Irish singer Stephen Gately was BOTD in 1976. Born in Dublin to a working-class family, he became interested in theatre in his teens, joining a disco-dance group and studying acting at the Gaiety Theatre. In 1993, he auditioned successfully for a place in boy band Boyzone, created by producer Louis Walsh as the Irish answer to English boy band Take That. The band recorded a series of anodyne love ballads and upbeat dance numbers, reaching No 1 in Ireland and the UK with their 1996 cover of the Bee Gees song Words. The group became one of Ireland’s most successful pop music exports, selling 25 million records by 2013. Gately’s cherubic, girl-friendly image was carefully cultivated by Walsh, who fed the press fake stories about his involvement with female celebrities, and encouraged tabloids not to out him in the press. Gately finally came out as gay in a 1999 interview with tabloid newspaper The Sun, revealing his relationship with Dutch boy-band singer Eloy De Jong. The story was later revealed to be a trade-off with the newspaper, who had threatened to out him. Following the disbanding of Boyzone, Gately launched a brief solo career, and appeared in West End revivals of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamboat and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He entered into a civil partnership with Andrew Cowles in 2006. Gately died in 2009 of a sudden pulmonary oedema, aged 33. A week later, the tabloid journalist Jan Moir published an article in the Daily Mail suggesting that Gately’s death was due to drugs and his “dangerous lifestyle”. Moir was widely condemned as a homophobe, triggering over 25,000 submissions to the Press Complaints Commission. The Commission concluded that the article, while offensive, did not breach the law or press standards, and no further action was taken against Moir or the Daily Mail.