Back in December, she first discussed her sexual orientation in an interview with Variety, where she confirmed that she is attracted to women. “I’ve never really felt like I could relate to girls very well,” she said. “I love them so much. I love them as people. I’m attracted to them as people. I’m attracted to them for real.”
Then, shortly after the interview, she appeared on the red carpet for a Variety event and confirmed that she “came out” in the interview. She also expressed her amusement about how people didn’t know she was attracted to women. “I kind of thought, ‘Wasn’t it obvious?'” she said. “I didn’t realize people didn’t know. I just don’t really believe in it. I’m just like, ‘Why can’t we just exist?’ I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I just didn’t talk about it. Whoops.”
This moment led to an even bigger media frenzy when Billie took to Instagram and accused Variety of “outing” her. “Thanks variety for my award and for also outing me on a red carpet at 11 am instead of talking about anything else that matters,” she wrote.
Now, Billie has more to say on the topic of her sexuality in a new interview with Rolling Stone. While promoting her new album that drops on May 17, Hit Me Hard and Soft, she was asked about her song “Lunch,” which features the explicit lyrics, “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be the one / And I can never get enough / I could buy her so much stuff / It’s a craving, not a crush.”
“That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real,” Billie said.
“I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl and then wrote the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina,” she added.
“I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up,” she said.
She also spoke about her Instagram response to being “outed” back in December and said, “Who fucking cares? The whole world suddenly decided who I was, and I didn’t get to say anything or control any of it. Nobody should be pressured into being one thing or the other, and I think that there’s a lot of wanting labels all over the place. Dude, I’ve known people that don’t know their sexuality, or feel comfortable with it, until they’re in their forties, fifties, sixties.”
“It takes a while to find yourself, and I think it’s really unfair, the way that the internet bullies you into talking about who you are and what you are,” she said.
She also said that if she could do the red carpet interview over, she wouldn’t have answered the question. “I’m lucky enough to be in a time when I’m able to say something like that and things go OK for me,” she said. “And that’s not how a lot of people’s experience is.”
Read Billie’s full interview here.