Feature image of Aunjanue Ellis, who confirmed she’s bisexual and queer to Variety magazine, Photo by David Livingston/FilmMagic
“The solitude of that is so lonely, it’s violent… It’s violent because you literally have to tuck and place so many parts of you to be acceptable, so people won’t run from you and don’t want to be around you. It was exhausting. That’s what childhood was like. That’s what adolescence was like. I knew [my sexuality], but there was no template for it; there was no example of it; there was no place for it, and certainly no forgiveness for it.”
I mean, that’s it. Isn’t it?
In today’s newly released Pride issue of Variety, Academy Award nominee — and all around phenom who rivets anyone watching to their chair the minute she steps onto the screen — Aunjanue Ellis confirmed she’s bisexual and queer in a stunning profile. She originally tried to subtly bring everyone in to her sexuality in March during Essence magazine’s annual Black Women in Hollywood luncheon, where she wore a custom red suit outfitted in crystals spelling QUEER down the sleeve. No one asked her what it meant. (Though I have to say, here at Autostraddle we did notice, we just had no way to confirm until now! Anyway!) This is what I’m supposed to be writing about. A quick, celebratory “WELCOME PARTY” for an Academy Award nominee.
And please do not get me wrong, before I go any further, anytime a Black person comes out as queer, I’m celebrating. A Black queer woman over 50, who’s proudly from the Bible Belt, coming out as bisexual? On June 1st? Baby — we throwing a whole damn Pride parade. Put her name in lights.
But I can’t stop thinking about the parts of ourselves that we’re forced to tuck away to be acceptable. The hushed “don’t tell grandma” that comes right after the “I love you” when we come out. The quiet bets we make with ourselves, “I’ll come out after I move away.” The violence of tearing ourselves into pieces that are smaller, more palatable. The waiting for permission to just be.
Aunjanue Ellis names it succinctly, “If [my family comes] to New York and they are around all my gay friends, they’re like, ‘Oh we’re cool.’ But don’t bring it to the house. Don’t be open with it.”
That part. The don’t ask, don’t tell part. That recognition of the negotiations we make, especially as Black people — and I’m sure other people make it too, but I can’t speak to an experience that isn’t mine. I’m Black and Aunjanue’s Black, so I am talking about Black people — make to be ourselves in our families. The ways we contort to make room for those people we know in our bones love us, but also love God, and haven’t yet wrapped their heads around how their God can also love us because God made us, too. The jokes and memes about Auntie who brings her “roommate” to the family reunion. It’s messy. So messy. But life isn’t neat.
I used to say that coming out stories were for white people.
That’s simplified. And I am not speaking for every Black person on the planet because Blackness is not a monolith. But I am speaking about the ways that Black queerness uniquely operates in open silence. That Queen Latifah, also Black and over 50, has still never said the words, and that doesn’t stop us from claiming her as our own. That Aunjanue Ellis literally walked a red carpet with the word QUEER going down her arm in sparkles, and no one bat an eye to ask — that other Black actresses in her peer group have made so many openly queerphobic jokes, the norms of heteronormativity, she came out to them in a group text to get them to stop.That when Niecy Nash announced her wedding to Jessica Betts in 2020, the first question people had was if it was simply for a role.
That I’m less than month from my 36th birthday, and the Editor-in-Chief of this website, but I’ve never actually come out to my mother’s very churchy sisters. That when one of them got remarried late in life, I sat in the front row of the church I grew up in and listened as my family minister talked about how my love was a sin. My mother sat next to me and squeezed my hand. I think she thought that helped. But really it only bought my quietness.
Different shades of grey across the same rhinestone. There’s protection in silence, love in half truths, family in not saying. But there’s also loneliness. I’m so grateful for Aunjanue Ellis making that plain today.
“It is imperative that we see more of that, because it is the truth of who we are,” Ellis says in the Variety interview. “It is not a blemish on who we are. It is the wonderful scope of our humanity as Black folks in this country. It is something that I am insisting on, in what I bring into the world creatively.”
More than anything for Ellis, this coming out party — and their life’s work — is for Black women. “I want to speak for them and to them in ways where they feel honored, where they feel that I’m doing and saying something that reflects their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their aspirations.”
And so here I am, Aunjanue Ellis, Black queer woman to Black queer woman, and I’m ready to do this thing! May streams of confetti fall upon your feet. May Beyoncé’s cover of “Before I Let Go” play with each step that you walk. May you have all that is good, because gahdamn this is one helluva way to kick off Pride.
