Bethany, who's married to Younger star Nico Tortorella, identifies as queer. If you’re not familiar with the sexuality term, people who identify as queer often feel that the terms lesbian, gay, and bisexual are too limiting and have cultural connotations that don’t apply to them, per GLAAD.
“How can you be queer if you’re married to a man?” This is apparently a question fitness instructor Bethany Meyers gets asked All. The. Time.
Bethany, who's married to Younger star Nico Tortorella, identifies as queer. If you’re not familiar with the sexuality term, people who identify as queer often feel that the terms lesbian, gay, and bisexual are too limiting and have cultural connotations that don’t apply to them, per GLAAD. Now, Bethany is spelling out via social media how it’s possible for her to be queer and still married to a guy.
“Who you’ve created a partnership with doesn’t determine your sexual orientation\"
“I firmly believe in the importance of allowing people to ask questions in a safe space where they won’t be deemed ignorant or politically incorrect. So for this question, that safe space can be here,” she wrote on Instagram, alongside photos of herself and Nico.
A post shared by Bethany C. Meyers (@bethanycmeyers) on May 8, 2018 at 6:00pm PDT
“Who you’re dating or who you’ve created a partnership with doesn’t determine your sexual orientation (if it did, bisexuality / pansexuality wouldn’t exist),” she continued. “Just because a woman marries a woman, that doesn’t mean she’s a lesbian (ie: Cynthia Nixon).”
Bethany said that if she had to put herself on a scale, with zero being straight and six being “rainbow,” she’d be a five. Nico, who prefers to use the pronoun "they," “happens to be so special, they made it to ‘lifetime-partner-status’ using my remaining 1,” Bethany wrote.
They also have a polyamorous relationship, which she says helps. “This works for me because our relationship is open, meaning the other portion of me who is attracted to women, gets to exercise itself. I’m lucky, I know,” she wrote.
Gender identity is also big for them, she says. “I don’t know that I (or my partner) would label me as strictly ‘woman’ nor would I label them as strictly ‘man,’” she said.
“This probably sounds less millennial-quirky than it actually is. If you believe boys should have the freedom to be feminine and girls should have the freedom to be masculine, the breakdown of the gender construct has already begun. So when you ask, ‘How is woman, married to man, queer,’ I’d challenge that the gender labels don’t apply.”
A post shared by Bethany C. Meyers (@bethanycmeyers) on May 4, 2018 at 12:33pm PDT
Bethany and Nico regularly field questions about their relationship, and she wrote an essay for WomensHealthMag.com earlier this year about why their love works. Although they love each other and are family, “We realized pretty early that we can’t satisfy each other’s every need, especially when we were living so far away from each other,” she said. “So we got really honest about dating other people and letting those people into each other’s lives.”
The polyamorous couple has continued that relationship mindset, even after they got married on March 9 this year.
In her latest Instagram post, Bethany wrote that, like at their wedding, she and Nico wore gender-bending ensembles to the GLAAD awards recently, as "an expression of our ever-changing, ever-evolving, truly-fluid identities."
But, she pointed out, that many of the couple’s transgender and non-binary friends and “allies” aren’t able to do that, and are regularly harassed and abused for their gender identity. “So to every person freely expressing themselves or working on it," she concluded her post, "shine on, love you.”