Canadian-American singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette came out as pansexual in last Tuesday’s installment of the Handsome podcast with lesbian comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster and bisexual nonbinary comedian Mae Martin.
During the conversation, Feimster complimented Morissette’s songs about her personal experiences with heartbreak, saying, “I’m sorry for the men that hurt you, but I’m not sorry for the songs that came from it…. Did it make you want to be a lesbian at any point?”
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Morissette replied, “That’s kind. I’m pansexual, so yeah,” adding, “I get everything!”
Feimster said, “Nice,” and Notaro followed up, asking, “Wait, you’re not really pansexual, are you?”
“I am,” Morissette said.
“How did I not know this?” Notaro asked before joking to Morissette, “You’re supposed to come into the Handsome podcast leading with, ‘I’m pansexual.’”
Morissette replied, “You know, I like to leave it for the epilogue. I like to confuse people on the way out. Is it confusing?”
A pansexual person is someone who can feel sexual attraction to anyone, regardless of their biological sex, gender, sexual- or gender identity. Pansexuals can feel sexual attraction towards androgynous, agender, bigender, cisgender, intersex, gender-neutral, gender-fluid, and transgender people.
Morissette, who is 52 years old, previously mentioned her past romantic encounters with women during a 2008 interview with disc jockey Howard Stern. While Stern called it a “lesbian phase,” she said she saw the encounters as a “self-defining thing” but added that she saw herself as “pretty heterosexual.”
Stern noticed her reluctance to answer his questions about it, and asked, “Are you embarrassed to talk about it?”
Morissette responded, “No. There’s a distinct difference between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy, I don’t want to do, because it implies I have shame about this, which I don’t. But I do have a privacy respect.”
On June 4, 2008, The Advocate published an article asking Morissette to elaborate on her “lesbian experimentation.” She said, “What can I tell you about it? I think it’s a beautiful rite of passage for everyone to play with their sexuality at some point, so I did exactly that. And it was great!”
She added, “I’ve felt love from the gay community since I was really young because all my friends were gay. There’s a passion, a presence, and a curiosity with a lot of gay people that I meet, and that aliveness is such a special quality to me.”
In the June 2000, season 3 episode of Sex and the City, entitled “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…”, Morissette played the role of Dawn, who kisses Carrie (the main character played by Sarah Jessica Parker) during a game of spin the bottle.
When discussing the episode on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Morissette said that she told the show’s producers, “I reached out to them and I said, ‘Might it be a nice time for Carrie to experience a lesbian moment?’ And they said, ‘Why, yes. We were thinking the same thing.’”
Morissette said kissing Parker was “easy,” “buoyant,” and “very pleasant.”
Morissette, who is 52 years old, has been married to her husband, hip-hop artist Mario Treadway (aka. Souleye), since 2010. They have three children: Ever (age 15), Onyx (10), and Winter (7). Morissette’s 1995 alternative rock album Jagged Little Pill was her breakthrough hit and one of the best-selling albums of all time.
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