I never shared my pain and loneliness with her at the time because I didn't think I could. 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.Then came I'm a Celebrity.
TV includes Have I Got News For You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Graham Norton and The Frank Skinner Show; hosting 4 series of BBC2's pioneering Gaytime TV and in 2000 her first BBC sitcom series, Rhona. I feel like all my life I've used alcohol as a way to avoid having any relationship with anyone or anything else. 'Cameron thinks now that much of her confusion and misery was due to the lack of lesbian role models. So why was I letting people do this stuff to me?
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.This led to a cycle of blurting out her feelings to successive girls and being rejected.
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. 'I don't even know what my father would have made of me or my sexuality.' 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. always very good, sometimes a little sarcastic. 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.Cameron chose 1979 to write about because it was the year her father died and her world crashed in. '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. 'I guess that was my way of exploring how other versions of me would look.
'For me, anyway. 'It was just what I'd always done, but I was getting paid for it.' Now I see that they were also disturbed, but I didn't put them in the same bracket as me. Which is a good thing for me. And one of them was this book.
As well as appearing in “The Rocky Horror” show on tour and then in the West End, where she played the first female narrator. I wanted to be leading the class revolt against the teacher. They left the group in 1989 and went alone, taking their name from… And that didn't stop.
'Back then, Cameron accepted what was happening to her even as she felt, 'lonely and dirty'. It's like, I wanted love and affection and I sexualised it. The ground just goes beneath you. I've found myself thinking about the past much less since I wrote the book. Sue Perkins struggled with her emerging sexuality alongside her then-boyfriend, who also turned out to be gay. I'd remortgaged for £30,000 before I went.
Only one six episode series was made, broadcast in July and August 2000 on BBC2.
These days, Cameron views I'm a Celebrity as a life-changing experience. When, equally innocently, some of them said yes, Cameron would step up her efforts to look and behave like a boy. From an early age, she knew she was adopted.
Among the comedians in the UK she remains to stands out and deliver her very own authentic humour.