After years of struggling to find her voice, Kristen Stewart says she is finally relishing her queer identity.
While promoting the upcoming Happiest Season, the 30-year-old actress sat down with the film’s director, fellow queer icon Clea DuVall, to discuss the difficulties she faced in being able to openly discuss her dating life after coming out as queer. When she was 21, she entered her first relationship with another woman and recalled that she was “immediately asked if she was a lesbian.”
“And it's like, ‘God, I'm 21 years old,’” she said in the interview for InStyle magazine. “I felt like maybe there were things that have hurt people I've been with. Not because I felt ashamed of being openly gay but because I didn't like giving myself to the public, in a way. It felt like such thievery.”
Stewart said that there was a period of time where she felt “sort of cagey” about the subject, and as a result, she would attempt to keep her private life out of the media, including her relationships with men. Prior to opening up about her queerness in a 2017 interview with The Guardian — which was accompanied by an “I’m so gay” shoutout during an SNL monologue — she dated her Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson.
“We did everything we could to not be photographed doing things — things that would become not ours,” she said of the four-year romance. “So I think the added pressure of representing a group of people, of representing queerness, wasn’t something I understood.”
Since she began to be more public about her same-sex relationships, she has been linked to singer St. Vincent (neé Annie Clark) and model Stella Maxwell. She is currently dating screenwriter Dylan Meyer, and in an interview with Howard Stern last year, Stewart dropped that she is in love and “can’t f**king wait” to marry her girlfriend.
As public attention grew, the actress said she had “no reticence” about being photographed while being affectionate with past girlfriends, although she admits to feeling “an enormous pressure” to be a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community.
“But it wasn't put on me by the [LGBTQ+] community,” she said. “People were seeing those pictures and reading these articles and going, ‘Oh, well, I need to be shown.’ I was a kid, and I felt personally affronted.”
Stewart goes on to say that the added expectations of “representing queerness” wasn’t something that came easily for her. “Only now can I see it,” she said. “Retrospectively, I can tell you I have experience with this story. But back then I would have been like, ‘No, I'm fine. My parents are fine with it. Everything's fine.’ That's bullshit. It's been hard. It's been weird. It's that way for everyone.”
Ahead of the release of Happiest Season, a queer Christmas romcom co-starring Mackenzie Davis, Stewart said she has come into her own skin as an advocate — which has shown in her increasing focus on playing queer roles. Last year, Stewart starred in the Charlie’s Angels reboot, and director Elizabeth Banks referred to as her character, Sabina, as being “definitely gay.” Stewart’s 2018 film, Lizzie, which tells the story of notorious murderer Lizzie Borden, was dubbed by this very site as a “lesbian feminist revenge fantasy set in 1892.”
“I love the idea that anything I do with ease rubs off on somebody who is struggling,” Stewart said. “That shit's dope! When I see a little kid clearly feeling themselves in a way that they wouldn't have when I grew up, it makes me skip.”
Happiest Season will bow in theaters on November 25, although it may be pushed back or be released on VOD due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
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