Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is using her voice to ensure more black and queer stories are told

We always knew that Oscar-nominated actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor was a queen. But it wasn’t until 2022 that we learned that Ellis-Taylor was a bisexual queen.

Two years ago in an interview with Variety, the King Richard And Origin Star came out as bi. And even though her closest friends and family had known for years, this was the first time she made her identity public.

“I’m public about how I live my life and the people I spend my life with,” Ellis-Taylor said. “I’m openly bisexual. I have a sweatshirt that says ‘Girl Bi’ that I wear everywhere.”

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According to the newspaper, the actress has known she is queer since she was eight years old, but her religious upbringing ultimately prevented her from truly coming out and she felt lonely.

“That loneliness is so lonely, it’s brutal,” she said. “It’s brutal because you literally have to hide and place so many parts of yourself in order to be accepted, so that people don’t run away from you and don’t want to be around you. It was exhausting. That was childhood. That was adolescence. I knew (my sexuality), but there was no template for it; there was no example for it; there was no place for it and certainly no forgiveness for it.”

It wasn’t until she was 30 that Ellis-Taylor decided to stop and embrace her queer identity.

In the years since, Ellis-Taylor has used her platform to advocate for greater LGBTQ representation in the entertainment industry.

At the beginning of the year, the actress announced her own film, The colour purplefor whitewashing the lesbian plot…a great move if you ask us!

“The colour purple is a book about black lesbians. Whether they chose to focus on that in the cinematic iterations or not The colour purpleit’s still a movie about black lesbians,” Ellis-Taylor told Buzzfeed. “People can try to say the story is about sisterhood, but it’s a story about black lesbians. Period.”

She continued: “What is hard for me is that when we have spaces where we can honor the truth, we turn away from it. We suppress it. We hide it. We sugarcoat it. By sugarcoating it, someone like me knows that The colour purple is a book about black lesbians – looks at it and thinks, ‘You’re whitewashing me and my friends and other people I love and adore. Why?'”

She’s also not afraid to call out her homophobic colleagues. In her interview with Variety, Ellis-Taylor told a story about a co-star who expressed concern about a character’s bisexuality (because God forbid anyone is LGBTQ!).

Instead of keeping quiet, the actress put her co-star in his place.

“I said, ‘Look, I love all of you. I value my relationships and friendships, whether at work or otherwise, with you, but you need to know that I am bisexual,'” she said. “So if you say things that are queerphobic when you were most intimate with me, then you are talking about me. And that hurts.'”

In addition to advocating for herself in the workplace, Ellis-Taylor has long called for more Black and queer stories to be told.

“The idea that we only decided to be gay two, 15 or 20 years ago is a lie,” she said.

“It’s imperative that we see more (black queer stories) because that’s the truth of who we are,” she says. “It’s not a flaw in who we are. It’s the beautiful scope of our humanity as black people in this country. That’s what I insist on in everything I put out into the world creatively.”

We can’t help but applaud Ellis-Taylor and all she does for the community! By using her voice to call out homophobes and advocate for greater LGBTQ+ and Black representation in film, the actress is making Hollywood more inclusive for everyone.

We can’t wait to see what she does next. Welcome to Pride50!

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