gillian anderson asked the question out loud in 2024 and answered it herself this morning
In 2024, promoting Want, Gillian Anderson did something people almost never do in an interview. She asked herself a question and did not pretend to have the answer.
"Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?"
That is a woman thinking in public, in front of a journalist, at an age when the culture has decided you are supposed to be finished. It got picked up and passed around and turned into a headline, which is what happens, and then everybody moved on and left the question sitting there.
she answered it on thursday
She answered it on Thursday. Speaking to The Australian while promoting More, the follow up to Want, Anderson said she is "pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders," and noted the Greek root, meaning all, or every.
She is 58. It is the first time she has used a specific word for it.
This is not a coming out in the sense the phrase usually gets used, and it would be rude to file it as one. Anderson has talked about her fluid sexuality since a 2012 interview with Out, and she said again this week what she has always said, that "in my younger years I was in relationships with women." Nothing was hidden. What changed is that a word finally fit, and she waited until it did.
why the slowness is the point
Which is the actual reason this is worth two hundred words. There is a whole economy built on getting people to pick a term fast: pick it at fourteen, pick it on a form, pick it in a bio, pick it so we know how to sort you. Anderson took two years between the question and the answer and treated both as normal, unhurried, adult business. Not a crisis. Not a confession. A woman in her late fifties reading up on a Greek prefix and deciding yes, that one, that's the one.
what want and more are
The books are the context and they are not incidental. Want and More are collections of anonymous sexual fantasies sent in by women from around the world, a project she has said grew out of playing sex therapist Jean Milburn on Sex Education. She has spent two books holding the space for other women to say the unsayable without a name attached. It tracks that she got to her own name last.
She also told the interviewer, with the specificity of somebody who has genuinely thought about it, that on men she likes forearms and nice hands, and on women, lips, buttocks, and the clavicle.
The clavicle. Correct.
