Dannii Minogue doesn’t know when she became a gay icon. “I don’t think anyone ever does,” she says. She has just finished washing iridescent rainbow paint off her eyelids and arm. “What I know is that I love the community and they love me back. And that’s where I leave it.”
Minogue’s coronation almost certainly took place some time between the early 90s, when she was one of the first bona fide pop stars to play G-A-Y nightclub in London, and this February, when she delighted crowds at Sydney WorldPride with her surprise duet with her sister, Kylie. Maybe it was when she sang at Pride in London in 1997, or when she posed naked except for a red ribbon on World Aids Day in 2004.
“This has been a part of my life since I started working, since I was a child,” she says. Now 51, Minogue began her career on Young Talent Time, a popular Australian variety show. “I knew there were people that I worked with who were gay, and I just thought that was completely normal.”
In the 90s, the media were not so progressive. “Artists were terrified,” she says. “Outing people was a thing.” For many, performing at gay bars wasn’t an option: gay artists didn’t want to be outed and straight artists were worried they would be deemed gay by association. “I’ve heard so many stories of people who were told: ‘No, you can’t be visible … that is gonna kill your career.’ I just thought: ‘Stuff it – say what you want about me, because you do anyway!’”
This is how a glammed-up Minogue finds herself in a photography studio to promote BBC Three’s new gay dating show, I Kissed a Boy. “I can’t believe we’re in 2023 saying it’s Britain’s first gay dating show ever. When those words spill out of my mouth, I’m in shock,” says Minogue. She loves being back in the UK, but is struggling with the separation from her 12-year-old son, Ethan. Still, she says: “It’s great for his growth … And mine!” I am about a foot taller than the 5ft 2in (1.57m) Minogue, and a lot less striking (she is wearing a black, off-the-shoulder evening gown), so it’s hard not to feel like Shrek next to her on the sofa.
Minogue plays Cupid on I Kissed a Boy, a role she enjoys among her friends, too. (She has been with her partner, the songwriter Adrian Newman, for about a decade, and definitely doesn’t miss dating.) In the programme, 10 single gay men are flown out to a stunning Italian villa, split into couples and expected to kiss immediately, with results that range from excruciatingly awkward to borderline pornographic.
They are then let loose to see if their chemistry is strong enough to last the series, or if they should try their luck elsewhere. With elements of Love Island, First Dates and RuPaul’s Drag Race, the show is familiar ground for Minogue, who is now as well known for her work presenting TV shows and judging talent contests as she is for her music.
She hopes more gay dating shows will follow. But is the British public ready to embrace them? “Oh, I think they have been for a long time.”
Judging by the first episode, the show is a kinder take on reality TV than some of its predecessors. This was deliberate, she says: “I’m Momma Minogue to the boys.” This is enough to make me want to break up with my boyfriend and sign up for the next season.
Minogue barely remembers a time when she wasn’t famous. Born in 1971, she grew up in Melbourne, the youngest of three to Carol, a former dancer, and Ronald, an accountant (as well as Kylie, there is her brother, Brendan, who is a cameraman). Danielle, as she was originally, fixated on performing after seeing Grease and was thrilled when a friend of the family, a casting director, called the children in to take their pictures.
At 10, Minogue joined the cast of Young Talent Time. “Fame looked different back then,” she says. “No paparazzi, no social media, no nothing. I was just in my world, apart from fanmail that would come. People still stop me and they’re like: ‘One of the best days of my life was when I wrote you a letter, never expecting anything, and you wrote back.’”
As a teenager, she signed a record deal with the Australian label Mushroom Records and juggled a brief stint in the soap Home and Away (1989-90) with recording an album in New York. Her debut album, Love and Kisses (1991), went gold in the UK. Cracking the US, however, was a different story.
“It was brutal and there was so much going on behind the scenes,” she says. During her nationwide tour for the US label that had licensed her album, she was expected to perform in as many clubs as possible – for no fee. Meanwhile, she claimed in her 2010 memoir, Dannii: My Story, “a little old guy with a bad attitude who billed himself as ‘tour manager’ [was] sure as hell” getting paid. “By the time we were landing back in New York,” she says now, “it was like: do I even want to be a part of any of this?”
The decision was almost taken out of her hands after her second album flopped and she lost her recording deal. Once Smash Hits’ best new artist, she was now voted the worst by its readers. She was stoical about the loss, though: Young Talent Time performers had to leave the programme when they were 16, so she had always expected there would be a time when she would have to find a “real job”. “There was part of me that always thought: enjoy it while it’s there, because at some point it’s going to be up. That’s part of the excitement. It’s like walking a tightrope every day.”
By 1995, she was broke. Playboy magazine offered a lifeline: a substantial fee in exchange for a nude cover story.
“It was personally empowering to me,” she says. “I still stand by those photos. I still think it’s awesome. My son’s 12, he and his friends are all on their phones, they’ll be Googling, pictures will come up – but I still absolutely 100% stand by that as a complete feminist move. Anyone can look at those pictures and you can say whatever you want about them. My body, my choice, my space. I controlled everything about the photos, the shoot, everything. And it just made me feel powerful.”
She did get pushback from her father, though. “He just hands down said: ‘I do not want you to do this. I think this is the worst move that you could make.’” Did he come around in the end? “I don’t know. I think that’s something we’ll revisit in conversation later. But maybe he can see it now, with me being a grown woman and a mum and still standing by those choices.”
Her recording career bounced back, with a trio of albums showcasing a more mature, electro-dance-pop sound. But after the release of Club Disco (2007), Minogue was ready to step back. That decision was confirmed in 2010 when she had her son with her then-partner, the former rugby player Kris Smith. “It takes a toll on your body, touring. Now, I get asked a lot about music and I’m like: it’s incredibly hard for me to do that the way I want to do it and be a mum the way I want to be.” It is impossible, she says, not to think about bath time and bedtime on stage. “It’s really oil and water.”
Still, she did manage nine Top 10 UK singles. Does she feel her music career is underrated? “It’s always been and always will be compared with Kylie’s success,” she says. “But all I can do is be happy with what I’ve done. If I look at that on its own: amazing. But I also don’t compare myself with Beyoncé or Mariah Carey.”
Minogue’s second act began in 2007 with a stint as a judge on Australia’s Got Talent, before its creator, Simon Cowell, drafted her in for the fourth season of The X Factor in the UK. Popjustice’s Peter Robinson was soon describing her as “the nation’s favourite reality pop judge”.
Minogue did four seasons of The X Factor, when the show was at its peak. “It was fever pitch,” she says. “When I stepped off, there were just under 20 million viewers. It was huge. You could not move about.”
In recent years, a number of former contestants have claimed they were mistreated on the show. Accusations include unfair editing and a lack of support for vulnerable contestants, while it was reported that documentary-makers were investigating allegations of behind-the-scenes bullying and harassment. A spokesperson for The X Factor says: “Duty of care to our contestants is of the utmost importance to us. We take welfare very seriously and have measures in place to ensure that they are supported.”
I Kissed a Boy is doing its best to avoid similar controversies. “Everyone is going to be looked after,” Minogue says; there will be a psychiatrist who specialises in the LGBTQ+ community on set. “The worst and most dangerous thing that I could do would be to make a gay dating show that was disrespectful.”
As for The X Factor, she says: “Whether you were a judge or a contestant, it felt like being in a tumble dryer. I don’t know how any contestant could walk away from the show and go: ‘It was easy.’ You didn’t come in here for it to be easy. It was like: we’re gonna make sure you improve every week.”
It was, she adds, “the most intense time of television, of celebrity, in the UK”. This was partly why she left the show. “I don’t know any other person that would walk away from a job that half the country’s watching and the numbers are just growing and growing and growing,” she says. “That was a ballsy move. But it was about what I felt inside and me going to sleep at night.” She loved The X Factor, but felt the mood had shifted. “I was feeling like it was getting very bitchy, very catty … I said: ‘That’s fine. If people want to watch it and if you want to make that, that’s fine. It’s just enough for me.’”
Leaving also put an end to the tabloid stories about her rivalry with her fellow judges: first Sharon Osbourne, then Cheryl. This was just one more stage in her career-long battle with the media.
“From when I first arrived in England to work – it was 1991 – I was horrified by a lot of stuff that I saw written,” she says. It was a horrible time for women in music. Of the articles Minogue read, “comparisons with my sister, a lot about my weight and making feuds supposedly between me and my sister – they were the most heartbreaking stuff. It’s amazing that I survived.”
In Dannii: My Story, she tells of one particularly gruelling moment, in 2005, when she travelled to Australia after Kylie was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Kylie and I are fiercely protective of our brother, of our parents, and the hardest thing was seeing what my parents were subjected to as they’re worrying about their daughter at their home,” she says. “It was horrific what the rest of our family went through.”
She remembers reporters three deep outside their house, “photographers standing on top of cars trying to shoot into the back garden – just an absolute assault. At the hospital, it was the same. We were worried about the nurses just trying to do their job and being subjected to all sorts of stuff that they shouldn’t have.”
Things are better, she says, now that the press is scrutinised in the same way as the celebrities it covers. “I’m so happy that time has shifted and we are in a different space. It’s kind of like the Uber thing: [if you write about me], you’re as accountable as I am – you’re going to get reviewed, too. So if everyone knows what you’re saying is full of shit – and there’s no research – that’s on you.”
It makes it easier for her to be in the moment, to fully enjoy the instants of happiness, such as that duet with Kylie at Sydney WorldPride. She spent the days afterwards going through all the videos she had been tagged in on social media. “It was like a love bomb and it felt very different from any other Mardi Gras. I still have that sense inside me that it could end at any moment, so it still surprises me when I see something like WorldPride and I think: ‘Hmm … still going!’”
She bursts into laughter. She is indeed. Long live the queen of the gays.
• This article was amended on 8 May 2023. Dannii Minogue was born and grew up in Melbourne, not Sydney as an earlier version said.
I Kissed a Boy starts on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer on 14 May
