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10 Straight Celebs Who Were In Gay Relationships

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The straight-celebrity dating résumé is a lot less straight than the tabloids let on.

TheThings Celebrity built an entire countdown around a simple premise: plenty of stars who now read as heterosexual — married, dating, papped with an opposite-sex partner — spent chunks of their romantic history with someone of the same sex. Some of it was a fling. Some of it was a years-long relationship that predates the marriage everyone actually remembers. The video “10 Straight Celebs Who Were In Gay Relationships” runs down ten names, mixing musicians, actors and TV hosts, and treats the whole thing less as scandal and more as evidence that celebrity dating histories rarely fit the box fans assign them.

• The countdown pairs pop headliners Lady Gaga and Madonna, both linked to same-sex partners years before their most famous relationships — Gaga with musician and club promoter Luc Carl, Madonna with comedian Sandra Bernhard.
• Actress Cynthia Nixon, known for “Sex and the City,” is included for a past relationship with a woman and her subsequent work as an LGBTQ advocate.
• The list also flags Jonathan Bennett’s past relationship with “Kyle XY” star Matt Dallas, who later came out publicly as gay while Bennett’s public dating life continued with women.

The Pop Stars Everyone Assumed Were Straight the Whole Time

Lady Gaga anchors the countdown’s opening slot, with the video pointing to her relationship with Luc Carl, a musician and club promoter who identifies as bisexual, as part of her romantic history well before her more recent, more publicized relationships. Madonna gets a similar treatment: in her younger years, the singer was romantically involved with comedian Sandra Bernhard, a relationship that was tabloid fodder at the time and gets revisited here as a reminder that Madonna’s dating history has never been as tidy as her public image suggests.

Neither woman ever built a public identity around the relationship — both are typically described in coverage as straight or as having had heterosexual marriages — which is exactly the tension TheThings Celebrity is chasing across the whole list: high-profile figures whose same-sex history got acknowledged once and then largely dropped from the narrative.

Actresses Who Talked About It Without Making It a Label

Angelina Jolie shows up for a relationship with a female roommate in her late teens, long before the marriages and relationships that made her a tabloid fixture. The video connects that history to her later advocacy work for LGBTQ rights and her role as the mother of a transgender child, treating the early relationship less as a secret and more as a data point in a longer story. Fans curious about how Jolie’s romantic history has been chronicled elsewhere can find more detail in a related breakdown of another actress’s relationship timeline, which covers similar ground on how tabloids track these arcs over decades.

Drew Barrymore and Cynthia Nixon round out this group. Barrymore has spoken publicly about her own bisexuality and a past relationship with Jane Pratt, founder of Sassy and Jane magazines. Nixon, who became one of the more visible LGBTQ advocates to emerge from mainstream television, had a same-sex relationship of her own before her advocacy work turned her into a recognizable voice on the issue — which is part of why the countdown treats her inclusion as less surprising than some of the others.

The Rockers Who Never Fit the Box

Billie Joe Armstrong, frontman of Green Day, has been open in interviews about relationships with both men and women over the years, and the video uses him as its example of a musician whose public image — married, punk-rock frontman, three decades in — never really squared with that part of his history. Jack White gets a similar slot: married to model and singer Karen Elson for years, but the countdown notes he’s also had relationships with men, a detail that rarely comes up alongside the White Stripes catalogue or the Elson marriage.

Readers who like tracking how musicians’ public personas diverge from what actually happened behind the scenes might also check out a separate rundown on musicians who aren’t what their image suggests, which runs a parallel thread on the gap between stage persona and private life.

The TV Faces Who Played It Both Ways

Alan Cumming’s entry is the most direct: the Scottish actor describes himself as “pansexual,” was previously married to a woman, and has had relationships with men as well — a label he’s used publicly rather than dodged.

Alan Cumming calls himself “pansexual” — married to a woman, open about the men, no interest in picking a side for the tabloids.

Jonathan Bennett’s slot on the list traces back to his relationship with Matt Dallas, star of “Kyle XY,” who later came out publicly as gay. Bennett’s own dating life stayed with women in the years after, which is the specific contrast the countdown is built to highlight. Andy Cohen closes the list — the “Watch What Happens Live” host has been in relationships with both men and women and has been consistently open about his sexuality across his broadcasting career, making him the rare name on the list who’s never really hidden the part everyone else on this countdown kept quiet for years.

Ten names, ten different comfort levels with the label “gay,” “bisexual” or “pansexual” — and that’s the actual point of the countdown. TheThings Celebrity isn’t arguing anyone on the list is secretly something they haven’t said themselves; it’s cataloguing a decade-plus of celebrity dating history that got flattened into “straight” simply because the marriage or the magazine cover came later.