Cara Delevingne just came out as pansexual and broke down what Pride means to her

In celebration of Pride Month, model and actor Cara Delevingne opened up about her own sexuality and came out as pansexual in an interview with Variety. She talked about how she has come to terms with her own identity as she has grown and changed, and she shared just how important Pride has been in her life.

“I always will remain, I think, pansexual,” Delevingne said. “However one defines themselves, whether it’s ‘they’ or ‘he’ or ‘she,’ I fall in love with the person—and that’s that. I’m attracted to the person,” she said.

The model also shared that coming to terms with her sexuality and gender fluidity has been a process, and it often means discarding labels to feel most like herself: “The thing is with me, I change a lot. I feel different all the time. Some days, I feel more womanly. Some days, I feel more like a man,” she said.

The Carnival Row star has been open with fans since she began her modeling career more than a decade ago, using her platform as a way to highlight issues facing the LGBTQ community. Speaking to Variety, she shared more about how being so candid helped shape her own sexual identity.

A moment of change came when she spoke publicly about her encounters with Harvey Weinstein in 2017 (in which she shared that he’d sexually harassed her as well as telling her that she’d “never make it as an actress in Hollywood” if she publicly dated women). Before then, she told Variety, “I never thought I needed to come out. It was just kind of like, ‘This is who I am. Just so you know.'”

Delevingne appears on the cover of Variety‘s Pride issue, and she shared why the celebration is so important to her, which also reflects her journey talking about her sexual identity.

“Pride to me is a sense of something that I never really had as a kid,” she said.

She added, “A sense of pride is like a sense of belonging, a family outside your family, a place where you don’t have to apologize or feel ashamed. I guess I never felt like I belonged anywhere as a kid. Or I always felt like I didn’t belong in my own body. I felt so lost.”

But now, she feels more free to be who she is. “Once I could talk about my sexuality freely, I wasn’t hiding anything anymore,” she said. “And the person I hid it from the most was myself.”

We’re grateful to Delevingne for sharing her story and taking fans along for the journey because her words are sure to help other young people who might have similar experiences.