Kyle Richards Says the Media Tries to Make Her Look Gay

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | January 25, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | January 25, 2024 |

Kyle Richards’s love life has been the topic of tabloid headlines as long as she’s been in the public eye. Lest we forget that Camille Grammer’s medium’s prediction that Kyle’s husband, Mauricio Umansky, would “never emotionally fulfill” her, came true last year. Speculation about her relationship with musician Morgan Wade has been swirling ever since.

Now Season 13 of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is airing, and the cracks in Kyle’s and Mauricio’s marriage, which led to their separation after filming wrapped, are starting to show. Mauricio is notably absent from this season compared to seasons past (when he is on screen it’s for tense conversations with his wife about her recent hobbies, like getting tattoos), but notably present is Morgan, who accompanied Kyle to get one of those tattoos Mauricio didn’t know about.

Kyle and Morgan have vehemently denied romance rumors from the start. At first, I didn’t believe them and thought they were playing it safe until Kyle was officially divorced, but watching the show changed my mind. All of Kyle’s recent life changes—the separation from her husband, the sudden close friendship with Morgan, the weight loss, the sobriety—make sense in the context of the season, which was filmed right after her lifelong best friend died by suicide. What we’re seeing is a woman thoroughly upended by tragic loss, and it appears to me that her husband simply wasn’t there for her the way she needed him to be, and her friends, including Morgan, were.

“She has a group of friends that I lean on,” Kyle said of Morgan in a recent episode of Jeff Lewis Live. “In the media, they only show Morgan. But she’s part of a group of friends. There’s just those friends that are the first text messages of the day…you know immediately, there’s like tiers of friendship. You may love all of these friends, but there are different tiers. My first text messages of the day are four different people, but, you know, if I’m walking down the street, having lunch with them, they’re usually cut out of a photo.”

I, for one, don’t text any of my friends first thing in the morning, but I get it. Kyle is a girl’s girl if there ever was one, and she’s always had a rotating group of close girlfriends who appear on the show. Back in the Camille Grammer days, Faye Resnick was around Kyle a lot, ready to defend her from any perceived slight. Her constantly evolving relationships with her sisters have driven whole season storylines. All of this is to say: women feature highly in her life, so they feature highly in her press.

“I never went to therapy before. I am in therapy now, but my friends were my therapists always and I grew up with a family of all women and, you know, when I’m struggling, my friends are my, they’re my therapists. They’re my rock.”

It’s no surprise that the misogynistic machine that is the tabloid media sees women living in harmony and thinks, “Lesbians!” What’s unfortunate is that the sexuality speculation is missing something genuinely compelling: women living in harmony. It’s especially compelling when the ethos of The Real Housewives is the exact opposite.

I don’t care who Kyle dates, but she is clearly changing, because people always do, especially in the face of tragedy. That’s what I think makes good television—a complicated person’s complicated growth—not who they fuck in the process.