Musician Brandi Carlile recently opened up about how becoming a mother helped her finally feel at ease as a gay person.
“When I really felt comfortable in the world as a queer person was, weirdly, when I had kids,” Carlile said, as reported by People, while being honored during a September 30th fundraiser for the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center. “And I wish I could think it through and explain it to you, but I got so steady when that happened. So much insecurity and old hurt and fear and religious confusion, domestic confusion, it disappeared as soon as I had a family. That’s how important gay marriage is.”
Related
Carlile has two daughters, 12-year-old Evangeline and 8-year-old Elijah, with her wife and manager, Catherine Shepherd. The whole family reportedly attended the event, which raised more than $160,000 and where Carlile also emphasized that queer people “have every bit as much of a right to write our names into the book of family as straight people do, and that we raise amazing kids and we have incredibly eccentric households, and that we should be really proud of our way of contributing to the culture as parents.”
“It’s easy to get bogged down with worrying about gender; wondering, ‘Am I depriving my child because they don’t have a father?’” she added. “Or they don’t have a mother, as it were. The truth is that there are fathers all around them, and there are mothers all around them, and the concept of chosen family and integrating blood into that conversation is even more so. That’s what I mean when I say we don’t do it like straight people; we need to not feel like we’re failing if we don’t provide the exact same template for our children.”
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Carlile has been out since she was a teenager and was inspired to come out by Ellen DeGeneres. In 2021, she told DeGeneres that she recorded her famous coming-out episode as a teenager… and put it on a tape labeled with her boyfriend’s name, David.
“‘David’s baseball game’ is actually Ellen’s coming out episode,” the star told DeGeneres’s audience. Carlile then told Ellen that she was the first gay person she ever “met” growing up in Ravensdale, Washington, population 1101. She was referring to the episode in which Ellen’s character came out in 1997.
“I wasn’t going to stay in the closet after that,” she said.
Carlile has also long been an activist. In February, she held a benefit concert in Minneapolis that raised $600,000 for families impacted by ICE’s occupation of the city. In 2008, she established the Looking Out Foundation, along with Tim and Phil Hanseroth. The philanthropic organization provides promotional and financial support to community nonprofits, including the Human Rights Campaign. Last March, she and Elton John released “Swing for the Fences,” an upbeat track meant to inspire queer kids to dream big.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.