Favorite Lesbian Couples in Hollywood
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If you ask anyone to name a lesbian couple in Hollywood, they’re likely going to say, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. They are probably the most well-known duo, who are out, proud and talk openly about their marriage. But since marriage equality became legal in 2015 in all 50 states, more celebrity women have come forward to share their wives and partners with the media and their fans.
It’s great to see veteran couples like Lily Tomlin and wife Jane Wagner share stories about their 50 years together — creatively and romantically. There are also unexpected romantic relationships like Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor, who don’t let their 32-year-age gap get in the way (and when you find out how Taylor made a very modern, romantic move, you will be impressed). What all of these celebrities are trying to say is that love is love and they sometimes want to share their personal lives and kids with the world because it may inspire the next generation of LGBTQ+ kids to understand that their dreams about love and family can come true, too.
And we love listening to these couples talk about how much they adore each other madly, truly deeply. “The truth is, and this is corny, I fall more in love with Portia all the time. I really do,” DeGeneres told People. “She surprises me all the time. It’s what anyone experiences when you find that person that gets you wants to take care of you, [and] wants the best for you. We’re really lucky because we know how rare it is.”
Learn more about our favorite lesbian couples in Hollywood — and don’t miss Wanda Sykes’ hilarious take on starting a family with her wife, Alex.
A version of this article was originally published in June 2022.
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Ashlyn Harris & Sophia Bush
While their relationship might be new, Sophia Bush has already made us swoon as she gushed about her girlfriend, soccer star Ashlyn Harris.
Talking about how they first connected, Bush said Harris was among the group of friends she relied on after her divorce from Grant Hudges. “Groups of women in my life started opening up about issues they were going through in their own homes,” she wrote in a candid essay for Glamour. “It seemed like every week there were more of us, including Ashlyn, whom I’d first met in 2019 and who was in the process of figuring out her own split from her wife.”
“I didn’t expect to find love in this support system,” Bush, who came out a queer in the essay, admitted. “I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option.”
In the end, Bush couldn’t help but gush over her new love. “The way she prioritizes and centers her kids, not only in her life but in the core of her being, is breathtaking to behold,” she said. Harris shares daughter Sloane and son Ocean with her ex-wife Ali Krieger.
The pair made their red carpet debut at the 2024 White House Correspondents Dinner in April.
Jessica Betts & Niecy Nash-Betts
Niecy Nash surprised her fans when she married singer-songwriter Jessica Betts in 2020. But the Claws star wouldn’t describe her marriage as a “coming out of anywhere,” but a “going into” herself situation, she told People.
“I was not suppressing my sexuality my whole life,” she said to the media outlet after the wedding. “I love who I love. At one point in my life, I married twice [Don Nash, Jay Tucker] and I love those people. And today I love this person. I’ve done everything I wanted to do on my own terms and my own way. So my choice now in a partner has nothing to do with who I’ve always been. It’s a matter of who I am in this moment.”
Beanie Feldstein & Bonnie Chance Roberts
Beanie Feldstein and Bonnie Chance Roberts have a very Hollywood romance tale to tell because they fell in love on the set of the film, How to Build a Girl in 2018. Roberts was producing the movie, and of course, Feldstein was one of the stars.
In June 2023, the two shared beautiful pictures from their wedding on Instagram. “Could never find the words to thank the angels below for giving us the wedding of our dreams,” Feldstein wrote.
Rebel Wilson & Ramona Agruma
Lovebirds Ramona Agruma and Rebel Wilson may have the most 1990s rom-com meet-cute we’ve ever heard of, and we’re obsessed.
“We spoke on the phone for weeks before meeting,” the Pitch Perfect star told People. “And that was a really good way to get to know each other. It was a bit old-school in that sense — very romantic.”
In Feb. 2023, Wilson announced they were engaged with some magical photos of her Disneyland proposal. Talking to People following their big day, Wilson explained why the ring was from Tiffany & Co. “Our friend Hugh, who set us up, gave us Tiffany heart charms on our first-ever date in Los Angeles in late 2021,” Wilson recalled. “So it’s amazing to celebrate our engagement with a gorgeous Tiffany’s ring.”
Amber Laign & Robin Roberts
Amber Laign and Robin Roberts’ love story has endured for over 19 years, but it wasn’t until 2013 that the Good Morning America anchor came out publicly as a lesbian after a health battle with a rare blood disorder when she thanked her girlfriend on Facebook for sticking by her.
In late 2022, the two finally got engaged. “We took the calamari rings and we slapped them on each other’s fingers and we just we proposed to one another,” Roberts said, per ABC. “Now looking back, it was pretty fitting for us to not have a down on one knee [proposal] and one person doing it … it was just us hanging out in our little hole-in-the-wall Mexican spot and putting calamari rings on each other and saying, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do it.'”
In Sept. 2023, they tied the knot. “An intimate, magical wedding ceremony in our backyard followed by a joyous reception…ohhhh the dancing!!” Roberts wrote on Instagram. “We are immensely grateful to all for making it a day and a night to remember. Honeymoon here we come!”
Jillian Michaels & DeShanna Marie Minuto
Jillian Michaels and DeShanna Marie Minuto started dating back in 2018, getting engaged in 2021. They ended up eloping earlier in 2022 in a private ceremony in Namibia.
In a previous interview with People, Michaels couldn’t help but gush over her now-wife, saying, “DeShanna is ‘all the things’ — beautiful, smart, funny, creative, quirky, passionate … I could run down the list of adjectives. Those characteristics obviously attract you to someone. But it’s the quality of their character that makes you think, ‘Thank God for this person laying next to me’ every night when you fall asleep.”
Stacy London & Cat Yezbak
In late 2019, Stacy London revealed she’s been in a serious relationship with a woman named Cat Yezbak on social media.
They like to keep their relationship private because London said in her post, “I’ve had public relationships before and I don’t love that. But I want to be clear here that with Cat I felt I owed us the chance to be private since this is my first serious relationship with a woman and I’m sure there will be some hoo ha about that. But I would never hide her out of shame.” And we can honestly say, she’s never looked happier!
Hayley Kiyoko & Becca Tilley
Former Disney star and singer Hayley Kiyoko revealed she and former Bachelor contestant Becca Tilley have been dating since 2018 in her 2022 music video “For the Girls.”
While they keep their relationship details private, Tilley couldn’t help but gush about Kiyoko on her podcast called For the Girls, saying, “Hayley has really made me feel brave, and she was always like, ‘People love you and they want to see you happy.’ And I’m just so thankful for [our fans].”
Heather Turman & Heather Matarazzo
Princess Diaries star Heather Matarazzo and her relationship with her wife Heather Turman is super private, with not many details known about them. Matarazzo proposed to her back in early 2018, marrying 10 months later on Nov. 11, 2018. While their details are private, they’re so cute on social media!
Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi
Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s love story took a while to unfold. They met in 2000 when de Rossi was still in the closet — but there was immediate chemistry. It took until 2004 when they reconnected at a photo shoot to realize this was true love.
“She took my breath away,” de Rossi told The Advocate in 2005. “That had never happened to me in my life, where I saw somebody and [experienced] all of those things you hear about in songs and read about in poetry. My knees were weak. It was amazing.”
The couple has been married since 2008.
Sarah Paulson & Holland Taylor
Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor have a 32-year-age gap, but that makes no difference to them. It took a decade for them to get together because Paulson was in a relationship with actress Cherry Jones prior to Taylor. After reconnecting in 2015, however, Taylor slid into her Twitter DMs — and the rest is romantic history.
“If my life choices had to be predicted based on what was expected from me from a community on either side, that’s going to make me feel really straitjacketed, and I don’t want to feel that,” Paulson told The New York Times about not putting a label to her sexuality. “What I can say absolutely is that I am in love, and that person happens to be Holland Taylor.”
Megan Rapinoe & Sue Bird
Soccer player Megan Rapinoe and WNBA player Sue Bird had been dating for over five years when Rapinoe proposed in 2020. “There was a look in her eye,” Bird tells GQ of that moment. “I could just sense it. I knew what was happening.”
While Rapinoe was engaged to someone else when they first met, it didn’t take long for her to realize there was something special there with Bird: “I was like, ‘Okay, don’t be a cliché lesbian, where you love this person when you first meet them’…But it just was immediately like, ‘Oh, this is home.'”
Ariana DeBose & Sue Makkoo
Costume designer Sue Makkoo met Academy Award-winning actress Ariana DeBose while working on Summer: The Donna Summer Musical together in 2018, and the couple soon made waves at the Oscars and beyond.
After DeBose picked up her award for best supporting actress in West Side Story, Makkoo shared a sweet Instagram selfie of them with this caption: “What are your dreams made of? Thank you Academy for seeing her! We should all lean in to the things our lives are meant for..”
Glennon Doyle & Abby Wambach
If you’ve read Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, then you know well the story of how she met and fell in love with soccer star Abby Wambach.
“Everything in me was like, there she is,” Doyle told podcast What’s Her Story of the day she first met Wambach. “Like just an absolute and total recognizing, even though I’ve never seen her before.”
“I was next to this children’s book writer, feeling like, well, I want to sit next to her [Glennon] for some reason. Why do I want to sit next to her?” Wambach adds. “This is weird. And then after dinner, we had to walk to the stage where the actual event was taking place. And in the literally three minutes it took us to get from the back room dinner table to the stage,I told Glen my whole story and she touched my arm and for sure that was like a lightning bolt for me. That shocked me.”
Fortune Feimster & Jacquelyn Smith
Comedian Fortune Feimster married her partner Jacquelyn Smith in 2020, two years after proposing.
“I was excited. We’ve been together for five-and-a-half years. If you don’t know who you’re marrying after five-and-a-half years, then you’re in trouble. So I knew it felt good, it felt right,” Feimster told People at the time.
While they kept the ceremony small due to COVID-19 concerns, it was in part fears of marriage equality being overturned in this country that prompted them to have their ceremony without further ado.
“We’re really thrilled and just so happy that we could do this. I do think it’s an important thing for people to know that this is something that means a lot to us,” Feimster shared. “We love each other and we wanted to be able to make this kind of commitment to each other like our friends have been able to make and our family. And to have so much support from people has meant a lot. We’re just really happy that we got to do this.”
Fiona Shaw & Sonali Deraniyagala
Actress Fiona Shaw married Dr. Sonali Deraniyagala, a Sri Lankan memoirist and economist, in 2018. Their spark began after Shaw read her moving story of losing her children, husband, and parents in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.
“I understand the value of things by being with Sonali. She lives knowing that at any moment the world could end because she lost her world. It has brought me into land, I suppose, about lots of things; a lack of arbitrariness about life,” Shaw told Good Housekeeping in 2020. “I’m married to a very unusual person, but maybe it took a very unusual person to be willing to marry me.”
Samira Wiley & Lauren Morelli
Samira Wiley and Lauren Morelli have Orange Is the New Black to thank for bringing them together — Wiley as an actress and Morelli as a writer for the Netflix show.
“So much of falling in love with Lauren was her own coming-out story. For the first part of our relationship, it was more of a confidante kind of relationship where she was having lots of questions about who she was. A lot of the beginning was me being a therapist, sharing my own experiences. I came out much earlier than her – I was around 20,” Wiley told Cosmopolitan U.K.
“Lauren is the most lovely person, and [we were] able to have that relationship blossom from being scared of what was happening in her own marriage to being on the other side and [realizing], ‘Oh, this is more than this, we actually really love each other,'” Wiley recalled.
The couple married in 2017 and welcomed a daughter, George, in 2021.
Raven-Symoné & Miranda Pearman-Maday
While Raven-Symoné and Miranda Pearman-Maday have kept many details about their courtship private, Pearman-Maday did reveal, via their YouTube channel, that they met “at a gay bar in West Hollywood” on a karaoke night that Symoné hosted somewhere around 2015. They surprised fans with a wedding in June 2020 in Debbie Allen’s backyard.
“I got married to a woman who understands me from trigger to joy, from breakfast to midnight snack, from stage to home,” Symoné captioned the now-deleted Instagram post, via People. “I love you Mrs. Pearman-Maday! Let’s tear this world a new a—!!! I’s married NOW.”
Jodie Foster & Alexandra Hedison
Jodie Foster and photographer Alexandra Hedison met in 2013 and were married a year later.
These two, who have kept their romance under wraps over the years, often share some sweet memories on Instagram. In November 2023, Hedison shared a candid picture of Foster with a lit-up birthday cake. “Loving you is easy as cake,” the filmmaker wrote. “Happy birthday, beautiful ??.”
Kristen Stewart & Dylan Meyer
If there is any celebrity in Hollywood who is ultra-private, it’s Kristen Stewart. But since meeting screenwriter Dylan Meyer in 2019, she’s been more open about her love life to the press.
“The day that I met her, all bets were off,” Stewart recalled to Howard Stern in 2020. “I was like, ‘Where have I been and how have I not known you?’ She’s been, like, living in LA alongside my life somehow but not ever converging?”
During another appearance in late 2022, Stewart confirmed the two were headed to the altar. “We’re marrying, it’s happening,” the actress said.
Wanda & Alex Sykes
Wanda and Alex Sykes met in 2006 on a ferry ride to Fire Island in New York and it was love at first sight. The couple married in 2008, aka the same year the comedian came out publicly at a Prop 8 rally in California to support marriage equality.
But their greatest joy together is their fraternal twins Olivia and Lucas, who were born in 2009. “I was like, oh, my God, what did we do?” Wanda joked to Vulture in 2016. “At one time I was contemplating taking one back. I was like, can we return one? I mean really, oh my gosh. I was thinking we can’t do this, we’re going to have to take one back.”
Kate McKinnon & Jackie Abbott
Let’s just say we don’t know much about Kate McKinnon’s girlfriend, actress Jackie Abbott, and they both like it that way, thank you very much.
The couple attended the 2017 Primetime Emmys together (see a photo here via E! News), where McKinnon won Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Saturday Night Live. It was obviously a big night, so it’s wonderful they were able to celebrate with each other.
Since then, they’ve continued to keep their relationship out of the public eye.
Jane Wagner & Lily Tomlin
Can we just applaud Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin for avoiding the Hollywood stereotype that relationships don’t last in the entertainment industry? These two have been together for 50 years and married since 2013. Their partnership isn’t just romantic, it’s also a creative endeavor — Wagner has written most of Tomlin’s characters and comedy specials. But really this was a love match from their first hello.
“A friend brought her to my hotel room,” Tomlin remembered to Variety. “And I tell you, in two minutes, I fell in love with her. She had on hot pants, stretchy boots that went up to her knee, and a little backpack. I don’t know what it was, but I was in love.”
Jennifer Cheyne & Jane Lynch
Jennifer Cheyne and Jane Lynch’s love may be one for the books, but it didn’t work out the first time around. In fact, after briefly dating in the early 2000s, the pair reconnected over a decade later in 2019.
“[We] fell back together so easily and lovingly,” Lynch told Parade. “We’re very different people now — we don’t have the same insecurities we used to have. We live very peacefully. We have our own routines and separate spaces to retreat to within our home, but then we’ll have coffee together in the morning and meet for a meal.”
Lynch and Cheyne then tied the knot in 2021.
“We’ve been together a really long time. It was more touching than I was expecting,” the former Glee star said of the wedding at Live with Kelly and Ryan, per People. “Because the impulse to do this, as we’re looking for insurance for Jennifer and I said, ‘Let’s just get married.'”
“But then we went down to the Santa Barbara Courthouse, which is where we live, and her son became a minister of Universal Life Church. And the three of us said our little vows to each other and signed the papers, and it was really nice. I shed a tear,” Lynch remembered. “I was a little surprised.”
Cynthia Nixon & Christine Marinoni
Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni, who first met in 2001 while advocating for better public schools, are one of our favorite lesbian love stories out there.
“When we started seeing each other, Christine kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for me to panic about what this would mean — to my career or to myself — as if somehow I just hadn’t noticed that she was a woman,” Nixon told the Radio Times, per People. “And then she met my mother and that was when she stopped worrying about it.”
The pair got engaged in 2009 and finally tied the knot in 2012.
On Feb. 7, 2011, Nixon and Marinoni welcomed their son, Max, 13. Nixon also has two children, Samuel, 27, and Charles, 21, from her previous marriage.
Melissa Etheridge & Linda Wallem
Some of the strongest marriages in Hollywood happen when you marry your best friend. That’s what happened to Melissa Etheridge and writer Linda Wallem, whose friendship turned into a marriage. After a decade of being BFFs, Wallem moved into Etheridge’s household while she was going through a brutal divorce with actress Tammy Lynn Michaels. Things turned romantic about six months into the move and, by 2010, they knew it was the real deal.
“One day, I realized, ‘Oh my gosh. She is my partner. She’s doing everything you would want in a partner. Why not?’ But I fell in love with her in a very different way,” Etheridge told Variety.
The couple has been married since 2014.
Sophie Huber & Cherry Jones
Handmaid’s Tale actress Cherry Jones found a match in her then-neighbor, screenwriter Sophie Huber, who was living in an apartment on the Los Angeles property Jones bought.
“I moved into a house in L.A. that had several apartments in it. Sophie was in one of those, and we got to be great dear friends,” Jones told Closer Weekly. “Several years later, we became more than just friends and then we married in 2015.” They’ve been together ever since!
Stephanie Allynne & Tig Notaro
It took comedian Tig Notaro’s life to fall apart for her to find true happiness. After losing her mother and battling a rare infection and then, breast cancer, Notaro connected with actress Stephanie Allynne while working on the movie, In a World, in 2013.
“Everything about her felt right. I knew I liked her, I knew I cared about her and that sent me into an identity crisis spiral,” Allynne explained to People about falling in love with Notaro after previously dating men. “I felt the need to label myself, was I gay? Was I bi? Was I still straight? as I ever straight? etc. It took me six months to realize those labels were ridiculous. Once I was able to own my true feelings it was all easy and beautiful. I now don’t believe in the labels.”
The couple married in 2015 and welcomed twins, Max and Finn, via surrogate in 2016.
Catherine Shepherd & Brandi Carlile
Catherine Shepherd and Brandi Carlile met back in 2009, getting engaged in June 2012. They married only three months later.
“We met through our activism and interest in charity. We communicated for about a year, and the entire time I thought I was talking to somebody who was 65. It was an interesting way to fall in love,” she said to Rolling Stone about when they first started talking.
