*“King Richard” star Aunjanue Ellis is opening up about being bisexual. Ellis, 53, told Variety that she didn’t publicly discuss her sexuality while promoting the film because “nobody asked.”
“How do you work that into the conversation, in the middle of me talking about this movie?” she shared. “I’m not that chick. My job was to talk about King Richard, the Williams family, these wonderful young women I worked with, Will Smith’s incredible work in that movie.”
She added: “I wasn’t going to be like, ‘And by the way, in case you ain’t heard yet…’ Because that’s artificial.”
Ellis continued, “There is an assumption made of me — a presumption made of me. Is it because I’m a Black woman from Mississippi? Is it because I’m older? I don’t know what the mechanics are that goes into them not processing, or them not just being able to believe that in the same way I am Black, I am queer. This is who I am.”
READ MORE: Aunjanue Ellis on the Williams Family Legacy in ‘King Richard’ | Watch
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In March, Ellis wore a red Dolce & Gabbana suit jacket with the word “Queer” written in rhinestones on the sleeve to the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards — but the moment went unnoticed.
“I was thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people pay attention to that?’ And I was like, they probably thought it said ‘Queen,'” she revealed. “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.”
Ellis admits that it was quite challenging to navigate her sexuality when she was younger.
“The solitude of that is so lonely, it’s violent,” she explained. “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.”
She continued, “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.”
Ellis added, “There aren’t a lot of novels about Black queer women. There are characters, but the full experience of a Black woman being gay or bisexual, it doesn’t exist, so we’ve got to write it into existence.”
“It is imperative that we see more of that, because it is the truth of who we are,” she said. “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.”
Aunjanue Ellis also co-stars on AMC’s ’61st Street” with Courtney B. Vance.
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