The Adolescence actor opened up about realising she likes girls
BY YASMIN VINCE, IMAGE BY NETFLIX
Erin Doherty, star of Adolescence and The Crown, has opened up about her sexuality and how she realised she was gay. It’s all thanks to a “mind-blowing” relationship she had with a woman in her mid-twenties.
In a conversation on the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast, she said: “It took me a really, really long time to finally get to the point where I was like, ‘Oh I’m gay’.” Growing up, she never questioned her sexuality and put that down to society conditioning her not to question it. “Knowing who I was in my heart of hearts, in my soul, it took me a really long time. No one in my life had shown me that that was an option, so I just never applied it to myself.”
“Looking back,” she added. “I always knew that my relationships with men weren’t as satisfying in that wholehearted way that I wanted them to be.” It took a while for Erin to realise this, but after a relationship she had with a woman when she was 25, she says she’s “there now”.
That relationship changed everything. “It was mind-blowing and it felt like I had come home. I was just like, ‘Wow, this is a part of who I am that I’d never got to meet’ which was just so crazy,” she said. “I wouldn’t change it because it’s really made me adore that part and really cherish it and I just hope that I get to offer that to other women or men, whoever you are just lean into your truth because there was something so monumental about that moment of going, ‘Whoa, this is me’ and just embracing it and not applying anything else to it. I just think we all deserve that.”
Erin has previously shared with The New York Times that being a “visible gay woman” is really important to her.
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