On last night’s episode of Anh’s Brush With Fame, Missy Higgins opened up on the struggle she faced at the hands of the press, forcing her to define her sexuality. In particular, to define herself as gay.
At the time Higgins was at the height of her career, where she says that journalists were basically asking her to put herself in a box with a label. As a result, Higgins went on hiatus after she released The Sound of White in 2004, returning to the industry in 2007 with On A Clear Night.
She began, “All of the journalists were trying to get an answer out of me, they all wanted me to say I was gay, and they wanted me to come out like loud and proud but I was still figuring it out myself, and I felt so much pressure to put myself in a box and to put a label on it.”
Higgins also revealed how the constant media scrutiny and pressure ended up having a long-lasting influence on her persona. And essentially how she became used to just shutting down to avoid answering certain questions.
She said, “Every time I did an interview, I was in shutdown mode, because they were probing, trying to get me to slip up. Trying to get me to say a pronoun, you know? I’d be like, How do I describe what this song’s about without saying ‘she’?”
“It was so traumatic, in a way. That became my persona, shutting down in that way meant I wasn’t going to be able to express myself because that would make me way too vulnerable.”
As reported by The Daily Mail, it was a conversation with comedian and now husband Ben Lee that shifted the narrative for her, where he said to her that it’s “okay not to know”.
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