Alanis Morissette came out in four casual words on a podcast, and the internet answered with anything but casual: a pile-on of mockery, memes, and open homophobia.
The California-based rock icon made the announcement on the Handsome podcast, hosted by Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin, per Us Weekly, and she did it with the ease of someone mentioning the weather. Handsome is hosted by three of comedy’s most prominent queer voices. “I’m pansexual, so, yeah,” Morissette, 52, said. When Notaro asked her to confirm, she kept it to two words: “I am.“
Why say it now, a full 31 years after Jagged Little Pill made her the voice of a generation of angry, honest kids? She had an answer ready. “You know, I like to leave it for the epilogue,” she said. “I like to confuse people on the way out.“
The revelation landed with extra force because of the life around it. Morissette has been married since 2010 to rapper Mario “Souleye” Treadway, and the two have built a family together; her coming out 16 years into that marriage became the detail outlets led with. She also dropped a new holiday album, Good Weather for Immaculate Conception, the same week.
Then came the pile-on. Across social media, the announcement drew a wave of mockery: an endless run of frying-pan jokes, cracks about her age and her marriage, “Ironic” puns, and the familiar chorus insisting her identity is not real. The cynics called it a publicity play, with one widely seen reply sneering: “Time to spice things up and get some new fans.” Some of it went much further, into the kind of open homophobia this piece will not reprint. For the record, pansexuality simply describes attraction regardless of gender.
Her history suggests none of it will rattle her. Back in 2008, she told The Advocate that exploring one’s sexuality is “a beautiful rite of passage for everyone to play with their sexuality at some point,” and she has said she has felt “love from the gay community since I was really young.” She has even reflected on her 2000 Sex and the City cameo, the spin-the-bottle kiss with Carrie, calling it “very pleasant.” Even the Broadway musical built from her songs, Jagged Little Pill, centered a queer love story through its character Jo. In hindsight, the epilogue had been foreshadowed for decades.
The Replies Were Brutal
The cynics framed it as a career move. “Alanis Morissette has become a parody of parody,” one reply read. Another dismissed it as opportunism: “She comes out as what ever will get her some political traction at any given moment.” Beneath those sat the worse material, the biphobia and the slurs, which no outlet should repeat. Defenders were hard to find in the replies, which may say more about the threads than about her fans.
She said it like a shrug. Thirty-one years after telling the world it oughta know, she just told it something else.
