Fridae

Cynthia Nixon who plays Miranda Hobbes on HBO television comedy series Sex and the City (1998 - 2004) and subsequent movies - Sex And The City 2 opens this month worldwide - tells The Advocate in an interview how she decided to come out in 2004, her butch partner Christine Marinoni who she met in 2001 and co-parenting her 7-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter with her, and surviving breast cancer.

Earlier this year, Nixon won the Vito Russo Award organised by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for her campaigning for equal marriage and adoption rights.

Coming out against the advice of her new publicist

Cynthia Nixon (left) and her partner Christine Marinoni are engaged to be married in New York as soon as it is legal.

With the media hounding her about her new (lesbian) relationship, Nixon hired a publicist for the first time but realised it wasn't working out when his advice was to deny, deny and deny.

The Advocate reported: He was “a very nice man who I won’t name, but he does have a number of clients who are closeted,” she says, adding that the publicist’s approach was to kill all the rumors—to essentially deny that Nixon was seeing a woman.

More optimistic than Miranda ever was, Nixon anticipated the possibility of a sustained relationship with Marinoni and pushed the publicist for a long-term plan, beyond flat-out lies and hiding. “He just kept saying, ‘It’s your life, and it’s private, and that’s it.’ And we kept asking, ‘That’s the whole thing? We never move past that? We’re at the playground with the kids, and pictures are taken of us, and we say, ‘No, she’s my friend?’” 

“My manager [Emily Saines], who is so wonderful, thought about this a little better,” Nixon says. Saines introduced Nixon to Kelly Bush, herself openly gay and a publicist to Tobey Maguire, Dustin Hoffman, and Javier Bardem. Bush suggested that Nixon simply confirm the rumors. “And I was like, ‘Really, we can just confirm?’ So that’s what we did. It was so fantastic.”

 Gay as a political stance

“I identify as gay as a political stance,” she says. “If anybody, prior to my meeting and falling in love with Christine, had asked me about what I think about sexuality, I would have said I think we’re all bisexual. But I had that point of view without ever having felt attracted to a woman. I had never met a woman I was attracted to [before Christine]. And maybe if I’d met her when I was 20, I would have fallen in love and only dated women. But maybe if I’d met her at 20, I wouldn’t have responded at all. Who knows?

Nixon on her butch partner Christine Marinoni who was an education activist when the pair met

“She’s basically a short man with boobs,” Nixon says, laughing. “A lot of what I love about her is her butchness. I’m not saying I fell in love with her in a sexually neutral way. I love her sexuality—it’s a big part of what I love about her—but I feel like it was her. It wasn’t something in me that was waiting to come out. It was like, This person is undeniable. How can I let this person walk by? Christine would probably kill me for saying this, but my daughter said one time that if you really had to break this down, [it looks like] she would be butch and I would be femme… but really once you get to know us it’s really the opposite.”

Cynthia Nixon's thoughtful and stirring speech about gays and lesbians as
moral leaders at the 21st Annual Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD) Media Awards in New York on March 13, 2010.