She’d say, ‘You have to do something about your voice! It doesn’t sound pretty! Listen to all the other kids, they sound nice, and then there’s you!’ I had no idea how I could change my voice. When I told Wanda Sykes during an interview some years ago that listening to her voice one-on-one is surreal, she replied, “I didn’t know I had a unique voice for many years, but I did know it sounded different when I was a kid. They’re more fearful of that.There is no mistaking the unique sounding voice of out superstar comedy legend Wanda Sykes. They’re more concerned about what other people are going to say. If we want to be involved in her life, I guess we have to roll with this.” Then I think my parents realized that, “Oh, she’s not going to change. The more I felt comfortable with myself, with who I was, I became confident and stopped arguing with them.
I thought, “My family’s not going to be cool with this.” Everything’s great now, but it took a long time for us to get there. Relationship after relationship, I eventually decided to be honest.
The five-part series features interviews-and reflections on identity-from Janet Mock, Neil Patrick Harris, Lena Waithe, and Margaret Cho, to name a few.Īhead, Sykes reflects to on how she came out of the closet-first to herself, later to her parents and then to the world-and why she continues to fight for LGBTQ+ visibility.
"I chose to be straight," Sykes told Oprah during a 2013 episode of Oprah's Next Chapter.Ĭontinuing that momentum, Sykes most recently teamed up with Apple TV+ to co-executive-produce a docuseries called Visible: Out on Television, which traces the history of LGBTQ+ representation on TV. In fact, Sykes was 40 when she came out to her parents and has said she "repressed" her gay identity for years (she and music producer Dave Hall were married between 19). In the years since her 2008 speech, Sykes has used her platform to raise LGBTQ+ voices, champion equality, and explain that understanding one's own sexuality isn't always simple. "It was not planned at all," she told Meredith Vieira in 2015, joking that she was later treated as a "unicorn" for simply being Black and gay. While she was already out in her private life and had married her wife that same year, Sykes hit the stage to deliver an impromptu speech about the dangers of Proposition 8, a now-overturned California state constitutional amendment that only recognized marriage between a man and a woman. So it may come as a surprise to note that Sykes, now 56, was 44 years old and well into her established career in entertainment when she publicly came out at an equality rally in Las Vegas back in 2008.