Photo: WireImage
In 2006, Cynthia Nixon sat down with New York’s Emily Nussbaum and, for one of the first times, talked about the issue. You know, the lesbian thing. She was reluctant to even address it, but, when she did, she gave a quotation that would become famous:
I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn’t a struggle, there wasn’t an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I’m a public figure.
It was emblematic of her attitude towards morphing into a gay woman at the age of 38. She would address it, but in a roundabout way and never in detail. It just wasn’t a big deal. It was so much of a small deal that it really wasn’t worth discussing, you know?
But now that she’s promoting the new Sex and the City movie, it’s all that she can talk about. She somehow went from being buttoned-up to baring all. It’s appropriate for a movie in which she actually, you know, shows her boobies. But, on a personal level, it’s quite a reversal. Now, because it’s all people ask her about, she seems to be able to talk about nothing but being a big, gay homosexual and dating education activist Christine Marinoni.
• On Oprah, the talk-show maven asked her how it was possible to fall in love with someone of the same gender for the first time. Flashing a lascivious grin, Cynthia replied: “You haven’t met my girlfriend.” Yowza! [Intel]
• “Christine doesn’t wear women’s clothes; she only wears men’s clothes. She won’t even wear any kind of women’s shoes. I bought her a pair of cowboy boots that were from the women’s department, and she was like, ‘Don’t do this again.’” [NYT]
• “In terms of my girlfriend, I don’t really have a desire to keep it secret, but even if I did I don’t even know how that would work. Like, there’s a butch woman living in my house, going out to the playground every day with my kids and I.” [Boston Herald]
• “I do feel that the ideal man is a woman,” laughs Nixon. “I feel like she’s much more intuitive about what’s going on with me. She’s much more willing to treat it like a partnership. We eat together, shop and cook together, raise children together. And there’s much more sense of the task at hand and we both fit in. I’m in love with her because she’s her; it’s hard to know if I’d be in love with her if she were a man. If she were a man, would she be different? Would she still be this intuitive? Would she still be this devoted?” [Times of London]
• “We don’t have a TV. But when there was a World Cup, we went to the local Ruby Foo’s and watched it. And we actually did watch the Super Bowl as well. She tried to explain it to me.” [OutSports]
• “If [same-sex marriage] becomes legal I think we would [do it],” says Cynthia, who still lives in the Upper West Side neighbourhood where she was born. “It’s something my girlfriend is interested in and it was not something my boyfriend ever was. I think that to get married to her would be a little act of rebellion. It’s like if you’ve never had the vote and then you get it you’re going to run out there and vote.” [Daily Mirror]
It’s sweet that Cynthia feels comfortable talking about this stuff now. But you don’t see Kim Cattrall getting grilled about her much-younger boyfriend, chef Alan Wyse. Or Kristin Davis getting asked about those gross sex pictures, even. Is a low-key lesbian family really that interesting?
Educating Cynthia [NYM]
