Actress Jameela Jamil identified herself as queer on twitter, and she also attacked ‘brutal’ social media users on the same platform.
This is the latest in a string of incidents around an HBO show happened this week.
— Jameela Jamil ? (@jameelajamil) February 5, 2020
HBO Max announced that Jameela, 33, will host the upcoming HBO voguing competition called Legendary, and also serve as a judge. Following this critics, said that voguing is part of LGBTQ culture, and Jameela was not a part of that.
She responded to it flashing the ‘queer’ badge. Jamil later clarified that she was only a judge on the show, while the selected MC was “King of Vogue” Dashaun Wesley.
The other judges announced to appear on the show are stylist Law Roach and dancer Leiomy Maldonado.
Responding to the backlash, Jameela revealed that she is not, in fact, cishet, but considers herself queer — confessing that she didn't want to share the news this way, but felt pressured into it by 'mean comments' on Twitter.
Her statement started with the heading 'Twitter is brutal'.
In her statement released on February 5 on twitter, Jameela said: "I added a rainbow to my name when I felt ready a few years ago, as it's not easy within the South Asian community to be accepted, and I always answered honestly if ever straight-up asked about it on twitter."
She said she kept it low as "I was scared of the pain of being accused of performative bandwagon jumping, over something that caused me a lot of confusion, fear and turmoil when I was a kid."
Jamil was born in Hampstead, London to an Indian father and a Pakistani mother.
In her statement, she described herself as a long time "ally" of LGBTQ community.
Fed up with criticism she said, "This is absolutely not how I wanted it to come out. I'm jumping off this hell app for a while because I don't want to read mean comments dismissing this. You can keep your thoughts."
