Jason Mraz reveals ex-wife helped him accept sexuality
Jason Mraz says his ex-wife helped him to accept his sexuality before their divorce.(Jamie McCarthy/Getty)
Jason Mraz has opened up about how his ex-wife helped him to realise and accept his sexuality before their divorce.
The “I’m Yours” singer came out as bisexual back in 2018 – three years into his marriage to Christina Carano.
Earlier this year, Mraz announced that he and Carano had divorced, marking the beginning of the recording artist’s solo journey of self-discovery.
In a new interview with GLAAD, Mraz revealed that it was Carano who helped him learn how to accept himself and acknowledge his sexual identity
He explained that it was his ex-wife who had suggested his sexuality might be Two Spirit, which is actually a term used by Indigenous North American and First Nations people to represent those who possess masculine and feminine spirits and can encompass sexual, gender, and/or spiritual identities.
The term was coined as a means of unifying the different gender identities and expressions of Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous people.
Recalling how Carano had described the Two-Spirit identity to him, Mraz told the LGBTQ+ advocacy group: “I like[d] that,” and that it was that idea that allowed him to start accepting his bisexual identity.
Mraz and Carano faced criticism and were accused of appropriation for their use of the term Two Spirit.
Now, Mraz is much more open about and accepting of his bisexuality, but it didn’t come without hard work.
“I had to play out a lot of other scenarios before I arrived here,” he told the GLAAD
“It’s both hard to do those and hard to unravel those, and what I’m basically describing is a divorce, you know? And that’s very hard. You carry a lot of shame, guilt.”
Mraz, who is part of this year’s Out100 list admitted that it hasn’t been easy to accept his bisexuality and go on this journey by himself, but he’s getting there.
“You want to heal as many relationships of the past as possible and at the same time, step into this new acceptance and new identity or whatever I’m claiming, and that’s also hard. So being on the Out100 is… it’s nice to be acknowledged.
Mraz is currently competing on Dancing with the Stars alongside celebrity contestants like Ariana Madix and Mauricio Umansky.
The singer has said that learning off dance routines each week has acted as a sort of metaphor for his life, as sometimes you can wake up feeling “uncomfortable for no reason at all.”
He said: “It happens to me all the time. And I have to figure out, like, accept myself, get back in my body, move through life in ways that I’m happy about, and so by the end of the day I feel accomplished and I feel happy to be me.
“Dance is an amazing medium for that transformation and for that accepting of one’s self.”
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