“Being queer felt fluid and free,” says Cara Delevingne
The model and actress weighs in on sex, love, and being your true self.
It was at the Dinah Shore weekend in Palm Springs that Cara Delevingne had her first real experience of queerness as a community, rather than an identity. The music festival describes itself as “the largest lesbian/queer women event in the world”, or, as New York Times writes, “lesbian paradise”. It is a marathon of a pool party, with dancing, music, love, and women being empowered and empowering each other. For Cara, it was like being thrown in the deep end.
She tells BBC that, while she has long known that she is queer, growing up in the spotlight meant that she hadn’t experienced certain elements of LGBTQ+ culture. “I haven’t really been able to live a queer life,” she said. “When you are in this job, it stunts a lot of things. I was never really in the community. I never went to Pride, never went to those parties.”
It is all the more difficult for young celebrities because they are often living a public life even as they go through the private process of figuring out their own sexuality. “At that time, I was still having trouble swallowing that pill myself,” said Cara. “It wasn’t even the fact it was going to be on the front page of a newspaper, it was ‘what if my family sees?’”
