Whoopi Goldberg is perhaps one of the most recognizable names in Hollywood. The actress and comedian has a long, award-winning career in the industry. She is one of the few who can boast an EGOT status; she has an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards to her name.
Now, the actress is coming out to tackle long-standing suspicions people have had about her. Keep reading to know more!
Whoopi Goldberg has been in the industry for decades at this point and knows how to effectively deal with the rumor mill. However, she revealed that there are some suspicions about her that she has never really been able to shake off.
While appearing on an episode of The Best Podcast Ever With Raven & Miranda, she was asked by co-host Raven-Symoné about her sexuality.
“Honestly, when I was around you, I loved you so much, like I just wanted to be up underneath the t*tties the whole time. But that’s also because you just kind of gave me lesbian vibes,” Raven admitted. “You give me lesbian vibes, you give me stud vibes.”
Raven’s wife, Miranda chimed in to make a joke; she said, “I think this is a secret fantasy of Raven’s. I think she just wants everybody to be gay and she’s just really hoping you’ll come out right here, right now.’”
She then gave the floor to Whoopi, saying, “So if you want to tell us anything, Whoops, you’re more than welcome to!”
Whoopi Goldberg has played queer characters several times in her career. Her most notable queer roles were in 1985 when she appeared in The Color Purple and in 1995 in Boys on the Side.
She said people have been “asking her this as long as I have been around.” People have often questioned Whoopi’s sexuality it seems, and the actress is well aware of the skepticism she faces.
It might all be fuelled by her several marriages to men, all of which ended and led her to make some statements. Goldberg has been married three times. She married her drug counselor Alvin Martin, when she was 18 years old, in 1973. They had a daughter together named Alexandrea in the same year. The couple divorced a few years later in 1979. She then went on to marry David Claessen from 1986 to 1988, and finally, Lyle Trachtenberg from 1994 to 1995.
After her third divorce, the actress has been vocal about her feelings toward marriage and even went as far as to call herself ‘relationship-averse’ at one point.“People expect you to have a boyfriend. They expect you to get married,” she said in an interview at one point. “So I kept trying to do that, but I didn’t want to share information with somebody else. I didn’t want anybody asking me why I was doing what I was doing, or to have to make the other person feel better.”
“But if you’re in a relationship, you have to do those things, and it took me a while to figure out that I didn’t want to,” she went on. “I’d be thinking, ‘Why don’t I feel the thing that I’m supposed to?’ Then one day I thought: ‘I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to conform…’ You can’t be in a marriage because everybody’s expecting you to.”
Symoné then went on to talk about Goldberg’s ‘duality’ in how she is both masculine and feminine. She said, “there is something beautiful about a woman being able to embrace their masculine and feminine at the same time and wear it so well, like you do.”She gushed on about Goldberg, saying, “It’s fantastic, you’re not either one or the other, you’re just a human living in your body and doesn’t really correlate to sexual orientation or any of that. It’s just the way you present and it’s so warming. You live in this duality so well, and I just want to applaud you for that.”
Goldberg said in reply, “God created us in duality” and how “God does not make mistakes.”
“You know, when people say, ‘Oh, you know, it’s this or it’s that,’ it isn’t this or that: It just is,” the actress simply concluded.
And to clear the air about her sexuality, the actress said in the interview, “I am not a lesbian but I know lots of them, and I’ve played them on television. I have always had lesbian friends because they’re just my friends.”
She went on to explain the boundaries she has established with her friends, saying, “I’m not gonna kiss you, but I’ll kiss you over here, I’ll do this but I’m not going to do this… And they’re like, ‘OK!’”
Whoopi Goldberg finally confirmed what we all knew about her; she is straight! All the rumors that swirled about her being queer were dismissed by the actress.