Billy Dee Williams Clarifies His ‘Gender Fluid’ Comments

Billy Dee Williams (Credit: Shutterstock)

Billy Dee Williams wants to clear up comments he made in a recent interview, which led to headlines saying he is “gender fluid.”

Last month, the Hollywood legend told Esquire he sees himself  “as feminine as well as masculine,” and uses the pronouns “himself” and “herself.” The 82-year-old actor added: “I’m a very soft person. I’m not afraid to show that side of myself.”

On Nov. 26, the day the article was published, Williams tweeted out a link to the story, along with the caption, “Well, isn’t this lovely” and thanked the writer for the “wonderful walk down memory lane.”

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But in a new interview, Williams said some of his comments in the previous story were misunderstood because he doesn’t even know what “gender fluid” means.

“Well, first of all, I asked last night. I said, ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’ That’s a whole new term,” Williams said in a Tuesday story published by The Undefeated.

“What I was talking about was about men getting in touch with their softer side of themselves,” he explained. “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 a collective consciousness.”

The Star Wars actor went on to say he wasn’t describing his sexual orientation.

“I wasn’t talking about sex, I wasn’t talking about being gay or straight,” he said.

Asked if he is gay,  Williams responded, “No, no, no, I’m not gay — by any stretch of the imagination. Not that I have anything against gay people. But personally? Not gay.”

The New York native is reprising his role as Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and has been doing a round of interviews to promote the film.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives in theaters on December 20, 2019.