‘King Richard’ & ‘Clark Sisters’ Star Aunjanue Ellis Comes Out As Bisexual: ‘I Am Queer — This Is Who I Am’
In celebration of Pride Month, beloved actress Aunjanue Ellis has come out as bisexual and she’s now sharing how she’s speaking and living in her truth.
In a new interview with Variety, the “King Richard” and “Clark Sisters” star playfully recalls her Essence Black Woman in Hollywood gala move where she intentionally rocked the word “Queer” on her red suit; something that everyone including the media didn’t catch. “I was thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people pay attention to that?’ And I was like, they probably thought it said ‘Queen’ [Laughs]. It wasn’t that I was expecting any sort of major reaction or anything like that. One of my family members noticed, but nobody else did.” The 53-year-old actress went on to say that a member of her family – just one of the majority who has known about her sexuality for decades – was unhappy with her bold move.
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It brought her back to the memory of growing up in a God-fearing family. “If they come 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.” Looking at things now, Ellis learned to accept that “I am a work in progress, and my family and my community are works in progress,” Ellis says. “I really believe that that is important to say because I’m not alone. We see people on the other side of it, where everybody’s good and fine: ‘Love is love.’”
Further into the interview, Ellis also revealed that growing up, she 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.” But it wasn’t until she was in her 30s that Ellis, who is in an 11-year relationship with a man she met in church, fully acknowledged that she’s bisexual.
“We were just spending time talking and hanging out,” she recalls at the grounds of the Sundance Lab with another female attendee. “We walked by this stream — those streams in Utah where it snows once, and then it becomes a beautiful, clear, clear stream — and there was a moment when the sun was hitting the water, and I was looking down in the water, and it was so clear, and I can only hear this woman’s voice behind me. I said, ‘This is how I’m supposed to feel. This is what I’ve been waiting to feel my entire life.’”
Ellis continued that she hadn’t been hiding her sexuality all of this time and that the reason why it hasn’t come up in the media is simply because “nobody asked.”
“The way that I live my life, around the people that I live my life around, I am public about it,” Ellis says. “I’m very clear about being bisexual. I have a sweatshirt that says ‘Girl Bi’ that I wear everywhere.” As the news outlet notes, Ellis is currently working on a project about voting and women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (following a 2022 short film in which Ellis portrayed her fellow Mississippian). She’s intentionally spotlighting queer characters who were involved with Hamer’s activism, Variety reports.
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