In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, Billy Dee Williams described himself using both male and female pronouns, suggesting he had rejected the gender binary. while stressing the importance of being yourself.
“I never tried to be anything except myself. I think of myself as a relatively colorful character who doesn’t take himself or herself too seriously,” he explained. “And you see I say ‘himself’ and ‘herself,’ because I also see myself as feminine as well as masculine. I’m a very soft person. I’m not afraid to show that side of myself.”
The 82-year-old actor, best known for his role as Lando Calrissian in Star Wars clarified his remarks about his gender have been misunderstood in an interview with Undefeated, the actor he identifies as a male, stating he was simply talking about the ways men can embrace their feminine side, and he doesn’t even know what the gender-fluid term means.
“Well, first of all, I asked last night. I said, ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’ That’s a whole new term,” Williams said. “But what I was talking about was about men getting in touch with their softer side of themselves. There’s a phrase that was coined by Carl G. Jung, who was a psychiatrist, who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and they had a splitting of the ways because they had different ideas about the … what do you call it? Consciousness. Unconscious. It’s collective unconsciousness. But he coined a phrase that’s, ‘Anima animus.’ And anima means that is the female counterpart of the male self, and the animus is the male counterpart of the female. So that’s what I was referring to.”
It became more clear that Williams truly didn’t know what gender fluidity was, as it seemed he had conflated it with sexual fluidity.
“I was talking about men getting in touch with the female side of themselves. I wasn’t talking about sex, I wasn’t talking about being gay or straight,”