‘Real Housewives’ star comes out
Braunwyn WindhamBurke came out as lesbian on Wednesday.
“I like women. I’m gay,” Windham-Burke told Anthony Ramos, head of talent for GLAAD, which advocates for equal treatment of the LGBTQ community in entertainment and media.
“It has taken me 42 years to say that, but I am so proud of where I am right now,” she said in the interview recorded on Wednesday. “I’m so happy where I am. To be able to be comfortable in my own skin after so long is just so nice.”
Windham-Burke, it appears, is the first openly gay wife on “The Real Housewives of Orange County” as well as on any of the other “Housewives” franchises, too.
In her second year on “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” Windham-Burke has been at the center of the show’s storylines, from her announcement on the premiere that she is an alcoholic, to the hint on Wednesday’s episode that she and husband Sean might have marriage problems.
“This year I got sober,” Windham-Burke said in the GLAAD interview. “I know that when you get sober and you start doing the work that goes into that you start realizing that a lot of the reason you drink is because of who you are on the inside.” But she added she had started to explore who she really was on her first season on the show, when in one episode she ended up making out with former housewife Tamra Judge.
“When I was younger, I would always be with a woman with someone else,” she said of the tradition she revealed last year of treating Sean to a third partner on significant birthdays. “And I would laugh it off. ‘ Oh, I was drunk; that was crazy.’ ”
At one point, Ramos asked her whether she thought, even initially, she might be bisexual, given that she and her husband have been a couple since she was 18, have seven children together, and just finished celebrating a 20th-anniversary vow renewal on the show this season.
“I love Sean,” WindhamBurke said. “He is my person; he is my family.
“But I am not attracted to men. I never have been. But I love him.
“There’s not a doubt in my head that this is where I belong.”