Actor and activist Cynthia Nixon has opened up about why she identifies as queer, telling magazine that, despite having and touting 'Unqualified Lesbian' badges during her gubernatorial run, she feels most comfortable with the 'Q' in the LGBTIQ+ acronym.
One of the stars of the upcoming Ratched on Netflix, in which she plays Sarah Paulson's love interest, Nixon said: "I could call myself a lesbian, gay, bisexual. But none of them seems really particularly right. To say ‘queer’ means, 'I’m over there, I don’t have to go into the nuances of my sexuality with you.'"
The former Sex and the City star, who has been with her wife, Christine Marinoni, for 16 years and has a trans son, Samuel, continued: "I feel like ‘queer’ is an umbrella term, and it includes my formerly straight self too."
"Falling in love with my wife was one of the great delights and surprises of my life, but it didn’t seem like I became a whole new person, or like some door had been unlocked,” she said. "It was like: ‘I have fallen in love with different people in my life and they’ve all been men before. Now this is a woman and she is amazing.’”
Nixon went on to say that members of the LGBTQ+ community need to stick together in the face of rising conservatism.
"It’s a really peculiar thing, how much they [the right] try to separate us as a community,” she said.
"But [after same-sex marriage was legalised] we saw a great divide in our own community too, between those who thought, I got my wedding ring, I can pass my money on to my spouse and not pay taxes, so I’m good, I’m done, as opposed to We have so far to go for so many members of our community, we are still so far from the promised land, we’re so far from having our full civil rights."
