Some stories don’t always fit with what people expect to see from the outside. In fact, quite a few famous women were married to men for years & had families before later sharing, in their own words, that they were lesbian. Here are some of those women who lived double lives in straight marriages. We’re not here to out anyone, as all of this information comes from outlets like People and Oprah Daily.
1. Meredith Baxter
Meredith Baxter spoke to People in 2009 and wasn’t afraid of hiding the sequence of events, describing how she had married three times to men. One of these included being married to actor David Birney. Baxter raised five children, but then later said she admitted she was a lesbian and revealed as much during her interview.
Baxter said she spent years trying to understand her identity, and it was only after her marriages had already ended that she decided to come out. Apparently, coming out helped her to understand why some of her previous relationships with men had been unsuccessful. Baxter got married to Nancy Locke in 2013, and the pair have been together ever since.
2. Kelly McGillis
During a different People magazine interview, actress Kelly McGillis said that she felt she had “always been gay,” despite being married previously to Boyd Black & later Fred Tillman. She built a high-profile acting career and appeared in hit films like Top Gun and Witness. She also had two daughters and briefly dated Warren Beatty.
However, McGillis came to realize that these marriages weren’t working out. She came to accept that she was a lesbian. In 2010, she entered a civil union with Melanie Leis, and she teaches acting at the New York Studio for Stage and Screen.
3. Wanda Sykes
Wanda Sykes has been open about the “straight” part of her life in quite a few interviews, saying that she had repressed her sexuality for many years. This included her marriage to music producer Dave Hall from 1991 to 1998. At that time, she was still early in her comedy career and was nowhere near the household name that she has become today.
That all changed in 2008 when she came out during a rally in Las Vegas over California’s Proposition 8 ruling. It turns out that Sykes had married her wife, Alex Niedbalski, a month early, and chose to tell the world the truth. Essentially, she decided that she was no longer willing to keep her truth hidden.
4. Portia de Rossi
Today, practically everyone knows that Portia de Rossi is a lesbian, but there was a time when it wasn’t so clear. She was married to filmmaker Mel Metcalfe for a short time, and that marriage lasted three years during the 1990s. De Rossi later spoke about why she chose to stay closeted during that period.
She said that she was worried that coming out would affect her career, so she decided to keep things under wraps. It makes sense. After all, that was the time when de Rossi started to gain some recognition in Hollywood, including her breakout role on Ally McBeal. She is currently married to comedian Ellen DeGeneres and lives in England.
5. Braunwyn Windham-Burke
One of the most recent examples comes from Braunwyn Windham-Burke. Despite coming out as a lesbian, she remained legally married to her husband, Sean Burke, for nearly two years, and both of them dated other women during that time. Windham-Burke spoke openly in interviews about how the pair of them dealt with such an arrangement.
What made things harder was the fact that the pair had been together for 20 years and had seven children together. Dealing with that transition publicly & privately wasn’t easy. However, the Real Housewife Windham-Burke made it through and is currently engaged to Jennifer Spinner.
6. Lauren Morelli
It didn’t take a long time for Lauren Morelli to discover that she was a lesbian. In an essay in 2014 for Mic, Morelli said she had been married to TV writer Steve Basilone for only a short time before she realized the truth about herself. Working on Orange Is the New Black made things feel impossible for her to ignore, and in the fall of 2012, she said she realized she was gay.
Ironically, she had begun writing Piper Chapman’s, the show’s main character, relationship with other women at that time. Morelli admitted that the storylines felt personal in a way that she wasn’t able to explain at first. But not long after, Morelli filed for divorce and later married one of the show’s stars, Samira Wiley. The pair announced they would be divorcing in 2026.
One thing that’s the same across all of these stories is the fact that the marriages happened first and the public statements came later. They were often years after their relationships had already changed their lives. Thankfully, though, these women are living their most authentic lives today.
