given on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Cameron's heated fights with fellow contestants Darren Day and Nigel Benn ('If you were a man, I'd knock you sparko') riveted the nation, and confirmed her darkest fears about how she would fare on the show.

'I was living through the hell that I felt I'd always lived through - I don't get on easily with other people and I certainly don't get on with other control freaks, or bullies or thick people.'

She wasn't scared of Benn ('If he'd touched me, I'd have kicked him in the balls'), but she got so low that she visited the show's psychiatrist who told her to 'rewrite her own ending for once'. This produced a lighter attitude, culminating in 'Sometimes...', her unscripted, eloquent rant about the various shortcomings of her fellow jungle inhabitants, including Tony Blackburn and Tara Palmer Tompkinson, both of whom she has affection for.

When Cameron emerged, her profile was heightened to the point where she hosted an ITV gameshow, Russian Roulette. 'I'm very mainstream,' she says. 'I could present the National Lottery. Why not?' Now comes the memoir, which seems to have been boiling away inside her for years. These days, Cameron views I'm a Celebrity as a life-changing experience.

'It's bizarre that a reality show set the balls rolling. Things happened on the show and things kept happening when I came out. And one of them was this book.'

Cameron chose 1979 to write about because it was the year her father died and her world crashed in. But she also viewed the book as an opportunity to lay some demons to rest. 'It's like that film Cinema Paradiso, someone going back to a a small town to tie everything up and just be done with it.'

A personal exorcism? 'Yes, in a way. Writing about the past totally preoccupied me, but in a way it always has. I've found myself thinking about the past much less since I wrote the book. Which is a good thing for me. I need to live in the present and concentrate on the future.'

Rhona Cameron was born in 1965 and brought up in Musselburgh, a small town just outside Edinburgh, by her parents, Jean and Bill. From an early age, she knew she was adopted. 'I was shocked when I found out,' she says. 'All adopted people are shocked. The ground just goes beneath you. It's incomprehensible. My immediate thought as a child was, "I knew there was something odd about me".'

As an adult, she had meetings with her birth parents, with varying degrees of success. She said once that she had difficulty trying to have relationships with two sets of parents. As a child, though, Cameron would sit drawing ageing versions of her own face. 'I guess that was my way of exploring how other versions of me would look.'

Looking back, Cameron believes she has always displayed classic adoption traits - an obsessive recall of small detail, a period of self-harming during which she cut herself, and a feeling of isolation. 'I always felt like an outsider. It's only recently that I've started to feel attached to anything or anyone. Before I was just sort of drifting.'

As detailed in the book, Cameron also had gender confusion. She had known that she was attracted to other females from 'something like the age of nine', realising as she grew older that this was not considered 'normal'. The first entry in her diary for 1979 plaintively reads: 'I'm going to be strong and I'm going to be better', but before long we come across tragicomic passages describing how she would stalk certain girls and teachers.

This led to a cycle of blurting out her feelings to successive girls and being rejected. Early on, she innocently asked if they might be interested in her if she was a boy. When, equally innocently, some of them said yes, Cameron would step up her efforts to look and behave like a boy. In part, this was because she thought boys had more fun.

'They seemed more powerful and interesting. If you're a strong character, why would you want to identify with girls? They seemed so passive and reactionary. I wanted to be with the ones with the voices and the humour. I wanted to be leading the class revolt against the teacher. I wanted to play football.'

Cameron thinks now that much of her confusion and misery was due to the lack of lesbian role models. 'These days, you can watch Sex and the City and see Samantha having a lesbian affair, Britney Spears and Madonna snogging onstage. When I was 13, I didn't have anything, apart from a slight suspicion about Billie Jean King. Otherwise, it was all male gay camp stuff.'

Predictably, her 'difference' made her a target. Things got better around the age of 16 ('when the thickos left school'), but she had to endure a grim extended period in which she was bullied, spat at, kicked and called a 'lemon', local slang for lesbian.

'When you're young, there are no benefits to a small town,' says Cameron. 'It was a nice place, we had this fantastic countryside, and kids could play outside, but once you were outside there was all this darkness going on, all this sex stuff with boys.' She smiles ruefully. 'For me, anyway.'

One of the most startling things about Nineteen Seventy-Nine is Cameron's candid descriptions of the regular sexual activity she was forced to participate in with local boys. Consumed with crushes on Tatum O'Neal, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Barbra Streisand, she nevertheless found herself at a young age with a highly active secret heterosexual sex life, though she didn't lose her virginity until she was 16.

There is a grey area here since Cameron sometimes was literally overpowered while, at others, she colluded willingly, almost in a trance-like state, with the boys, led by her chief tormentor, a local whom she idolised. She writes frankly and graphically on the endless mauling of her breasts, the tearing off of her clothes, the 'fingerings', 'giving the top and the bottom', and the 'fear and bargaining' that lay behind her apparent complicity.

Back then, Cameron accepted what was happening to her even as she felt, 'lonely and dirty'. 'And I did feel I wasn't a slag. There were slags at my school and they were famous for it, really tough and loose. Now I see that they were also disturbed, but I didn't put them in the same bracket as me. I was this girl who was close to her parents, went to church, loved swimming, became a girl guide, got loads of badges. So why was I letting people do this stuff to me? It didn't make sense. But I didn't have any choice. I was terrified that if I didn't do it, they would rub dead birds in my face which they'd shot with air guns. Or they would threaten to phone my parents.'

Was it abuse? 'It would be called that nowadays. And I did feel abused.' She sighs. 'Boys have a different sexual journey. No young girl wants to have sex. You want to be taken to the disco, you want somebody to love you. It's like, I wanted love and affection and I sexualised it. And that didn't stop. I have led a very sexually promiscuous life and it's not a good thing.'

Cameron's most high-profile lengthy relationship was with TV presenter Sue Perkins, the Celebrity Big Brother resident, with whom she says she felt 'married'. The last time she had a boyfriend was when she was 17. 'But by then I had a habit of being attracted to abusive men. That's not why I've had gay relationships. I just needed a big powerful figure to look after me. I lost one and after that I went to anything. I only had sex with men, though,' she says pointedly. 'I didn't have boyfriends.'

Frank as she is, Cameron is worried about her mother's reaction to the book. 'I don't want her to feel regret or guilt. I never shared my pain and loneliness with her at the time because I didn't think I could. But she's had to change a lot through circumstances - Dad dying, her heart attacks, me being a lesbian, the ups and downs I've had. She's a modern woman now, all in favour of expressing and talking, so we've found a place to be very close.'

What would her father have made of the book? 'I don't even know what my father would have made of me or my sexuality.' Cameron worshipped her father. 'He was a traditional man. There's a kind of older generation of Scottish men who are all a bit like Alex Ferguson. But my father had a gentle side, too; he was quite tortured.'

In her book, Cameron reflects on his death from lung cancer at the age of 55 in a way she had never done before. 'I'd had a couple of experiences as a grown-up where I'd been off my head on drink or drugs and gone ballistic, thinking I was back at the funeral and stuff like that, but I never addressed it properly.'

His death left her hypersensitive to her own mortality. 'I want to live for a very long time.' Cameron quit smoking three years ago, plays football for the Camden women's team, and tries to eat and sleep well. 'I'm a real hypochondriac, very conscious about health for someone who abused themselves with drink for a very long time.'

Once into her twenties, Cameron embarked on a 10-year mission of self sabotage - deliberately failing an exam that would have taken her to art school, and then 'just drifting'. Living off girlfriends who were slightly more together, moving to Australia to be with a woman and then on to London, signing on, doing dead-end jobs, 'drinking like a man. I was living the low life when I wasn't a lowlife. It wasn't the way I'd been brought up'.

She came to stand-up by a circuitous route and clicked with it instantly. 'It was just what I'd always done, but I was getting paid for it.' She won the So You Think You're Funny? award at the Edinburgh Fringe, presented Gaytime TV and, in 1996, co-wrote and starred in the ill-fated sitcom, Rhona. Along the way, she became increasingly unhappy about being labelled a 'lesbian comedian': 'People should be allowed to be individuals. I'm not there just to entertain lesbians. I'm sure a black person wouldn't want just black audiences. You want to reach out. It's as simple as that.'

Then came I'm a Celebrity. Cameron can laugh about it now. 'We were all either desperate or broke. I'd remortgaged for £30,000 before I went. As my manager said, we couldn't say no.'

She enjoyed her period of 'fake fame' at first. 'I won't lie, it was nice sitting in Tara's car, with blacked-out windows and cameras going off, but after a while you're just worrying about whether you've held your stomach in.'

Cameron says that, rather than celebrity, she wants 'what everybody wants - respect. Maybe I'll get that with this book, maybe not. "Published author" definitely sounds better than "gameshow host"'.

She has a tour coming up, and would like to direct Nineteen Seventy-Nine as a film. She also plans to write another book but doesn't yet know what shape it will take. 'I'd have to take it from personal experience. I do have a pot of despair to choose from.' As Cameron takes her leave, she chats about what she would do if she got big money. 'I would buy a really big place and have a room just to paint in. The crazy life is over. Right now, I'm just facing up to stuff, having a quiet, reflective time.'

· Nineteen Seventy-Nine: A Big Year In A Small Town, by Rhona Cameron, Ebury Press, £9.99

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