This Mormon wife has a new secret to share!
Layla Taylor has come out as bisexual! The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star shared the life update on Monday’s episode of Jay Shetty‘s On Purpose podcast. The 25-year-old said publicly for the first time:
“It’s just something that I honestly didn’t really know how to formally address for a long period of my life. … I’m gay and I’m bi and date women and men.”
Related: OMG! Taylor Frankie Paul’s Season Of The Bachelorette Could Air Very Soon!
The reality star explained that her sexuality was something she’s known about herself from a young age, it just took her a long time to fully process and figure out:
“It’s just something that I honestly didn’t really know how to formally address for a long period of my life. We’re only on this earth for however long we are here and I’ll be damned if I’m not able to be fully who I am.”
Amen!
She furthered:
“Growing up, I didn’t fit in for a lot of reasons in my childhood. I grew up in a very predominantly white area, and being a little Black girl, I already stood out so much to my peers and took that on a lot more than I feel like I realized. I always had these thoughts, and I kind of laugh about it now because I would be watching shows like Pretty Little Liars, and I would watch, like, Shay Mitchell kissing a girl. I was like, ‘Wait, why is that hot?’”
Hah! Layla continued:
“But I didn’t know what those feelings were because I didn’t have queer representation around me of [someone] I could look at it and be like, ‘OK, this is normal.’ It wasn’t necessarily that I had parents — or I was Mormon at one point — but I didn’t necessarily have that pressure to not do that. I just didn’t have people around me that modeled that.”
While she’d kissed girls while drunk at parties, the TikTok star “didn’t know if it was just a phase” before she tied the knot to Clayton Wessel, with whom she shares two kids:
“I would just kind of underplay it for a long period of my life. [Now] I just feel like I’m finally in the era that I’m over not being truly myself and I’m over not showing every part of Layla to the world. I’m very proud now to be out.”
As Mormon Wives viewers might know, Layla was most recently dating Mason McWhorter. She now credits their recent breakup to her coming out:
“I just feel like I just never was in a place that I feel like I could truly authentically focus on it. Honestly, that breakup was like a blessing in disguise because I feel like now I’ve been fully able to just focus on Layla and just focus on who I truly am.”
And now, she’s dating a woman! She didn’t reveal the other woman’s identity, but said she slid into Layla’s DMs after Layla liked one of her thirst trap posts. Hah! The girl shot her shot and it worked! She recalled:
“We met up, and we hung out and it was just kind of like that first kiss of, like, this wasn’t like a drunk moment. Like this was me intentionally going into a moment knowing how I felt about women.”
As for how the relationship is already so different from her previous romances, she explained:
“[Women are] already more emotionally aware about certain things and very patient. I feel like at least who I’m talking to right now, she’s just been very understanding and letting me take this at my own pace because it is just still foreign to me and it is so new. [It’s the] level of understanding and just being there for me.”
Love that for her!
So, what do her cast mates think — or even know? Well, this could be news to them! At the time she recorded the podcast, Layla said none of her co-stars knew:
“No, [they don’t know]. We’ve been — not in a bad place [with] any of us girls. [But] I know that there’s some friendships that are in different places than they have been in the past. I think right now we’ve just been kind of a little separate since just going on that pause from filming. So we just haven’t seen any of them in person.”
Oof. We’re sorry to hear that Taylor Frankie Paul‘s legal drama and other cast feuds have caused so much turmoil for them all!
Moving forward, Layla hopes to have an in-person conversation with her pals when the time is right, she said:
“I feel like me coming out, it’s not really a text. I feel like I want to see them in person to let them know. So they might see this before and then I’ll talk to them in person the next time I see them. But yeah, for right now, no one from the group knows.”
We hope they embrace this update with love and kindness!
Hear her full chat (below):
We’re so happy Layla’s living her most authentic life! It’s not easy to come out after growing up in such a deeply conservative and restrictive religious community, but she’s going to be a positive influence for so many going through similar challenges!
[Image via Disney Plus UK/YouTube]