Since announcing her nuptials with musician Jessica Betts, Niecy Nash has spoken minimally about whether revealing their marriage to one another was by default her way of coming out. In an interview on Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk,” she explains that she doesn’t necessarily feel she “came out.”
The “Claws” star spoke with Jada Pinkett Smith in the interview, which publishes Wednesday, about her family’s reaction to her surprising love affair with Betts, whom she met and befriended years ago. The 51-year-old told Smith and her mom Adrienne Banfield-Norris that she had never “been with a woman” before meeting her “hersband,” as she affectionately calls Betts. The couple sat down with Smith, Banfield-Norris and Willow Smith for the new Facebook Watch episode.
“My daughters were like, ‘Wait, what?’ " Nash recalls. “My youngest daughter, she reminded me, she was like, ‘Wait a minute, mom, are you the same mom that was like girl, I’m strictly (expletive)?’ And I was like, ‘Wah, wah. Like yeah, but no.’ "
In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres earlier this month, Nash further explained that her marriage is not about gender. Instead, she and Betts connected due to Betts’ “soul.”
“A lot of people say that, like, ‘Oh, you came out!’ and I say, ‘Well, from out of where?’ You know what I mean?” Nash said of her sexuality. “I wasn’t anywhere to come out of. I wasn’t living a sexually repressed life when I was married to men, I just loved them when I loved them. And now I love her.”
Nash revealed in the “Red Table Talk” interview that she understands people have had a hard time accepting that she does not “fit into the box” that she was put in, but that she cannot control that perception. She also talked about her other marriages to men but made the distinction that the relationship with her wife was the first time she felt “fully seen.”
“’We thought you were this,’” she said. “I am everything you thought I was. I just lay my head somewhere else.”
The “Reno 911″ star also admitted she does not consider herself squarely fitting into the “LGBTQIA” moniker, joking that if there were a group she was in, it would be “LGBTQ plus Niecy.”
The full interview will post on Facebook Watch on Wednesday at https://www.facebook.com/redtabletalk.
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