Wayne Brady Shares Why He Waited A Decade To Come Out
Wayne Brady revealed why he decided to keep his sexuality a big secret from his fans and family for years.
The television host and comedian joined his blended family — his ex-wife and business partner Mandie Taketa, their 21-year-old daughter Maile, and his ex-wife’s partner Jason Michael Fordham — on ET‘s Spilling the E-Tea for insight into his sexuality and interesting family dynamic.
Wayne, Mandie, Maile, and Jason star together in the reality show Wayne Brady: The Family Remix. The show gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look into a household that is very different from the typical family.
Wayne and Mandie married in 1999 but divorced 17 years ago. They have remained close friends and business partners since then, so it made sense for Mandie to seek answers about her ex-husband and business partner’s understanding of his sexuality — asking why it took so long for him to come out as pansexual to her.
“The answer is easy — because I didn’t know! Like, I didn’t know what it was even called,” Wayne said. “It’s not like I had this secret that I was sitting on and at night I was pansexual Batman going out.”
“I didn’t know what it was called because I think that we’ve come so far with the lexicon with those terms, right? And understanding and acceptance.”
He continued, “Because back in the day, it was very much, ‘Well are you gay and are you not?'”
“Knowing, well, maybe I find that person attractive, but that’s a man, but I also think this woman is attractive, but also learning that it’s not just as black and white as those two things,” Wayne continued. “For me, it took all this time and all this work and all this therapy and all this fight in therapy to get off…not self-hate, but the language that is instilled in you, especially from [my] generation.”
Wayne described that he needed to get off “the shame train” that he was the conductor of at one point. “It took all that time, and I went, ‘Oh, this is what this is, and I don’t want to be crazy, and I don’t want to have secrets,’ so that’s why it took me so long.”
Mandie asked if he was nervous about coming out to her, and Wayne admitted he was “nervous to say it out loud” because she was his “closest friend” and was afraid that the next stop of his “shame train” would be abandonment from his family.
In August 2023, Wayne came out as pansexual. In an interview with People, he said, “In doing my research, both with myself and just with the world, I couldn’t say if I was bisexual, because I had to really see what that was, especially because I really have not gotten a chance to act on anything.”
Wayne Brady: The Family Remix is on Freeform and streaming on Hulu.
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