Portia de Rossi and Ellen DeGeneres have been married for over a decade already. However, before marrying DeGeneres, she admitted that she didn’t want people to know she is gay.
Portia de Rossi on her sexuality
Portia de Rossi is gay. She is married to Ellen DeGeneres. However, she didn’t have it easy when it comes to coming out.
“I just didn’t want to be a lesbian,” she said in an interview on The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet per Radar Online.
“I’d never met one for a start and I just thought they were strange and that they hated men and they were very serious and I had these ridiculous images in my head and there were no out celebrities or politicians or anybody that I could look to and go, ‘Oh, I could be like that.’
There was nobody that I could say, ‘I could date her and I want to be like her.’ I just kind of thought I don’t want to live like this. I don’t have to, I don’t need to, I just shut down the emotional life.”
De Rossi admitted that her confusion and happiness came to a head while she was starring on Ally McBeal from 1997 to 2002. It resulted in an eating disorder.
“I didn’t like people thinking of me as a sexual being, and I was just terrified that people would know that I was gay,” Portia continued.
Ellen helped Portia come out as gay
In a candid interview with Advocate in 2005, Portia De Rossi shared how she admitted her sexuality to the public. According to her, her wife, Ellen DeGeneres, had something to do with it.
“I respect her [DeGeneres] so much. She was so courageous and so loud in ’97, and now she is doing something that is more subliminal. She’s changing the world,” de Rossi said in a past interview. “And it’s exciting to be a part of that”
Portia and Ellen chose each other
Portia de Rossi and Ellen DeGeneres had respective partners when they met. However, they broke up with their former partners to be together.
“She had a girlfriend and I had a girlfriend, but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have an affair’,” DeGeneres recalled.
“We were just supposed to be together. It was a tough decision. I was physically getting sick because I was trying not to say anything. So I told Alex and she told Francesca. It was really hard to uproot everything.”