Mel B recently caught up with Attitude magazine, revisiting the group’s 1998 cover. The interview was to mark the new updated version of her bestseller, Brutally Honest, a memoir that chronicled the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, Stephen Belafonte, which I covered here. 

 

During the interview, though, she opened up about her sexuality, and described feeling like she is a part LGBTQ+ community.

“I didn’t start off my sexual journey going, ‘I’m this, I’m that, I’m bisexual,’” she explained. “I was, and always will be, very open. I happened to fall in love with a woman and was with her for five years. We still talk to this day. I don’t want to put a label on it, but I’ve always thought women are beautiful.”

 

Despite not explicitly naming her, it’s safe to assume the woman Mel is referring to is her ex-girlfriend Christine Crokos, who she reportedly began dating shortly after Mel’s divorce from Jimmy Gulzar, her first husband and the father of her daughter, Phoenix Chi, in 2000. She and Christine remained together until 2006.

It’s not the first time the former pop star has opened up about her sexuality. Back in 2016, she spoke to Gay Star News, setting the record straight on her relationship with Christine, making it clear that her being with a woman was not some “experiment”, and that experiments don’t last five years.

Mel’s got a point. Especially considering how quickly people tend to dismiss same-sex relationships among women that begin after a divorce as fake, or just a “phase” any given woman might go through after being “scorned” by a man. But that isn’t to say that there isn’t an increasing number of women who do, in fact, become more open to dating women after breaking up with men. Why is that?

Late-blooming lesbians is something that’s recently caught the attention of scientists. And when I say recent, I mean it. The first major studies surrounding lesbianism didn’t even emerge until the 1990s, and studies prior to that were non-inclusive of transgender people and mostly assumed binary categories.

 

A 2013 Pew Research study found that 38% of gay men first felt like they might not be heterosexual when they were younger than the age of 10. For lesbian women, that number was 23%. On the other hand, 14% of lesbians said that they only first had a sense they may not be heterosexual when they were in the oldest category, which was age 20 or older, compared to just 3% of gay men.

This research correlates with the pieces I’ve written before about women who begin dating women later in life. Women like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards, who, in her mid-50s began a high-profile relationship with country star Morgan Wade amid her split from Mauricio Umansky, which I wrote about here. And women like Katie Maloney, who, during this season of Vanderpump Rules and at the age of 37, happens to be currently pursuing the exact same woman as her ex-husband, Tom Schwartz, is after, a messy topic which I touched on here.

While it may be easy to suggest that since the women I cited are reality TV stars and perhaps they’re just hopping on some sort of bandwagon for a storyline, we can consider a woman like Niecey Nash, who surprised fans when she announced her marriage to singer Jessica Betts in August 2020, despite never officially coming out or publicly dating women. Since marrying Jessica, she’s been very open about her sexuality and she’s had a lot to say about her queerness, something she’s adamant she only really discovered later on in life.

"When it comes to being a part of the queer community, I just got here," she told USA Today last year. "I'm a grown adult woman, but living this part of my life is still very brand new."

 

Prior to marrying Jessica, Niecey had been married not once, but twice, both times to men. Her marriage to Jessica, she says, is her favourite. In her interview with USA Today, she opened up about not having many gay people in her life growing up, and why she was careful to never use the phrase ‘come out’. Her reasoning, she says, is because there’s no “big news flash”.

“I don't feel like anything about me has changed. I am the same person, just in a better relationship.”

As someone who has a series of relationships that didn’t work out under their belt, I can attest to how much more each breakup can better attune a person to things like boundaries, non-negotiables, and the difference between wants and needs when it comes to a partner. With that understanding can absolutely come flexibility, and a more open mind. So it makes absolute sense that these two women, and the many more we may simply not know about, have become more open to same-sex relationships, in Niecey’s case, later on in life, as they discover and exercise their own self-agency after spending years trying to fit into societally prescribed boxes.

For Mel B, she had her come up being the only member of colour in a pop group with all white women. Years after the Spice Girls heyday, I can truly understand and appreciate the significance of her rocking her naturally curly mane at a time when Eurocentric beauty standards were still very much the norm. Between that and her maintaining a years-long relationship with a woman in the early 2000s, it’s safe to say she truly is a trailblazer in her own right.

 

And with Niecey Nash, she’s been very vocal about the opposition and adversity she faced throughout her acting career as a Black woman. She opened up to USA Today about constantly being instructed to lose weight, to not pursue drama, being told certain roles weren’t the right fit for her and experiencing genuine devastation at the rejection she constantly faced.

This Walrus article chronicles the disservice a one-size-fits-all approach and the overall lack of prioritization to studying and truly understanding women’s sexuality has had on women.

“The fact that women have this capacity to respond sexually to a broad range of things means that the late-blooming lesbian might stay in a straight relationship for many years without realizing anything is missing,” Meredith Chivers, a leading researcher of female sexuality, said.

Despite Mel settling down with Stephen after dating Christine, then filing for divorce and now being engaged to Rory McPhee, I’m glad that even now, years later after what many might call her early 2000s “lesbian fling”, she remains steadfast in her assertion that she has always been very open about her sexuality. And I’m thrilled that the third time was indeed a charm for our girl Niecey Nash. Because all of this reminds us of the importance of being open not only to our sexuality, but to everyone else’s, too.

Here's Mel B at Victoria Beckham's birthday party on the weekend.