Lily Tomlin said this week that coming
out publicly has been “a challenge” for her.
The 75-year-old Tomlin has previously
said that she never hid her sexuality. Still, she didn't publicly
acknowledge her more than four-decade relationship with Jane Wagner
until recently.
Tomlin and Wagner married on New Year's
Eve in New York.
“I wasn't totally forthcoming,” she
said during a HuffPost
Live interview. “Everybody in the business knew I was gay, and
certainly everybody I worked with and everything like that. I just
never had a press conference to announce it.”
“I wonder if I'd come out on that '75
cover of TIME if I would have had as long a career as I've
had, because it would have been an inopportune time to make such a
grand statement. I mean Ellen [DeGeneres] didn't really come out
until 20 years later.”
Tomlin stars opposite Jane Fonda in the
upcoming Netflix comedy Grace And Frankie.
(Related: First
Look: Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda star in Grace
and Frankie.)