Aunjanue Ellis Reflects on Her Bisexuality: 'I Am Queer - This Is Who I Am'

Aunjanue Ellis is getting candid about her sexuality.

In a new interview with Variety published Wednesday (June 1), the 53-year-old King Richard actress told the outlet that she hadn’t spoken about her sexuality publicly because “nobody asked.”

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“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. I wasn’t going to be like, ‘And by the way, in case you ain’t heard yet…’ Because that’s artificial.”

“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?” she added. “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.”

Back in March, Aunjanue attended the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards in a red suit jacket with the word “Queer” written in rhinestones on the sleeves. However, the fashion statement was mostly ignored on the red carpet.

“I was thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people pay attention to that?’ And I was like, they probably thought it said ‘Queen,’” she said. “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.”

She went on to say that the family member had been “hurt” by her decision to wear the look, despite having already known about her sexuality.

“I am a work in progress, and my family and my community are works in progress,” she noted. “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.’”

“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,” she added.

“The way that I live my life, around the people that I live my life around, I am public about it,” she told Variety. “I’m very clear about being bisexual. I have a sweatshirt that says ‘Girl Bi’ that I wear everywhere.”

But she also reflected on the challenges she faced navigating her identity when she was younger.

“The solitude of that is so lonely, it’s violent,” Aunjanue shared. “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.”

She also called out the lack of representation in the entertainment industry.

“There aren’t a lot of novels about Black queer women,” she said. “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 added. “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.”

Several stars have come out as members of the LGBT+ community this year.