I used to adore Gillian Anderson, circa X-Files. I still do, she just hasn’t been around as much. In the mid to late 90s, she was the sh*t. I tried to copy her hair style, hair color, her look and her overall mystique. Agent Scully made smart logical women look kick ass and beautiful with a touch of vulnerability. I read a biography of Anderson about 15 years ago in which they either got direct quotes from her or compiled details from interviews. I remember that she admitted to being promiscuous in college, and I think I found an interview from 1996 that it may have been based on. Anderson said “Life was excruciatingly painful for years. I’d deal with it by being quite wild – promiscuous, drinking a lot. Anything and everything was fair game. Ninety nine per cent of college students do exactly the same, so why should I be any different? Some get caught up in it, and it doesn’t stop. Fortunately I was lucky and came out the other side.” I could definitely identify with that, as I went through a wild stage too.
In a new interview with Out Magazine, Anderson reveals that she had long term relationships with women when she was younger. She’s matter-of-fact about it, and about the fact that she didn’t consider herself gay. I admire that she’s being so open. Here’s more:
On being in a relationship with another girl when she was in high school
She recalls moving from England to Michigan, when she was 11, and discovering that she was no longer part of the tribe. “Going from London to a small Republican town like Grand Rapids was quite a shock,” she says. “I thought it would be a place of sunshine and happiness and candy bars.” In high school, she was voted “Most Bizarre” and “Most Likely to Be Arrested.” Both descriptions, says Anderson, contained a kernel of truth, “based on how I chose to look, dress, behave, you know—the relationships I was in at the time were freaking people out.” Invited to elaborate, she begins to list them: “I was in a relationship with a girl for a long time when I was in high school, and then I was in a relationship with a punk rock drug addict who…”
Wait, a lesbian relationship? “Yeah, yeah, well it’s… You know, I’m old enough that I can talk about that,” she says, before resuming her list: “And then I was in a relationship with somebody who was way, way older than me. Everything that that kind of anarchistic attitude brings—the inappropriate behavior it leads to—was how I chose to be in the world at that time, which was, you know, not what people did.”
Much of this has been written before — how she dyed her hair purple, how she glued the school gates shut on graduation night, the drugs and alcohol — but her lesbian romance is something new. Understandably, she is wary of making a big deal of it, precisely because it is a big deal for so many people. “If I had thought I was 100% gay, would it have been a different experience for me?” she wonders. “Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”
Anderson says she has had relation-ships with other women, but they have been the exception, not the rule.
On losing her brother last year
Last September, Anderson’s younger brother died of a brain tumor at the age of 30. He was a Buddhist, and Anderson says the grace and spirit with which he approached his death has gifted her with a powerful legacy, one that has helped her resolve her own conflicting identities.
“He left me with a vigilance for the truth in my life and a conscious, active shedding of everything that feels contrary to me,” she says. “There was an extraordinary period of time where we all got to be together for the last couple of weeks, and it had a sustained and profound effect on my life.”
I was touched at how she explained how profound it was to be with her young brother at the end of his life. She sounds so intelligent and yet not pretentious. You get the sense that she just speaks like that.
Anderson didn’t use male or female pronouns for the other people she was in relationships with when she was young, (the drug addict and the much older person) so it’s hard to know if she’s talking about men or women. I’ve mentioned before that I think sexual preference is on a continuum and that there are people in the middle who see relationships with the same sex as more of a choice. That’s what I get from her comments on it.
Anderson is set to star in “Great Expectations,” where she plays elderly stuck-in-the-past spinster, Miss Havisham. The BBC series has already aired in the UK and it’s set to air in the US, on PBS Masterpiece, on April 1 and 8. I am so looking forward to it!
Oh and I forgot to mention Anderson’s photoshoot with Out. It’s really pretty and has a kind of ethereal feel to it.
Anderson is shown at the BAFTA Awards on 2-12 and at the Elle Style Awards on 2-13-12. She’s also shown at London fashion week on 2-19-12. Credit: WENN.com
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