Graham Norton with Kristian Seeber, AKA Tina Burner from RuPaul’s Drag Race. (Dave M. Benett/Getty)
Graham Norton once described his on-again off-again relationship with RuPaul’s Drag Race star Tina Burner as a “disaster”.
Burner is among the queens battling it out to become America’s next drag superstar on RuPaul’s contest – but before she became a star on the show, she was Graham Norton’s boyfriend.
The New York drag queen, whose real name is Kristian Seeber, dated the BBC talkshow host in the early-to-mid-noughties – but the relationship didn’t end well.
Norton later opened up about their romance in his 2014 memoir The Life and Loves of a He Devil. In the book, Norton reflected on meeting Seeber for the first time in the Barracuda bar in New York.
The drag queen was “tall and broad-shouldered with an easy smile that took up half his face,” Norton wrote at the time – and the pair quickly hit it off.
The experiment lasted for about six months and it was a disaster.
While Norton was infatuated, his friends did not feel the same. The Irish television and radio personality said that if he “were to be judged solely on his behaviour, then I concede he was not great boyfriend material”.
“What they [his friends] couldn’t see was the special spark that fires within him: when he decides to shine his light on you, it makes you feel as special as he is.”
Graham Norton and Drag Race star Tina Burner lived together for six months.
Graham Norton and Seeber dated for months, but their relationship soon ended in heartbreak, with them both agreeing to call it quits.
But their separation didn’t last too long. They promptly got back together, with Seeber moving in with Norton in London.
However, their relationship was simply not meant to be, as Norton explained in his memoir.
“The experiment lasted for about six months and it was a disaster,” he wrote.
“I realise that even to a perfect stranger the outcome would have been glaringly obvious, but when you are in the middle of something and you are desperate for it to work, you’ll try anything.”
Seeber ultimately broke up with Norton “over lunch in an empty restaurant”, with Norton writing: “I walked home, finding some comfort in the fact that a man in his mid-forties could still feel such heartache.”