Janelle Monáe came out as nonbinary on “Red Table Talk” on April 22.
The Facebook Watch talk show, hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter Willow Smith, and her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, came back for its fourth season yesterday with a bang. The women invited the musician—a special request of Willow’s, Jada said, revealing Willow as a stan like us—to talk about her sexuality, spirituality, and self-acceptance.
“I’m nonbinary, so I just don’t see myself as a woman, solely,” Monáe said. “I feel all of my energy. I feel like God is so much bigger than the ‘he’ or the ‘she.’ If I am from God, I am everything. I am everything, but I will always, always stand with women. I will always stand with Black women. But I just see everything that I am, beyond the binary.” “That’s beautiful,” Jada replied.
“That opens you up to fall in love with any beautiful spirit,” she also said about her pansexuality.
Monáe’s representative also confirmed to Rolling Stone that she still uses she/her pronouns.
Monáe, who came into the show rocking a pair of cute space buns and a black vinyl skater dress, also talked about growing up in a poor and religious household. “I grew up Baptist, super religious and super conservative, so I didn’t love that. I didn’t feel like I could really dream big. I had to create my own world.”
Previously, Monáe came out as pansexual in her 2018 Rolling Stone cover. When asked what it took for her to come out in public, she said that she made sure that she figured things out for herself first (“I had to own all of me”) and talked to her family about it.
“My grandmother, rest her soul, but she was super religious. My whole family is church, church, church, and I’m just like, ‘What does it mean to go against your whole family on this thing?’” she recalled. “But I was ready. I was like, ‘You know what? If they don’t love me, don’t call me asking for no money. You will not get my LGBTQIA+ money. How about that?’”
She also shared about her fear of abandonment and need for perfection. “If I wasn’t perfect, would they leave me? I don’t want to feel the pain of anybody leaving me,” she said. This stemmed from her parents’ split, caused by her father’s addiction (he has since become sober).
The best thing about the show has always been the fact that it’s headed by three generations of family, which allows them to have open and frank conversations in such a way that few other talk shows can do. This episode was no exception. “That’s such a deeply primal wound,” Willow commented on Monáe’s fear of abandonment and rejection, and asked her mother if she felt that same fear as well.
“You know, my mother’s a recovering addict, and my dad was an addict, and coming into this industry, I ran into the same thing of ‘Oh my god, all these people are having demands of me,’ and I got afraid of success. I said, ‘I don’t want to feel the hurt of when it all goes away,’’’ Jada replied.
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This episode turned into a pretty spiritual episode, and watching it felt like going to church or a group therapy sesh, but in a good way. “God loves all people. God don’t make mistakes,” Jada said about accepting herself.
In the second half of the show, they brought on Monáe’s mother, who she described as a firecracker of a woman. “She had me really young. She was working class. She was a janitor, was always in the front row of the talent showcases like, ‘My baby!’” Hugging her mother, she said, “This is my ride or die.”
“I love her unconditionally. Nobody will take that from us,” her mother Janet said. “But I get a lot of backlash about Janelle. I told them back at home, I said, ‘Who are you to judge?’”
“You stick up for her!” exclaimed Willow, prompting Janet to reply, “All the time. They don’t want the bear to come at ’em.” We love a supportive mama bear.
Photo screengrabbed from the Red Table Talk episode
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