This story originally appeared on Them.
We all have those memories of our awkward teenage years and our first high school queer crush. And by “we all,” I of course include icon Gillian Anderson who had her own tumultuous experience with a sapphic relationship early in her life.
While speaking about her childhood with The Times, Anderson spoke about her rebellious, anti-establishment phase after leaving England to live in the United States as a teenager, which included a high school lesbian relationship.
“Not only did I not fit in, I didn’t want to fit in,” she told the newspaper. “I was a punk in a conservative town. There wasn’t a single other person who had a nose ring and a mohawk. I was very self-conscious, with low self-esteem.”
The X-Files actress and Golden Globe winner shared that one of her first relationships was with an older girl while she was in high school. Though it wasn’t her first time being coupled up, “it felt secretive and illicit and wrong, and we had to hide.”
“Later on,” she added, “I had a boyfriend who found out and broke up with me.”
Though she had been in a relationship with a woman at an early age, Anderson clarified that she didn’t think she was gay.
“I didn’t, because I’d had a couple of boyfriends. But I definitely felt I didn’t have the language for it,” she continued. “Even later on, when I had other relationships [with women], I’m not sure I ever thought of them as being potentially for ever.”
Anderson pointed out to the Times that she feels more comfortable with the idea of a queer relationship now, even though she is married to a man.
“The person I consider my life partner happens to be male, but I think I would feel the same way if it were a woman,” she said. “I’d feel, ‘This is my life partner.’ When I was younger, there were parts of my brain that thought [women] were temporary.”
Anderson has previously spoken about this relationship in a 2012 interview with Them’s sister publication, Out magazine.
“If I had thought I was 100% gay, would it have been a different experience for me?” she said of her high school romance. “Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”
Anderson told Out in 2012 that she had also had additional relationships with women.
Anderson has enjoyed a large lesbian following throughout her career, much of it amassed during her time on The X-Files, in which she played skeptical FBI agent and medical doctor Dana Scully.
Anderson is currently starring in Jane Schoenbrun’s latest queer horror thriller Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, even further cementing her queer street cred.
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