The conversation about coming out continues.
On Wednesday, the second episode of Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk: The Estefans” dropped. It features a powerful and candid conversion between Emily Estefan, who is openly gay, her mother Gloria and cousin Lili, along with guests Michelle Rodriguez and Rosie O’Donnell, about sexuality.
With the episode arriving soon after National Coming Out Day, the Estefan family opens up about the challenges and conflicts they faced when Emily came out.
Talking about how she had been dating her girlfriend Gemeny Hernandez for a couple of months before she felt ready to come out to her mom, Emily expresses she was nervous at the time.
Lili tells her, “Your mom is one of the most open-minded people, but I don’t think you felt that.”
“Well I can tell you why I didn’t feel that,” Emily says, tearing up. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m in love with this girl.’ The first thing you said was, ‘If you tell your grandma and she dies, her blood is on your hands.’ I just wasn’t ready for that, because I understand my grandma was old, but it made it feel like, ‘whatever it is, hide it, it’s not okay.‘”
She adds, “So that’s where my hurt started. I’m never going to forget that.”
Gloria explains that her relationship with her own mother at that time was very complicated, saying, “I was trying to protect both my ailing mother from any shock that could affect her health, and Emily from anything that could harm their relationship.”
She goes on to say, “In my mind and heart, I thought you were the biggest bad**s, strong. This is what I thought.”
The conversation gets heated as Gloria explains that she was also looking out for her daughter’s burgeoning music career at the time.
“Okay, but who cares? Again, even this perspective is like, guys, you’re missing the point. But like you’re talking about my career? I was suicidal,” Emily tells her.
“But we didn’t know that,” Gloria responds. “We had no way of knowing this.”
Emily adds, “The things that I was facing in the moment were so crippling that I couldn’t see anything but the hurt.”
Gloria tells her, “I understand that, and I hate to know that I was part of that hurt.”
On Instagram, Emily shared photo with her girlfriend, along with a message on National Coming Out Day, writing, “Be you. Be kind. Be better. Be open, be careful if you feel unsafe, be LOVE. Anything else is icing … Happy love day… because that should be every. Single. Day.”
In the new episode, O’Donnell also shares her own experience, and what made her decide to make her sexual orientation public, revealing that she dated a man for two years before coming out.
“I dated a man for two years — a lovely, lovely, warm man,” she says. “But I would find myself staying in the bathroom, popping pimples, doing everything not to get to bed.”
She continues, “It wasn’t the sex that was the problem, necessarily. It was the emotional connection. … The intimacy.”
O’Donnell also recalls, “When I came out on TV after 9/11, it was like a blip. But I, like you, Emily, was surprised that people thought I was not gay.”
She adds, “I went to a comedy club and I was doing stand-up, and I’m like, ‘I’m gay. Listen, 9/11 happened, I’m gay. I’m telling you all, I’m gay. In case the buildings blow up again, I’m so, so gay,’ you know?”
Rodriguez, meanwhile, talks about her experience growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness while being bisexual.
“I like boys. I like girls. I like both,” Rodriguez says in a preview of the episode.”
