Relationships5 min(s) read
Jono Lancaster, born with Treacher Collins syndrome, shares candid details about his sex life
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Jono Lancaster was abandoned by his birth parents 36 hours after he was born because of the way his face looked.
He has spent 40 years learning to live with a condition that makes him visibly different from everyone around him.
In a new interview, he has spoken more openly than ever about the part of his life that nobody usually asks about: sex.
Lancaster was born with Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects the development of the facial bones.
He has no cheekbones. His eyes droop downward. He has no external ears and lives with significant hearing loss. The condition affects roughly one in 50,000 people.
In a new episode of LADbible Stories' Honesty Box, he answered 21 questions submitted by viewers, including one that most people would never think to ask someone with a visible facial difference: 'How have you found navigating your sex life?'
What Jono said about his sex life
When the question appeared on screen, Lancaster did not flinch.
He answered it the way he answers everything in the Honesty Box: directly, without self-pity, and with the kind of honesty that makes you uncomfortable because of how normal he makes it sound.
He said his longest relationship lasted 10 years. He said he has been in multiple relationships over the past 18 years. He said the beginning was the hardest part.
"It was definitely hard at first. There was a lot of trauma at the beginning."
He described the internal voice that followed him through his teens and into his twenties.
The voice that told him nobody would ever want him. Not just emotionally. Physically.
"Nobody's gonna find me attractive. That somebody would find me sexually attractive... I would be like, 'Oh, I'm so unlovable,' and it didn't happen for me."
That line is the one that will stay with people.
He did not say 'attractive'. He said 'sexually attractive'. The distinction matters because it is the thing most people with visible facial differences are never asked about publicly, and the thing that most of them carry privately.
Desirability. The fear that nobody will want to be close to you. The assumption that intimacy is something that happens to other people.
But then he said the thing that makes the whole segment land differently from how you expect it to.
"Whereas now, the past 18 years, I've had so many beautiful relationships."
As a teenager, girls would flirt with him on a dare.
He would look over their heads and see their friends laughing. He hid away while his mates went out, got drunk, and made memories.
He became obsessed with his body as compensation. Diet, gym, tanning, exercise. If his face could not be the thing that attracted people, his body would have to be.
"I had no boundaries and I was a people pleaser," he has said in previous interviews. A man so desperate to be accepted that he would do whatever it took to make someone stay.
That was then. Eighteen years of beautiful relationships is now. The distance between the two is the article.
How he was abandoned at birth
Lancaster was born on October 31, 1985, in West Yorkshire, England. His birth parents took one look at him and decided they could not cope. He was given up within 36 hours.
A woman named Jean Lancaster fostered him two weeks later. When she saw the baby, she picked him up without hesitation. She asked the nurse when she could take her son home. She formally adopted him when he was five.
"How can you not love a kid?" she later said.
Jean gave him stability, love, and the confidence to face the world.
Primary school was manageable with her behind him. Secondary school was not. The stares, the bullying, the loneliness, and eventually the self-loathing followed him through his teenage years.
He stopped looking in mirrors. He avoided reflections in shop windows. He hated his face.
When he tried to contact his birth parents
Years later, when Lancaster was in a good place with a relationship, a job, and friends around him, he decided to reach out to his biological parents. He wanted to tell them he was okay. That he had made it.
They rejected him again.
"Now I've stripped it all back and the truth is the only thing I know about my birth parents is they gave me life," he has said. "And it's down to me to live this life and make the most of this life."
Where Jono is now
He is 40 years old. He is single. He has written a book called Not All Heroes Wear Capes.
He presented a Channel 4 series called Love My Face. He travels the world meeting children born with Treacher Collins and other facial differences, helping them build the confidence that took him decades to find for himself.
He chose not to have cosmetic surgery. He was asked about it directly in the LADbible video. His answer was that he would not change the way he looks.
"For the first time in I can't remember how many years, I absolutely loved what I saw," he has said about the moment he finally accepted his reflection.
It is sandwiched between 'If you could, would you change the way you look?' and 'Is it rude to ask you about your appearance?'
The fact that he answered it at all, on camera, for millions of people to see, is the point.