Out actress Holland Taylor talked about
her career and being out in Hollywood in a recent episode of the
LGBTQ&A podcast.
Taylor, 77, is best known for playing
Charlie Sheen's bisexual mother in Two and a Half Men and
Peggy Peabody in The L Word.
Taylor, who came out publicly in 2015,
told host Jeffrey Masters that while she kept her sexuality private,
she didn't feel as if she was hiding.
“Why was that the right time to share
that with the public?” Masters asked.
“Well, I'm a very private person,
just generally,” Taylor
answered. “I would be no matter what my life was, but I was not
private in the sense of hiding. I lived my life in public. I think I
was about 29 or 30 when I had my first relationship with a woman, but
I didn't talk about it per se. It would never have occurred to me to
talk about my personal life in an interview anyway.”
Taylor came out in the course of dating
fellow actress Sarah Paulson.
“It became a news event and so I
wasn't going to deny it,” she said.
When asked to explain what she meant
when she said that she wasn't political about dating women, Taylor
answered: “Well, I don't join clubs. I just live my life out in the
world. I don't understand, certainly at this point, carrying signs
about it or making proclamations about it or making statements about
it. It's just about life. It's just a normal life for me.”
“So it isn't like campaigning against
some law or other or some discrimination. That would be a political
act. So beyond that, it just doesn't feel like a political atmosphere
to me in my life,” she said.
Not working because of the coronavirus
pandemic has “been quite something … because it's a big part of
who I am,” she said.
She added that she would define herself
as gay but doesn't like labels. “I just don't have any impulse to
define myself at all by anything other than a person. I'm a person,”
she said.