By the time Kristen Stewart started dating women, the Twilight saga was done. Since then she’s made many films, some of them queer-centric, some not. She was one of the leads in The Happiest Season, the first major lesbian Christmas movie. She’s got Love Lies Bleeding, in which she and a female bodybuilder get into romantic roundelays that she vows will “shock people.” But what if even her straight movies are queer-coded? That’s what she argues about the movie that the original Twilight.
“I can only see it now,” Stewart told Variety of the 2008 vampire-werewolf YA romance’s gay subtext. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating.
“It’s such a gay movie,” she concluded, “I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
Stewart started dating women in 2013, soon after her longtime, mostly on, sometimes off relationship with her Twilight costar Robert Pattinson ended. Though she was very much open about her same-sex relationships, she didn’t formally come out as gay until 2017, during an SNL monologue, in reference to a certain then-president who had long been creepily obsessed with her dating life.
“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart said in the same interview. “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”
Stewart is also still planning to make her feature-length directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, with Imogen Poots as a burgeoning artist wrestling with family sexual abuse and violence, as well as discovering her sexual identity. Hopefully she gets to make that one soon.
(Via Variety)