Sophia Bush Comes Out as Queer: ‘My Sexuality Exists on a Spectrum’

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | April 26, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | April 26, 2024 |

Former One Tree Hill star Sophia Bush filed for divorce from then-husband Grant Hughes last fall after just a year of marriage. Come fall she was making headlines about her new relationship with a woman, former professional soccer player Ashlyn Harris. This week she wrote an essay for Glamour, confirming her relationship and coming out as queer.

“In April of 2022 I was close to calling off my wedding,” she writes. “In 2023 my now ex-husband posted a lovely tribute to our first anniversary on Instagram. When I saw it, I felt the blood drain from my face. Fans and friends were telling me how exciting this milestone was and how happy I looked. I felt nothing. Things hadn’t been easy at home, but everyone says marriage is hard, right?”

She writes about going through the motions in her marriage and how she’d spent her life up to that point “showing up for others” while “turning my back on myself.” But she pushed down any feelings of being in the wrong relationship, telling herself she was “too sensitive.”

“There have been moments in my life when it feels like the universe is screaming at me to pay attention. This was one of them, but I didn’t listen,” she said. But it got harder to ignore her feelings when she found herself “in the depths and heartbreak of the fertility process,” which she calls “the most clarifying experience” of her life. While dealing with that, she realized her partner “didn’t necessarily speak the same emotional language” as her. She felt alone in the process, but says it “would take my head and heart a while longer to understand what my bones already knew.”

So, when she got an opportunity to do a play in London, she jumped. But, she says, “The body does, in fact, keep the score.” She and most of the cast came down with a virus, and her ill health forced her back home. “My time in London was over,” she writes. “So was my marriage. It all came crashing down at once.” She moved back home alone, separated from her husband, and started the divorce process.

“Groups of women in my life started opening up about issues they were going through in their own homes,” she remembers, including Ashlyn Harris, whom she’d first met in 2019, and who was splitting from her then-wife. At first, she didn’t realize the affection she felt for Harris was romantic, because “it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option.”

Long story short, they fell in love and the rest is history.

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024,” Bush says of her sexuality now. “But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history … I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer. I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

“I finally feel like I can breathe.”

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