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Rosie Perez made a surprising revelation about her sexuality Monday night during the TrevorLIVE New York event in NYC.
The 50-year-old View co-host, who is happily married to artist Eric Haze, admitted she was attracted to a girl named Michelle in Junior High.
“Every human being, whether they want to admit it or not, went through a period of questioning. I know I did,” Perez told the audience before recalling of her same-sex crush, “All I wanted to do was hump her.”
“And I suppressed the urge and suppressed the urge and suppressed the urge until Michelle one day started humping on me,” she continued.
Eventually, Perez’s relationship with Michelle faded. “I’m not the only one that went through this questioning period. I’m not the only one that suppressed those feelings. Who hid their story,” Perez went on. “I know I’m not lesbian, gay or whatever, I’m a quasi-straight person, I still went through that period. And I thought I was all alone.”
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Perez said she might have felt differently about her sexuality if there had been services like the Trevor Project’s counseling hotline when she was growing up. “I remember that hurt,” she said. “And that hurt kept me silent and that silence brought shame. I didn’t have a community. I didn’t have The Trevor Project.”
“If I had other people, specifically adults, if I was just able to call up and they said, ‘Oh, I humped the Michelle-type person too, you’re normal, don’t worry. You’re either gonna go here, there or in the middle, don’t worry about it, it’ll pass. You’re just figuring it out,’ even that simple statement…that would have made all the difference in the world,” Perez said in her speech.
“There’s no such thing as normal,” Perez concluded. “What is the norm is being different.”
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