Very cool: The passage of Prop 8 has given Wanda Sykes to dig in and start speaking out against it.
“You know, I don’t really talk about my sexual orientation,” the Emmy Award winner said. “I didn’t feel like I had to. I was just living my life, not necessarily in the closet, but I was living my life,”“Everybody that knows me personally they know I’m gay,” she continued. “But that’s the way people should be able to live their lives.”
The motivation behind the revelation: the Nov. 4 passage of a same-sex marriage ban in California that has took the nation by storm.
Sykes aid the ban (also known as California’s Proposition 8) made her feel like she was “attacked.”
I’ll confess I was a bit surprised by this, because Sykes jokes about men in her stand-up act, and because the character she plays on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is straight. Now, I know not to take actors who play themselves on the show at face value. The joke about Sykes on the show is that she loathes Larry David and that she only tolerates him because she’s friends with his wife, and I suspect that’s not true in real life. But they generally don’t play too loose with the facts when it comes to the actors’ real lives on the show. Ted Danson really is married to Mary Steenburgen. Cheryl David is a thinly disguised version of Laurie David.* So I just assumed that the way they played Sykes’ private life—-that she’s single and straight—-was real. My mistake.