Mo’Nique is opening up about her sexuality in her new special, My Name Is Mo’Nique. The Oscar winner, 55, revealed she considers herself somewhere between straight and a lesbian in the special, now streaming on Netflix, but found it difficult to come out when she was younger after witnessing her religious grandmother’s fraught relationship with her queer child, whom the comedian affectionately referred to as “Uncle Tina.”
“See, my grandmother could not come to grips that she had a gay daughter. She could only love her privately. She couldn’t love her publicly because the Church had my grandmother f-ed up,” Mo’Nique shared. “And I felt cowardly when my grandmother left, because I couldn’t tell my grandmother who her granddaughter really was,” Mo’Nique continued through tears of her sexuality.ย
Videos by PopCulture.com
“I adored how she adored me,” she added. “I couldn’t tell my grandmother my secret thoughts and my fantasies ’cause I … did not want her to leave this earth thinking she was a failure. Because had I told her my secret thoughts, she would have left thinking she had failed.”
Mo’Nique then joked that she is not “all the way” a lesbian, sharing that she used to try and hide her sexuality in the past by having sex with as many men as she could so she wouldn’t be treated “like something was wrong.” She remembered, “I promised that I would never tell anyone, that I would take that to my grave. Because I saw how they treated the people in my family with that ‘disease.’ Because they made us believe it was a ‘disease,’ right?”
Mo’Nique admitted she was “so scared” when she finally decided to share her sexuality with her husband and manager Sidney Hicks, whom she married in 2006. While Mo’Nique was afraid he would “walk away” from her with the revelation, she shared his hilarious response to her finally speaking her truth out loud. “‘I want to be with another woman sexually,’” she recalled telling her husband, “and he looked at me so beautifully and so patient and so loving and said, ‘Bitch, me too.’” Mo’Nique also brings up her respect for the LGBTQ+ community elsewhere in the special, praising members for being “free enough to be their goddamn self” regardless of what other people say.ย My Name Is Mo’Nique is now streaming on Netflix.
