Rosario Dawson has thrown more light on her sexuality in an interview with Bustle for her new TV series ‘Bairpatch’.
The interview was to promote her new show and she used that as an avenue to clarify her 2018 Instagram post for Pride Month. Most people interpreted the post as her ‘coming out’ post.
Dawson is now actually coming out with what she identifies with.
“People kept saying that I [came out] … I didn’t do that,” Dawson told Bustle. “I mean, it’s not inaccurate, but I never did come out. I mean, I guess I am now.”
She admits she has never been in a queer relationship, so she never felt the need to clarify her sexuality. “I’ve never had a relationship in that space, so it’s never felt like an authentic calling to me.”
The controversial post was a video from queer rapper Chika with quotes from her lyrics that seemed as though Dawson was using to make her own personal assertions.
“I will not be ashamed. This is just who I am. And who I was meant to be. No mistakes,” Dawson wrote at the time, quoting Chika.
She also added that she was hesitant to come out earlier because, “I’ve never had a relationship in that space, so it’s never felt like an authentic calling to me.”
The 40-year-old actress has been in a relationship with Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), 50, since October 2018.
In ‘Bairpatch’, Dawson’s character has an ‘illicit’ relationship with a senator which many have voiced the apparent similarity to her relationship with Booker.
“We did the pilot in September 2018 and I started dating Cory in October 2018, so at first, there wasn’t anything at all!” Dawson said of the parallels.
“It was after [we started dating] that I was like, ‘Oh, that’s gonna maybe be weird.”
In the interview, she recalled how messy it was to explain the script to Booker’s chief of staff, admitting, “And yeah, he does have aspirations for the presidency and he also speaks Spanish. But besides all of that, there are no similarities!’”
The public scrutiny about her relationship with Booker has not been easy to manoeuvre with regards to raising her daughter, Isabella, 17, who was adopted in 2014.
“It’s the first time I felt like I had to be responsible about my choice of love, which is a challenging thing to do,” she said.
“If you fall in love, you fall in love. But there’s another aspect I had to consider what this meant in [putting] a microscope on my family and particularly on my daughter.”
“But in each other I think we found our person,” she added.