ESC

No, Billy Dee Williams Isn’t ‘Genderfluid’

Billy Dee Williams is one of the coolest people on the planet. We all know this, you don’t need me to tell you. He was Lando Calrissian, the new main character in the best Star Wars movie and who doesn’t love Colt 45?

Billy Dee is also a soft boy. He’s in touch with his feminine side. In fact, he told Esquire that he considers himself “both feminine and masculine.” This led to all sorts of reports with headlines like “Billy Dee Williams Comes Out as Genderfluid!” These were, of course, not true. He didn’t even know what ‘genderfluid’ means. I’m not sure myself, but it sounds like something my girlfriend would yell at me for getting in her hair.

Here’s what Billy Dee told The Undefeated when they asked him about it.

“Well, first of all, I asked last night. I said, ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’ That’s a whole new term,” Williams said in an interview with The Undefeated this week.

He was misunderstood, he says.

“But what I was talking about was about men getting in touch with their softer side of themselves.”

Basically, Billy Dee wasn’t coming out as trans, he was coming out as Zach Braff’s character from Scrubs. He also talked a bit about Jungian psychology and mentioned he may be in touch with his feminine side, but he’s still straight.

“No, no, no, I’m not gay — by any stretch of the imagination. Not that I have anything against gay people. But personally? Not gay,” he said.

I understand the desire to push everyone who seems not to fit into traditional gender roles into a trans gender identity; the gains that trans people have made for their civil rights are still somewhat precarious and the fight isn’t over. It turned out to be the case that there was a massively undercounted population of bisexuals in the world who had just been letting people think they were straight until people became more accepting of the idea of sexuality being a spectrum, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case with gender identity.

So it isn’t a big surprise that Billy Dee Williams considers himself a man, all things considered. The important thing is that you realize that you can be a soft boy and still be cool like Billy Dee.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments