Hinsegin dagar í Reykjavík - 01.08.2000, Blaðsíða 8

9 F
'or a decade glamorous pop star Paul Oscar has been a
celebrity and, at least after his stirring Eurovision act in
1997, not only in his native Iceland. But at the same time
sf) M he s been very controversial. One moment ererybody seems
' ■ to love him, the next they don't. But one thing is certain:
He really has a chameleon like ability to change images. Being a successful singer,
dancer and entertainer he also has his own radio program and is currently corre-
sponding with the readers of the newspaper Fókus as the omniscient Dr. Love. It's no
wonderpeople ask: Who is the man behind the many faces? Paul Oscar is of a family
renowned for it's artistic abilities; hisfather is a gifted singer and his sister one ofthe
leading soloists of the Icelandic opera. But looking back Paul Oscar says that he wasn’t
always a happy child and even was bullied a lot in school.
“When I look back I don 't consider my childhood as bad at all. But I didn 't have many
friends growing up. I was as old as thirteen when I had my firstfriend, a girl I knew. We soon
became best buddies. She was the first one I told that I thought that I was gay. Somehow I
thought it was all a bigjoke as I was raised in a real middle-class family with strong tradi-
tional values. Now everybody seems to think ofmy family as a duplicate of the Von Trapps in
Sound ofMusic. But in reality it was quite different. I even learned to look down on women,
children and oldpeople for various reasons. Our family life could be almost oppressive and
at times everybody 's life seemed to revolve around my father. Sometimes it felt like a Catholic
upbringing. Of course I would have liked to skip the oppressivepattern Igrew up in. But then
I would maybe be a different person than I am today and doing different things. You know
like if we had been sipping herbal tea all day long, my mother had been a feminist in the
early eighties and my dad had worked as a clerk in a bakery.After I had told my girlfriend
about my speculations I tried not to think more about them. But the feelings wouldn 't go