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Aunjanue Ellis On Her Bisexuality: “This Is Who I Am”

“I am a work in progress, and my family and my community are works in progress,” Ellis said in an interview.

Let the world know you are queer and here! Aunjanue Ellis revealed in an interview with Variety that she is a proud Bisexual woman and talks about the presumptions she’s faced.

“There is an assumption made of me — a presumption made of me,” she tells the publication.

“Is it because I’m a Black woman from Mississippi? Is it because I’m older?” she muses. “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.”

She also tells the outlet how she’s “public” about her bisexuality.

“The way that I live my life, around the people that I live my life around, I am public about it,” Ellis says.

“I’m very clear about being bisexual. I have a sweatshirt that says ‘Girl Bi’ that I wear everywhere.”

In the interview, she shares how one family member noticed, but nobody else did.

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“I was thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people pay attention to that?’ she said.

“And I was like, they probably thought it said ‘Queen. 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.”

Ellis’s goal is to expand the queer representation through her work and is currently working on a project about women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, spotlighting queer characters who were involved with Hamer’s activism.

“There aren’t a lot of novels about Black queer women,” Ellis says.

“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. This idea that we just decided to be gay two years ago, or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago is a lie. It is imperative that we see more of that, because it is the truth of who we are. 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.”

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