Suzi Ruffell has revealed she didn’t realise she was gay until she watched Kate Winslet in Titanic… and even then pretended to be straight for several years.

The comic also said she used humour as a defence mechanism to distract school peers from discovering her sexuality – yet even now is frequently targeted with homophobic heckles when on stage.

Speaking on the podcast How To Fail with Elizabeth Day, 39-year-old Ruffell said: ‘ I didn't know I was gay until I saw Titanic. I went to the cinema when I was 12 to see Titanic and yes, there is nudity, but she's also a kick-ass character who owns her sexuality and knows who she is in the world and doesn't want to be closed in by what the world expects of her. 

‘I went home and I was really confused by it and then I went to see the film seven times at the ABC Portsmouth and the first time I cried because I was thinking, "Oh my God, it's so sad that all these people died" and the second time I cried because I was like, "Oh no what I've realised about myself in watching this film really changes my life".

‘I didn't want to be gay. I didn't want to be different. I didn't want any of that. I mean, I'm fine with it now, but it was a journey. There was a massive journey of acceptance of who I really am and being confident enough to dress how I want to dress and look how I want to look.

‘ It was nine years after I watched Titanic that I finally came out, it wasn't like I was brave immediately but yes, because of that, Kate holds a really special place in my heart.’

She told how  she was ‘terrified’ of her sexuality at school, saying: ‘I didn't want to be too friendly with any of the girls in case they realised, so I took myself out of friendship groups and then needed something to be obsessed with that wasn't hot babes. So I became obsessed with musical theatre… People would be talking about Blur versus Oasis, while I'd be like, "so Bob Fosse was this guy that was a really great choreographer…" 

‘I just didn't feel normal and that was a queer thing. I found it quite hard to make friends and I'm severely dyslexic, so at school, I felt really thick.

‘So I wanted to constantly divert people from like, please don't work out I'm gay and please don't think that I'm massively thick. So, I just was a bit of an idiot to not be noticed.

‘I would try to say stupid things. I'd get in trouble loads. I remember calling the teacher a wanker. He did tell me that I would amount to nothing, and so I called him a wanker.’

In the nine years between realising her sexuality and coming out, Ruffell  said she was ‘kissing boys, dating boys, all that stuff’ even living with a boyfriend, thinking: 'Oh, I could probably end up with you and you are really nice and you're Catholic, so you never push me for sex. This is ideal…. maybe this will be fine, maybe this is enough.’

But she told Day: ‘’Then I met a girl and was like, oh, this is what it's supposed [to be like]. This is what the rest of the girls feel like when they're with boys when you fancy someone. 

‘She worked in the bar that I worked in and I would look forward to my bar shift all week so that I could spend a couple of hours with this slightly older gay woman who was very confident in herself, knew who she was and I couldn't believe that people could be happy and gay.’

However when she started stand-up, she said the scene was ‘quite homophobic’ and ‘even occasionally now, you'll get someone shout something out.’

She explained: ‘This is quite crude, but it happened, the most consistent heckle I got for a period was, "I can fix you."

‘That's happened to me I think maybe five or six times I've been on stage and someone shouted, "I can fix you", a man.

‘The first time it happened I asked my friend how I dealt with it and she said, "you look visibly hurt" and it's because I was, I remember crying on the way home from the gig and then it happened again. 

‘The last time it happened, I was in a comedy club and I hadn't even got to the mic… I asked them to put the lights up in the comedy club and then I asked him to stand up and I addressed all the reasons why he wouldn't be the man to fix me.’

Ruffell also spoke about how class still plays a role comedy, telling Day: ‘When I first started stand-up, and going up to the Edinburgh Festival, I noticed that there were lots of people who had been to Cambridge or Oxford that then knew people that worked at the BBC and could get on things.

’Is that a class thing or is that a connections thing or are those things the same? I don’t know. I think that certainly we are living in a time now when  in many ways class feels more prevalent than it did ten years ago because of austerity and because of people really struggling at the moment and there not being enough support around the welfare state.

‘I think there were real steps being made forward and now it feels like it's really stagnated or, if anything, it's slipped back a bit.’

Ruffell was on the podcast to speak about her new book, Am I Having Fun Now?: Anxiety, Applause and Life's Big Questions, Answered.

• Ruffell’s episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is available on all platforms now.

• Am I Having Fun Now? is available from Amazon, priced £12.54  – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores. She is also on tour this autumn. Suzi ​Ruffell tour dates.