Way before Reneé Rapp played a lesbian character on “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” she had a crush on a girl in high school that sent her reeling. At the time, the actress didn’t have a positive understanding of bisexuality, partially due to negative comments her family often made about a bisexual family member.
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“I had never heard anything surrounding [being gay] in a positive light because the one queer person that I knew in my life is a family member of mine who I really looked up to, who got absolutely shitted on by everybody in our family,” she recently told Alex Cooper on an episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
Rapp told Cooper that she tried to come out to her friends as a lesbian who also liked boys, and one of her friends had to explain to her that bisexuality was valid. She then felt comfortable with the label, but unfortunately, the people around her did not take her coming out experience seriously.
“I was just like, laughed at every time I tried to come out,” she told Cooper. “So then I never really talked about it.”
Things changed when Rapp booked her role on “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which wrapped up its second season in December.
“I called one of my friends and I was like, ‘I am straight like I think I’m just straight; I can’t do this,’” she told Cooper. “I wasn’t [straight] but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me, or me laughing at myself, that I hated the first year of filming.”
Now, Rapp is more comfortable with her identity.
“Now I’m on a TV show and I’m very publicly out and accepted as a bisexual woman and on the show as a gay woman. I wanted to play the role in a way that, if I saw it as a kid, it would feel good to me.”
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