Six years after he first publicly recognized as bisexual, Jason Mraz is wanting again on his path to residing honestly.
The 2-time Grammy winner and “Dancing With the Stars” contestant appeared on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s on Me” podcast Tuesday and defined why he saved quiet about his sexuality early in his profession.
“I didn’t have too many sexual experiences in high school,” mentioned Mraz, who grew up in Virginia. “I was bullied and was just ready to get out of town. So that’s why New York City was great and then, even eventually, California was great.”
He continued: “The romance in my songs was just copying other romance in songs ― these are things that you sing about to please others or something. It wouldn’t be probably until I got to California that I met a community of people that would see me in a new way that I’d never fully been seen before. And I liked how I was being seen and heard.”
Frank Hoensch through Getty Photographs
Mraz, now 47, catapulted to world fame with the 2002 album “Waiting for My Rocket To Come,” which featured the smash single “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry).” Regardless of his rising profile as a musician, nonetheless, he mentioned, “I still took with me the conservative street that I grew up on.”
He added, “In the ’90s, being gay was like [the] punch line of a joke, and I didn’t want to be the punch line of a joke.”
The singer-songwriter initially alluded to his sexuality in June 2018 as a part of a Billboard characteristic celebrating Pleasure Month, during which he wrote a brief poem that includes the road “I am bi your side.”
A few month later, he advised Billboard that he hadn’t meant for the poem to be interpreted as his popping out. Nonetheless, he famous, “I’ve had experiences with men, even while I was dating the woman who became my wife.”
On the time of that interview, Mraz was married to Christina Carano, his second spouse. The couple divorced in 2023.
Elsewhere in his “Dinner’s on Me” chat, Mraz described himself as a “late bloomer” in lots of points of his life, and acknowledged that “other people my age might be more experienced.”
“I can’t say that I have found love yet,” he mentioned. “I have been in amazing relationships and I’ve always learned and grown. And hopefully I don’t have bad karma woven through those relationships, but I love where I am and I feel so much love for myself, finally.”
Take heed to Mraz’s “Dinner’s on Me” interview under. His feedback about his sexuality start across the 23:30 mark.
