What Chloe Sevigny Really Thinks About Those Drag Impersonator Videos

It’s a surprisingly sensitive side to the woman who gives off an air of toughness, but this actress turned activist is a continual surprise. In the past she’s told reporters that she’s experimented with women, kissed a lot of girls, but wouldn’t consider herself bisexual. Still, when she talks about the LGBT world, she often says “we.” So is she queer?

“No, I think I’m straight. I think I’m straight. I really can admire women, their beauty and all of that,” she says, awkwardly into the phone from her mother’s Connecticut home, where she’s hanging out for the week, a situation she says makes her “regressed to like a 12-year-old.”

“God, I feel freaked out because my mom yesterday said that a neighbor friend asked if I was gay, and now I feel like I can’t answer this question.” She laughs. “The thing is, I’d really like to [say I’m queer] because I think that she was kind of like, ‘I thought it was kind of weird.’  I’m like, ‘Aw, you poor woman.’”

Today, the hetero-flexible actress is tired of the labels often given her; she wants to move people with her work and away from the two labels that have dogged her: Hollywood “it” girl and the queen of indie cinema. “Because I don’t feel like either of them really pertain to me. I feel like they’re incorrect. I’m not a girl, I’m 37, so I’m a woman,” she laughs. “And yeah, I’ve done mostly independent films, but now that I’ve been on television for the past five years — I just don’t want to be pigeonholed in any way. The only term I really will accept is rebel.”