Much has been written about how wonderfully LGBT friendly Orange Is The New Black is – including recently on this site – and that side of the show got very personal for one of the writers, Lauren Morelli, as she says working on the Netflix series helped her realise she was gay, even though she’d recently married a man.
Writing on Policymic, she says “[From my] first episode of Orange, my life fell into a parallel rhythm with Piper’s story in a way that went from interesting to terrifying in a matter of months”.
“The sound stage for Orange, where we proudly employ what has to be at least 64% of lesbians in the New York City metro area, is not a place where you can shy away from women or sexuality.
“As we started to shape our characters and debate fictional Piper’s ‘true’ sexuality that first season, we engaged in long discussions about sex, gender and our own experiences.
“I was finally forced to consider a question that had never, ever occurred to me before: Holy shit, am I gay?
“While it certainly would have been disorienting to begin to question my sexuality after three decades of knowing myself, it was particularly blinding because I’d gotten married only a few months before.
“It’s now a punch in the gut every time I have to say, ‘I’m getting divorced because I’m gay’. It’s a sentence I’ve said approximately 5,223 times in the last six months.
“I am now out to my family, my friends and most of my co-workers on Orange.
“Now, when I am in the writers’ room or on set, I no longer feel like I am stuck in the middle of two truths.
“I belong because my own narrative fits in alongside the fictional stories that we are telling on the show: stories of people finding themselves, of difficult paths and of redemption.”
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