This was a very good article! I loved hearing Kristen’s (and Jodie Fosters) perspective as a queer trailblazer. Inserting some snippets below 🤍
To get to this point, Stewart’s weathered more than a decade of unrelenting media scrutiny, first about her straight relationships, then about her gay ones, as she figured out her own identity. She leveraged her global stardom from the “Twilight” franchise not to become a superhero or a lifestyle guru, but to fuel an astonishing run of acclaimed independent films, including “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Still Alice,” “Certain Women,” “Personal Shopper” and the Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination.
“Whenever I hear that she’s doing something new, I’m so curious to see what it is, because it’s going to be a movie that hasn’t been made before,” says Clea DuVall, who directed Stewart in one of her only Hollywood films during this period, Hulu’s 2020 release “Happiest Season,” the first lesbian Christmas rom-com backed by a major studio. “She really is so herself. And I think that’s why so many people respond to her the way they do — because she is so authentic.”
By the time Stewart stepped on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” in February 2017, she’d spent the previous two years trying to convince the press that it was OK to write about her relationships with women, rather than resort to the vexing practice of referring to her girlfriend as her “gal pal.”
“It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” she says. “I was so openly out with my girlfriend for years at that point. I’m like, ‘I’m a pretty knowable person.’”
But even with that posture, the media’s “gal pal” dog whistle triggered a deeper, more painful history of intrusive curiosity about Stewart’s sexual identity. “For so long, I was like, ‘Why are you trying to skewer me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? I’m a kid, and I don’t really know myself well enough yet,’” she says. “The idea of people going, ‘I knew that you were a little queer kid forever.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, you should honestly have seen me fuck my first boyfriend.’”
It’s worth dwelling on this point: For almost the entire history of Hollywood, queer actors dreaded the public discovering who they really were, and that fear kept the closet door firmly closed. “Because I was gay, I really retreated,” says DuVall, who came out publicly in 2016. “Even doing a teeny tiny movie like [the ’90s lesbian cult favorite] ‘But I’m a Cheerleader,’ people immediately were like, ‘She’s gay, how can we out her?’ I wanted to stay small.”
Stewart, though, went big, with a monologue on “SNL” about how President Donald Trump, in 2012, obsessively tweeted about her relationship with Pattinson. “Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude,” she said to wild cheers from the audience.
“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart says before running through the kind of questions queer actors have had to consider before coming out publicly: “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”
A few days later, I mention Stewart’s “SNL” monologue to Foster over the phone, and she lets out a big laugh. “I never knew that,” she says. “What a wonderful, funny, wry, modern way to be honest to the world. That’s just awesome.”
As Stewart talks about her “SNL” experience, I think about how no stars of her age and stature ever came out when I was growing up as a gay kid in the 1980s and ’90s. So to have her professional trajectory not skip a beat feels like real progress.
When I tell her as much, she takes the conversation in an unexpected direction. “Because I’m an actor, I want people to like me, and I want certain parts,” she says. “I have lots of different experiences that shape who I am that are very, very far from binary. But I did get good at the heteronormative quality. I play that role well. It comes from a somewhat real place — it’s not fake. But it’s fucked up that if I was gayer, it wouldn’t be the case.”
I try to clarify what she means: “So your career maybe would have suffered after coming out had you not affected a performative femininity …”
“… that I know works to my advantage,” she admits, nodding. “That’s why I’m fucking stoked about ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’”
Stewart didn’t let that scandal, as intense as it was in the moment, stifle her. Instead, she grew to fully embrace her queerness in her public life — like bringing her girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the Oscars in 2022. “It’s not that I wasn’t scared,” Stewart says. “It was just that there was no other way to live.”
She’s even started to recognize that the most ostensibly heterosexual thing she’s done, “Twilight,” has its own queer sparkle. “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
I ask Stewart if she understands how much her decision to come out has also made her a role model for LGBTQ people. She cackles. “Oh, you have no idea,” she says. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like” — she whispers — “‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”
It can be easy to forget just how rare this still is, a giant movie star living such an openly queer life. “It feels like a generational thing, where I’m watching somebody make the leaps that I didn’t think I could ever do,” Foster says.
After fiercely guarding her privacy for decades, Foster came out publicly at the 2013 Golden Globes, and has just now played her first explicitly gay character in the 2023 biopic “Nyad.” Talking about Stewart has put Foster in a reflective mood. As our call is coming to an end, she offers this unprompted insight: “I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry, and was I — I don’t know …” She exhales. “Was I helpful in terms of representation? I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person. I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”
This sense of communion with the wider LGBTQ tribe is why Stewart has dedicated herself to embracing the fullness of who she is as a bro-y, butch-y queer woman in her work as an actor and, come hell or high water, a director.
“I was like, ‘I would like to be on that team because we need each other,’” Stewart says. “I didn’t want to be left out anymore. It was this whole world that I didn’t realize I could explore.”
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