Missy Higgins Opened Up About Her Bisexuality In A New Interview, And My Heart Is Full
"We weren’t out to everybody because it was early days, it was my first relationship with a woman."
Iconic Australian singer and songwriter, Missy Higgins has talked about her first girlfriend and the process of embracing her sexuality in a new interview.
Missy Higgins has travelled a long road, grappling with her sexuality and the public eye. Speculation on the award-winning ‘Scar’ singer’s sexuality has dogged her since her debut album in 2004 and has never really stopped, despite her identifying as bisexual since 2007.
In recent years, since separating from her husband Dan Lee, Higgins has slowly opened up more about her sexuality. In a 2021 episode of Anh Do’s Brush with Fame, Higgins discussed how various media outlets would pressure her to ‘slip up’.
“Every time I did an interview, I was in shutdown mode, because they were probing, trying to get me to slip up. Trying to get me to say a pronoun, you know? I’d be like, ‘How do I describe what this song’s about without saying ‘she’?’” she told Ahn Do.
In another profile for the Sydney Morning Herald, Higgins admitted that the media’s attempts to out her drove her crazy. “For so many years, the media was trying to get me to say I was gay,” she says. “Except I didn’t feel that I was. It drove me crazy.”
Now in a more recent interview on ABC’s Take 5 with Zan Rowe, Higgins recalls the complex joy she felt in her first relationship with a woman.
“She was kind of my tour manager and her and I were kind of in secret in those days,” she remembers. “We weren’t out to everybody because it was early days, it was my first relationship with a woman. It just wasn’t something that I was ready to talk about yet. It was my first girlfriend and neither of us had kind of come out.”
“We kind of didn’t want it to be anyone else’s business. Because it was just this beautiful thing between us. She was really my rock through that time, because it was early days of me being famous and me experiencing so many things for the first time. I was really kind of quite unstable in so many ways, but I had her. She was just there for me.”
In many ways, the world is changing for the worse, but it’s a small and heartwarming thing that Missy Higgins has gone from being unable to speak about her bisexuality at all in public, to joyfully recalling memories of her ex-girlfriend on national television.
You can watch the full interview with Missy Higgins on Take 5 on ABC Iview and the clip of Higgins discussing her sexuality below.