ACTOR Sir Ian McKellen has spoken to schoolchildren about his life as a gay man and suffering homophobia.

Bolton-raised Sir Ian talked about coming out as a gay man aged 29 and said he could not tell his stepmother until 20 years later.

He was working with a group of students at a school in Gloucestershire, on a play about homophobic bullying.

The play was performed in front of an audience of around 200 pupils, some as young as 11, from other schools in the county.

After spending an hour in a drama workshop, the 70-year-old star of stage and screen – who developed his love of drama while a pupil at Bolton School – said he was proud of the students for tackling issues around homophobic bullying in schools.

“Being gay was a topic that was never mentioned when I was your age. We had not really invented the word gay – at school I used to be called Oscar, after Oscar Wilde,” he told the audience.

“If you were gay there was nowhere to go and no one to talk to, there was no other gay person as far as I knew.

“When I was 29 it was illegal for me to make love, I had a boyfriend and we slept together but the law said that we should be in prison.

“It was very hard to walk out in the street and say to him don’t touch me or brush your hand against mine, there may be a police man around the corner.”

He said the greatest regret of his life was that his parents never knew that he was gay.

“My mother died when I was 12 and my father died when I was 24, and I didn’t get around to telling him,” he said. “At 49 I told my step-mother Gladys. She said she had known for 40 years.”

Sir Ian also used the opportunity to speak about gay rights, criticising the US military’s stance on gay soldiers and he talked about the way homosexuals are treated in the Middle East.

He even slammed Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles for using the word gay in a derogatory way “because he is a careless lout”.

And he added it is a “worry that some religious people think that part of their faith is a need to believe that gay people are sinful, and in some sense not God's creatures”.

He then gave an impromptu Shakespearean monologue from the play Sir Thomas More, which he said was his present to the drama students.

Sir Ian, a committed gay rights activist, is touring schools with the organisation Stonewall, a group he helped to set up 20 years ago.