Billy Dee Williams recalls attending underground gay parties at the Met Opera House in the 70s

Star Wars actor Billy Dee Williams has been opening up as of late about his love for LGBTQ+ people. While he does not identify as queer, he said he never minded being mistaken for being part of the community.

He told Page Six he’d been called a “Closet Queen” but never paid any mind to it, preferring instead to have fun at the secret gay parties he attended in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera in the 1970s.

Related:

The roads that led to Billy Porter: How Black queer artists set the stage for the actor to shine

A lot had to happen for an actor like Porter, known for AIDS activism and gender-bending outfits, to rise to mainstream prominence.

“It all seemed very normal to me,” he said. “I was around it all of my life, so I never really gave it much thought.”

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Williams spoke to the publication while promoting his new memoir, What Have We Here. In it, he reportedly describes a conversation with his daughter about Carl Jung’s theory that men have an unconscious feminine side and vice versa.

“I was talking about why men should get more in touch with the female side of themselves and then my daughter told me — the first time I ever heard the phrase — gender fluid,” he wrote. “My daughter was very happy to think that I was gender fluid!”

In 2019, though, Williams made it clear that he does not identify as gender fluid after a series of publications interpreted his statements about using multiple pronouns as a coming out.

“What I was talking about was about men getting in touch with their softer side of themselves,” Williams said at the time. “There’s a phrase that was coined by Carl G. Jung, who was a psychiatrist, who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and they had a splitting of the ways because they had different ideas about the- what do you call it? Consciousness. Unconscious. It’s collective unconsciousness. But he coined a phrase that’s, ‘Anima animus.’ And anima means that is the female counterpart of the male self, and the animus is the male counterpart of the female.”

“So that’s what I was referring to,” he said. “I was talking about men getting in touch with the female side of themselves. I wasn’t talking about sex, I wasn’t talking about being gay or straight.”

He stressed that he identifies as “a very cute man,” adding that “people should read” Jung.

In his memoir, Williams also talks about turning down a romantic proposition from screen legend Marlon Brando.

Williams said he politely declined the Godfather star’s offer, telling Brando, “I’m not into guys.”

“I had no qualms with that kind of stuff,” Williams recently told People. “Whatever you are, that’s who you are. I’m more interested in meeting interesting people.”

“I’ve spent a lot of my life around gay people,” Williams added. “James Baldwin, who was gay, was my dearest friend.” He added that he’s used to fending off admirers.  “I’ve been getting hit on all of my life,” he said. “Gay, straight, whatever, somebody’s always hitting on me.”