Actress Gillian Anderson, famous for playing Agent Scully on The X Files, has identified as pansexual, which means attraction to both sexes regardless of gender identity.
Anderson discussed her sexual identity and past relationship in an interview with The Australian.
“In my younger years, I was in relationships with women,” she said before later saying that her sexuality changed after learning of other women’s experiences.
“I’m not a big flirter. I don’t put it out there very much. I do hear of a lot of women around our age who are rediscovering their sensuality and their desire for sex,” she said.
“It certainly sounds like they’re in the dating field. That they’re having a lot of fun, a lot of opportunities, but also being approached on these apps by much younger men,” she added.
Anderson shares a daughter with her ex-husband Clyde Klotz and two sons wither her former partner Mark Griffiths. In a previous interview with the Sunday Times, she discussed her experience dating a girl in her younger years, adding that she did not have the language to classify her sexuality at tht eim.
“It felt secretive and illicit and wrong and we had to hide,” she said. “Later on, I had a boyfriend who found out and broke up with me.”
“Even later on when I had other relationships [with women] I’m not sure I ever thought of them as being potentially forever,” she continued. “The person I consider my life partner happens to be male, but I think I would feel the same way if it were a woman,” she continued. “I’d feel, ‘This is my life partner.’”
Anderson revealed her past relationships with women in a 2012 interview with Out magazine.
“I was in a relationship with a girl for a long time when I was in high school. Then I was in a relationship with a punk rock drug addict,” she said. ” nd then I was in a relationship with somebody who was way, way older than me. Everything that that kind of anarchistic attitude brings — the inappropriate behavior it leads to — was how I chose to be in the world at that time, which was, you know, not what people did.”