Modern Family star Aubrey Anderson-Emmons says coming out wasn’t ‘intentional’

Modern Family actress and musician Aubrey Anderson-Emmons has said that she “didn’t mean to come out” as bisexual with a viral Instagram post during Pride month.

In June, the 18-year-old actress best known for playing Lily Tucker-Pritchett in the long-running ABC sitcom, used a much-loved scene from the show to tell her fans that she is bisexual.

The scene sees a young Lily confused between nationality and sexuality, with Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (Sofia Vergara) telling her that she’s Vietnamese.

“No, I’m not, I’m gay,” protests Lily, with her father Mitchell (Jesse Tyler-Ferguson) telling her that she’s “not gay” but “just confused”.

Anderson-Emmons shared a video of her lip-syncing to the clip, along with the overlaid text: “People keep joking so much [about] me being gay when I literally am (I’m bi).”

She captioned the text: “Happy Pride month to all and to all a goodnight hehehe.”

The clip received more than half a million ‘likes’ on the platform and made headlines worldwide.

Now, the star – who has just released her first EP Drown – has revealed that she didn’t expect the clip to garner so much attention, and she didn’t intend for it to be a coming out statement.

Speaking to Them, Anderson-Emmons said that “everybody” in her personal life knew that she is bisexual, but “it was just one of those things I forgot to mention to the public”.

“I didn’t even mean to come out, I just thought the video was really fun,” she told the publication.

“And I was like, ‘People will find this funny.’ And indeed they did, but I didn’t even think of it as, ‘Oh, I’m coming out to the world as bisexual, this [is a brave thing] that I’m doing,’ because it shouldn’t have to be something. It shouldn’t have to be a moment of bravery to come out because it should just be normalised.”

The actress and musician reaffirmed that sharing the clipp was not an “intentional” coming out moment, as she views herself as an “open book” and has been out as part of the LGBTQ+ community for some time.

She went on to say that she was “surprised” by the intense reaction to her social media post.

“It always surprises me when something goes a little bit viral that I do online, because I’ll just get one of my friend’s screenshots. A couple of my friends screenshotted the ‘bisexual coming out’ stories that were happening on Twitter and I was like, ‘What?’ I didn’t even notice how much coverage this whole bisexual thing was getting.”

She continued: “I did not think it would be like that at all. I was very surprised. I thought that one clip would just go viral, and that was going to be it, but then other news [outlets] started posting about it, and I was like, ‘Whoa.’ But yeah, it was very unexpected and not plotted and schemed on at all.”

Aubrey Anderson-Emmons joined Modern Family in 2011 during season three and remainedpart of the cast as Mitchell and Cam’s (Eric Stonestreet) daughter until its 11th and final season in 2020.

Her EP Drown is out now.

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