As I was saying…

Last week, actress Cynthia Nixon got LBGT activists around the world in a serious flutter over a comment in an interview where she implied her sexuality was a choice.

Most of us know Nixon best as Miranda in the award-winning HBO show, Sex and the City, and the two subsequent films based on the show. What you might not know is that Cynthia is bisexual and has been in a relationship with her partner Christine Marinoni since 2004, and that the couple have two kids from Nixon’s previous marriage to a man.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, during rehearsals for her upcoming production of Wit, Nixon had the following to say about her sexual preference, among many other things that she said:

I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.

Silence. Tumbleweed rolls past. Armageddon descends.

Cut to a week later; following a global backlash from the recreational offenderati against what hundreds of reporters blogged they thought she said, Nixon has calmly cleared the air regarding what she meant, this time in The Advocate:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.

There was more, and you can check out her full statement here, because you can be sure the blowhards who went Defcon 1 on her previous statement probably won’t peruse this one very deeply either.

[Source: New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Advocate]