Reverand Richard Coles has opened up about being gay and religious during a conversation in the I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! campsite. In an episode aired on Monday, November 25, the former Church of England priest was talking to fellow LGBTQ+ contestant GK Barry, who asked him if he found it difficult to navigate the two.

“No not at all,” Richard replied. “I’ve never given it a moment’s twinge of anxiety over whether God thought it was alright or not.

“Whether other people thought it was alright of not, well I’m happy to have that argument…”

He added: “Also, I was not the first. Sometimes I look at documents from the early church, or the church of the middle ages and I just think – so gay.”

Richard Coles, who is also an author, multi-instrumentalist and media personality, began training for his priesthood in the Church of England in 2003, before being ordained two years later. He worked as a “half-time vicar” until 2022, when he retired because of the church’s conservative position regarding LGBTQ+ inclusion.

Now taking part in I’m a Celebrity, the reverend has formed a close relationship with fellow queer contestant GK Barry, aka Grace Keeling. Speaking to the Bush Telegraph, GK admitted: “I came into this jungle, maybe not knowing who I would gel with or who I would be close with in here and never in a million years if you told me that I would be getting on best with a reverend would I have believed you. But, he is honestly… I think he might be my favourite person in here.”

In a different episode of the show, Grace opened up about her own coming out story. The TikTok star and podcaster is in a relationship with footballer Ella Rutherford.

“Online I’ve been like, ‘Yeah I’d slept with girls or whatever as well’, but I’d only dated men,” she explained. “And then it was by accident that I found Ella…And then I really liked her, first day I met her.”

However, she had never told her parents about her sexuality up to that point. 

“I’d mentioned, ‘Oh I’m just going to see my friend Ella’, or ‘I’m staying around Ella’s’, so they’d heard her name. And then they came down to visit me at my house and Ella was there – they were speaking to her and then we got in the car because I was dropping them to the train station and they were like ‘Who is Ella?’ and I was like, ‘That’s my girlfriend’…They just love her, never had an issue with it.”

This wasn’t surprising to Grace. “To be fair, I feel like the closet may have been glass,” she joked. “They’ve always said, ‘Whoever you end up with, we do not care. Girl, boy, whatever, as long as they’re not a d*ck.”

I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! airs in Ireland every day from 9pm on Virgin Media, and can be watched back on the player.