If you had to keep a same-sex relationship secret in high school, you’re not alone. Gillian Anderson recently opened up about having that exact experience as a teenager and how a boyfriend later ended their relationship after learning about it.
In a new interview with The Sunday Times, the actress opened up about one of her earliest relationships with an older girl at her Michigan high school.
Sapphic Relationships On and Off Screen
“It felt secretive and illicit and wrong,” Anderson recalled, explaining that the pair believed they had to hide their relationship. But she couldn’t keep it a secret from everyone, and she later had a boyfriend break up with her.
Although Anderson had relationships with both girls and boys, she said she did not fully understand her sexuality at the time.
“I definitely felt I didn’t have the language for it,” she explained. Anderson added that even when she had other relationships with women, she struggled to imagine being in a long-term relationship.
“Even later on, when I had other relationships [with women], I’m not sure I ever thought of them as being potentially for ever.”
That perspective has since changed. Anderson said gender would not determine whether she viewed someone as her lifelong partner.
When I was younger, there were parts of my brain that thought [women] were temporary.”
Beyond who she dated, Anderson said she never felt like she fit in. She moved from London to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when she was 11 and quickly felt like a fish out of water.
“I was a punk in a conservative town,” she recalled. “There wasn’t a single other person who had a nose ring and a mohawk. I was very self-conscious, with low self-esteem.”
The Queer Story Anderson Wishes She Had as a Teen
Anderson’s latest role feels especially personal. She stars alongside Hannah Einbinder in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a horror film overflowing with blood, desire and gloriously messy queer characters.
Einbinder plays Kris, a filmmaker tapped to revive the cult classic Camp Miasma franchise. Hoping to reconnect with the original movie, she tracks down Billy Preston (Anderson), the mysterious former scream queen who started it all. What begins as research soon becomes much more intimate, pulling both women into a surreal world where obsession, pleasure, and horror are impossible to separate.
The film may deliver killers and plenty of gore, but its heart lies with people taught to hide the most honest parts of themselves. Its themes of alienation and self-discovery hit particularly close to home for Anderson, who spent her teenage years feeling out of place and lacking the language to understand her attraction to women.
“If Camp Miasma had come out then, I would have felt seen,” she told The Times.
Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) brings the film’s queerness fully into the light. Through Kris, Billy and the franchise’s complicated trans killer, Little Death, Camp Miasma wrestles with horror’s history of repression, queer coding and gender anxiety without sacrificing the bloody fun that makes slashers so irresistible.
“There’s a reason we remake these movies year after year after year,” Schoenbrun told Gayety. “We treat them almost like mating rituals. There’s a lot of anxiety in these movies about gender, sexuality and deviance. That’s just all in the soup.”
The result is strange, sexy and unapologetically queer. More importantly, it is exactly the kind of story Anderson wishes she had seen while growing up as a punk outsider in conservative Michigan.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now in theaters through Mubi.
