Kehlani has something personal to share: She now identifies as a lesbian.
The 25-year-old singer made the revelation during an Instagram Live of a friend on Wednesday (April 7). She opened up to her fans about her sexuality on the social media platform, sharing her truth in photographer Jamie-Lee B’s live stream.
Kehlani declared:
“You wanna know what’s new about me? I finally know I’m a lesbian.”
Previously, she identified as pansexual. In an interview back in 2018 after revealing her pregnancy, Kehlani said:
“I never identified as a lesbian. I’ve always been pansexual. My first mixtape included songs about males, and songs about women. My first album had songs about a nonbinary ex, an intersex ex, and male/female exes.
I don’t always make it a point to identify pronouns in the music because that isn’t the focal point.
I think what steered everyone in the direction of categorizing my sexuality (which is still really narrow-minded) was my song ‘Honey’ and a couple of the other features I’d done after.”
The musician, who shares a two year old daughter named Adeya with Javaughn Young-White , also recently opened up about how her “straight passing” persona has been able to gift her with “a lot of privilege”. She candidly stated:
“I think a lot of artists who we talk about and say, ‘Oh, they had to come out or they had to do this’, a lot of them can’t hide it.
I didn’t even really have to come out in my private life. I don’t walk down the street and people look at me and go, ‘oh, I bet she’s queer’ of ‘I bet that she’s into women’ or anything like that because of the way I present.”
Kehlani went on to share that:
“That’s all privilege and I think that there are quite a few artists who were truly at the forefront but weren’t able to make the strides that I was able to make being 100 percent myself because of the way they present and the biases and the phobias of the American public in the world.
I’ve been lucky, super lucky.”
