Reneé Rapp Recalls Being 'Laughed At' Every Time She Tried To Come Out

Reneé Rapp has been open about how her experience playing a lesbian character on The Sex Lives of College Girls helped her embrace her own bisexual identity, but she recently expanded on her experiences growing up and why it was so difficult to get to that point.

Speaking with Alex Cooper during a recent episode of Call Her Daddy, she acknowledged that she first realized she was attracted to women in high school, thanks to an unexpected crush that sent her into a tailspin.

Rapp didn’t have a grasp on bisexuality at the time, due in part to her family making negative comments about a relative who identified as bi, and thought she had to “pick a side.”

“I had never heard anything surrounding [being gay] in a positive light because the one queer person that I knew in my life is a family member of mine who I really looked up to, who got absolutely shitted on by everybody in our family,” she recalled.

The actress started trying to come out to friends as a lesbian who also still liked boys, until one of her friends explained that bisexuality was a valid option, and, so it seemed, one that suited Rapp well. But her coming out journey was far from over.

“I was just like, laughed at every time I tried to come out,” she said. “So then I never really talked about it.”

Things hit a turning point when she booked The Sex Lives of College Girls, which wrapped up its second season in December. She told Cooper that she repeatedly psyched herself out while filming the first season, due in part to insecurities about her own sexuality.

“I called one of my friends and I was like, ‘I am straight like I think I’m just straight; I can’t do this,’” she admitted. “I wasn’t [straight] but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me, or me laughing at myself, that I hated the first year of filming.”

In the time since then, it’s obvious Rapp has become far more comfortable in her own skin, speaking more freely about her identity and her struggles, and admitting last year that she had cut homophobic people out of her life ahead of season two of the HBO series.

“Now I’m on a TV show and I’m very publicly out and accepted as a bisexual woman and on the show as a gay woman,” she said, adding, “I wanted to play the role in a way that, if I saw it as a kid, it would feel good to me.”