Cynthia Nixon: ‘I didn’t really identify as bisexual’

Cynthia Nixon is married to a woman and before that had a 15-year relationship with a man.

But don’t call the out actress bisexual.

‘I didn’t really identify as bisexual,’ the actress tells Huffpost, ‘but people were so insistent that I pick a ― you know, it caused a huge controversy and everyone wanted to graft on to me this narrative ― [that] I felt that I had just simply been mistaken about myself for all these years and finally the veil was lifted and I was a lesbian. And that was not true.’

Nixon caused a controversy in 2012 when instead of saying she is bisexual, she said that for her, being gay was a choice. She later clarified in a statement to The Advocate. ‘I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.’

The Sex and the City star and Christine Marinoni, her girlfriend since 2004, tied the knot in 2012. She met Marinoni after she her long relationship with photographer Danny Mozes – the father of her oldest children – had ended.

‘I’d been with men all my life, and I’d never fallen in love with a woman,’ Nixon said in 2007. ‘But when I did, it didn’t seem so strange. I’m just a woman in love with another woman.’

Nixon, however, has no qualms about labeling Emily Dickinson bisexual.

She is getting critical acclaim for her portrayal of the poet in the new film A Quiet Passion. (I saw it last night in Pasadena and her performance is sensational)

‘I do think she was [bisexual.] It’s so hard for us 150 years later to really get tone right,’ Nixon says.

What has most formed Nixon’s opinion is letters she read between Dickinson and the poet’s sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, who was married her Dickinson’s brother, Austin.

‘It seemed like there was a love affair there,’ says the actress. ‘And way before I did this film, I read the letters between them, ‘Open Me Carefully,’ which are really erotic, some of them, and are really hard to read as anything other than a female romance.

‘But again, it’s hard for us to know and people were so full of adoration for friends back then, that it’s really hard to tell. But it seems to me there was tremendous fighting and jealousy and seems to me Emily had a plan, a hope at least, that she and Susan would live together and spend their lives together. And then it all broke up.’

She adds: ‘I do think it seems very clear that whatever the nature of that relationship was, that Emily had passionate love affairs with men as well, and again whether those had a physical component or they were a love from afar, it’s very hard for us to to know.’