In her newest Netflix special, My Name Is Mo’Nique, comedian and actress Mo’Nique recalls confessing to her husband that she wanted to be “with another woman sexually.”
The Academy Award winner married her husband, Sydney Hicks, in 2006 and remembers keeping the desire a secret due to her family history. Towards the end of her set, she brought up a distant relative, her grandmother Mimi and a queer family member she referred to as Uncle Tina who she had a distant relationship.
However, she felt “cowardly” because she never told her grandmother her true self before she died.
“I adored how she adored me. When we would walk into the store if I was on a magazine cover, she made sure everybody in that fucking store knew that I was her grandchild, and I was her prize,” Mo’Nique says in the special. “So I couldn’t tell my grandmother my secret thoughts and my fantasies because I didn’t want her to love me privately, and I did not want her to leave this Earth thinking that she was a failure.”
She added, “But I kept that secret, and I promised myself I wouldn’t ever tell anyone that. I would take that to my grave, because I saw how they treated the people in my family with that disease — because they made us believe it was a disease.”
Though she changed her opinion when meeting her third husband. She wanted to tell her husband her long-running fantasy.
She finished, “I must keep it a fantasy, because I know me, and they would talk about me in the LGBTQ community. They would talk about me, and they would say that bitch fights for equality, but that bitch ain’t willing to give equality.”
My Name Is Mo’Nique is now streaming on Netflix.
