It's no secret that Reneé Rapp has been dominating the pop culture scene lately — after her successful second season on the smash hit The Sex Lives of College Girls and the release of her new EP Everything to Everyone, she's on a roll.
But on this week's episode of Call Her Daddy, Reneé opened up about how events in her life haven't always been worth celebrating, especially when she tried to come out as bisexual in a small conservative town.
On the podcast, she talked about the moment she realized she was queer — when she saw a girl at her high school who had dyed hair and didn't wear a bra that everyone considered "different." Suddenly, Reneé realized she had a crush on the girl and said that she “went home, started full-blown crying…[and] had a meltdown."
"I had never heard anything surrounding [being gay] in a positive light because the one queer person that I knew in my life is a family member of mine who I really looked up to, who got absolutely shitted on by everybody in our family."
Reneé added, "[The family member] was bisexual at the time, and they were like, 'Oh, she needs to pick a side.' They were like 'Oh, you shouldn't be around her, you never know who's gonna make you gay.'" And this mindset made her believe that she, too, had to pick a side. "I was like, 'Well, have to pick a side. Gotta be a lesbian,'" she said.
It was Reneé's friend who told her that she might be bisexual, not a lesbian. "She said, 'I think you're bisexual.' And I was like, 'You're kidding?!' That was so intriguing to me."
She also shared that her experience with coming out was not as simple as she originally let on by saying, "I was just, like, laughed at every time I tried to come out. So then I never really talked about it. And I had always just said, 'I just was one of those people who never felt like they really had to come out.'"
"To be honest, I feel like my genuine coming out to my family — close and extended — has been doing College Girls. Because now that part of me is on display in a very palatable way."
And this whole experience not only diminished her self-worth, but also made her hate filming the first season of Sex Lives of College Girls. She said, “The first year of doing College Girls was terrible, it sucked so bad, because at the time, I was in a heteronormative relationship and I hated going to work because I was like, 'I don't think I’m good enough to be here. I don’t think I can be here. I don’t think I can be doing this' … and then I would come home and I would psyche myself out, literally.”
She even remembered the pressure made her question her entire identity and shared, “I called one of my friends and I was like, ‘I am straight, like, I think I’m just straight; I can’t do this.’ ... I was in a panic constantly, and I wasn’t [straight] but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me, or me laughing at myself, that I hated the first year of filming.”
"I'm going through set and I'm doing these scenes and I have gay men coming up to me and being like, 'So, are you really gay? Like, do you just play gay?' And I was like, 'Ugh!'"
She finished by saying that she understands her situation, in particular, is also nuanced, but it made her question her identity as a bisexual woman. "I understand there's an immense level of difference in people who are bisexual. I'm a cis, white woman. That's loaded in and of itself. I understand that. It still really fucking pissed me off. It made me second-guess everything about myself."
