Big Gay Closet

When SATC writer and director Michael Patrick King presented Nixon with the Vito Russo Award at this year’s GLAAD Awards, he described her as being out: out and proud as an actress, out as a breast cancer survivor, out as a woman who was with a man for 15 years, and out as a woman who is now in love with a woman. Nixon’s been doing a lot of coming out in the past few years.

She met partner Christine Marinoni (then an education organizer) in 2001, when Nixon was campaigning to reduce public-school class sizes in New York City. The two women became friends and confidants during Nixon’s 2003 split from Danny Mozes, her partner of 15 years and the father of her two children, 13-year-old Samantha and 7-year-old Charles. She and Marinoni started dating in 2004.

Nixon’s either reluctant to talk about the tipping point—from friend to girlfriend—or there’s simply not a clear delineation between the two. But her costar and close friend Kristin Davis, who plays SATC’s proper Charlotte York, says there never really was “a coming-out moment.” Although ­Davis says she’d “met and known Christine,” she didn’t have any inkling of their budding relationship until it dawned on her how much Nixon was devoting to the schools campaign—and to Marinoni. “They’d be on the phone and writing speeches,” Davis says, “and I thought, She’s really into this.”

Her costars weren’t the only ones to take notice. “Shortly after we started seeing each other—like a month after—we got a press inquiry about it,” Nixon says. “And I thought, This is crazy.”

Uninterested in addressing media questions about her new relationship (or the gender of her steady date), Nixon understood that she might need help managing the new attention, so she hired a publicist for the first time. He was “a very nice man who I won’t name, but he does have a number of clients who are closeted,” she says, adding that the publicist’s approach was to kill all the rumors—to essentially deny that Nixon was seeing a woman.

via Cynthia Nixon is More Than Just Sex | Cover Stories | Advocate.com.

I love Cynthia Nixon for the way she pinged off the screen when she was Miranda on SATC. I love her for loving being out and wanting to be out. I love how she discusses her identity as lesbian/bisexual without worrying that it’s a problem to feel somewhere in the middle. I just love her.

I mistakenly thought that even if it wouldn’t be easy, it at least wouldn’t be that big a deal to date a man again – but the invisibility is back. As my boyfriend and I walk up to see a movie, I give the butch-femme couple in front of us the smile of shared community. They glare at me with “we-don’t-need-your-patronizing-smile-of-acceptance-straight-girl” faces, and a part of me goes cold. I know that smile – I would give it to people as I walked next to my butch, waiting for a gawk at her presentation from the straights around us so that I could glare back. I loved the feeling of community when I smiled at other obviously queer couples.

I went home this weekend with my new boyfriend. My mother’s joy hurt. My ex had nursed my mother through multiple painful events, mowed the lawn when she couldn’t, gotten drunk with her, but all of this was wiped away by bringing a man home. And she should love him too – he is amazing and wonderful and smart. But she should love him for him, not for his gender.

via Holding My Boyfriend’s Hand: On Becoming Invisible Again – Feministing.

I saw this story and it reminded me of OttoKitty’s exceptionally popular post from earlier this week. And since you all enjoyed her post so much, I thought you’d enjoy this one too.

I was still coming out. I never excelled at social situations anyway, but newly out of the closet I found myself learning a new vocabulary, new social cues, making new friends.

But I was busy, and had other things to occupy my time. My recent history of dates that qualified as significant natural disasters meant I wasn’t exactly pushing ahead.

In those days I wore make-up so often that when I vacated my apartment, I had to pay for professional carpet cleaners to deal with the huge accumulated make-up stain just below my mirror. I wore skirts and heels to work. I said things like,

I like women who look like women.

I ate exactly one meal a day, and my ritual at this time was a crayfish sandwich at the Old Cheese Shop, just around the corner from work.

One day I arrived and cursed under my breath as I joined the back of a long queue. While I tried to figure out what made my normally perfect timing betray me on that day, I noticed someone in a hardhat and toolbelt, looking my way.

It took me a few moments to realise that she — she! in her hardhat and toolbelt and dusty boots — was not simply looking my way but half smiling, she was looking right at me. It could have been — surely should have been — creepy, but it wasn’t, and I could feel her eyes on me.

Confused by a feeling I had rarely felt, certainly never in a sandwich shop before, I blushed and looked away, studying the prices on the bottled water until it was time to order.

All women look like women.

I still have a thing for toolbelts.