By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | February 14, 2024
Behold, Kristen Stewart’s new Rolling Stone cover:
Damn! Kristen says that during her Twilight days, she didn’t get to do a Rolling Stone cover “because the boys were the sex symbols.” See: Taylor Lautner posing in a wet tee with a football back in 2009. So, now that it’s her turn, Kristen wanted her cover to be as gay as possible:
“Now, I want to do the gayest f*cking thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a f*cking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would. Guys — I’m sorry — but their f*cking pubes are shoved in my face constantly, and I’m like, ‘Ummmm, bring it in.’”
Kristen has a new movie, the romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding. It’s directed by Saint Maud’s Rose Glass. Kristen plays Lou, a mulleted gym manager who falls for Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian). In her Rolling Stone interview, she says it was “really f*cking fun” to be allowed to have “the little, dykey sister be the main protagonist in a movie”.
Kristen says that as an openly gay movie star (“and there aren’t that many openly gay movie stars”) she enjoyed acting in a queer film that wasn’t a coming out story. Playing Lou felt like a return to her “first setting”:
“It is a really weird, kind of moving return to form in some way. Kind of like who you are when you’re 11 — physically, the clothes you choose to wear — before you’ve just been pummeled by male expectation.”
Kristen adds that she may have played more “feminine” roles in the past, but she didn’t feel like she was performing “femininity in order to reap its benefits in a way that felt like a lie”. She describes herself as “very fluid”:
“I’ve never felt like, ‘Oh, wow, I was doing this lie for a long time in order to get jobs.’ That would be wrong. I have had a good time playing with all of the tonal qualities. But there’s so much room for success when you choose the girlie one. There’s no room for this other one.”
Like many of us, puberty did a number on how Kristen viewed gender. She remembers her classmates being grossed out by her unshaven legs, the time she accidentally hit a friend in the testicles and he cried, “Oh, you f*cking man!” and clocking how boys treated her more “girlie” friend versus how they treated her:
“I was immediately aware that these guys who I was friends with saw me as not f*ckable,” she says. “My sexuality is totally fluid. I’m all over the f*cking map — and I think I was then. But I also really wanted to be normal and hot, so I was like, ‘Cool. I’m going to do everything I can to try and f*cking figure out how to look like a girl and get these guys to like me.’ That’s it. It’s totally a normal story.”
Kristen says she’s had time to settle into being a queer woman in the public eye, and she has some thoughts:
“And it goes: Jodie [Foster], me, boygenius,” she says, plainly, of the spots she imagines they all hold on the queer-celebrity continuum. “I’m in the middle. Do you know what I mean? Jodie had such a hard time [as a gay actor], and I’m not speaking for her — I am objectively analyzing the time and place in which she was being her, and that is not easy — I would say f*cking near-impossible if you wanted to continue doing what you love.”
For Kristen, being a queer actor “wasn’t a problem,” perhaps because she never wanted to be a mainstream commercial star. She adds that officially coming out on SNL back in 2017 wasn’t super hard for her, as she was “physically out with my body” long before then. She calls the decision a “very shoot-from-the-hip moment.”
Here are some more photos from Kristen’s extremely gay photoshoot:
