Michelle Visage isn’t comfortable being labelled ‘bisexual’ despite having slept with both men and women
Michelle Visage. (Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images)
Michelle Visage isn’t comfortable calling herself bisexual, explaining that while she has slept with both men and women, she feels the label doesn’t quite apply to her for some reason.
“No,” she told The Guardian when asked if she identifies as bisexual, “when I grew up, that wasn’t a really a thing.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race judge feels identifying as bi would be the ‘easy way out’.
“If it was, it was gay boys who could come out as bisexual first because it was easier for them,” she continued.
“It was just if I saw a pretty girl and I was attracted to her, why not?”
The 51-year-old acknowledged that identifying as bisexual may tamper down the criticism she has encountered in recent years from those saying she is not part of the LGBT+ community; criticism amplified by her role as judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
She said: “It would be easier, but I don’t feel like the easy way out is always the right way out.
“I don’t want to take anything away from somebody who’s truly living a bisexual lifestyle.”
Michelle Visage opens up about life in New York City seized by AIDS.
Visage moved to New York City in 1986, a city gripped in the peak AIDS crisis.
Manoeuvring the streets and avenues of the city, one haunted by trauma and death, Visage described how the epidemic devastated the LGBT+ scene and redefined daily life for queer New Yorkers and their loved ones.
“So many of the people that I’d known through the ballroom scene are gone,” she said.
“To see that many people go, and to see relatives not come to their funerals because of the shame, it just wasn’t necessary.
“It was so tragic.
She added: “I lost a lot of friends in that community to drugs, or to being sex workers who were killed by tricks.
“Just dangerous living. These kids needed to be taken care of.”
