Update: Wanda Sykes

Who was pregnant? Wanda or Alex? Wanda nose has some serious "spread" to it! Usweekly has reported that Wanda Sykes is a "new" mom! Wanda and her "mate" gave birth to twins. Funny - there are no pictures of Wanda's ex-husband David Hall (of seven years) or her current "wife" who goes by the name "Alex". I wonder if David Hall is currently living life as "Alex".


A Wanda Sykes Interview:

“When did you realize you were a lesbian?” and “Why did your first marriage end?”

“This is weird,” she complains. “This is for The Advocate, right?” Right. “So why do you need to know this stuff? Isn’t it just preaching to the choir?”

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“I actually made the choice to be straight as a kid,” she says. “Early on I knew [being gay] wasn’t gonna fly. No way. And from the teachers and church and all it was, This is wrong! What’s wrong with me? And you pray and ask God to take it away, and you bury it and bury it, and you shut that part of yourself off. Then you try to live the life that you’re supposed to live.”

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She and Hall divorced in 1998, but Sykes is careful to clarify that her marriage didn’t end because of her sexual orientation. “It had nothing to do with that. My marriage was fine. I think it was just…I don’t want to get too much into that.” She hesitates, and then continues, “It’s just that when you bury a part of yourself, you can take those relationships only so far because you can’t be totally open. Once we were divorced there was a defining, liberating moment of, OK, I’m free of this marriage, now what? It’s kind of like giving yourself permission. I guess that’s when I started actively dating women.”

In 2006, Sykes went on a weeklong, end-of-summer vacation with friends to Cherry Grove, one of two predominantly gay communities on New York’s Fire Island. (“I’m not making that Pines money,” she says of the neighboring, ritzier enclave, Fire Island Pines. “But it’s so nice over at the Pines. Nice coffee shops, gourmet foods, and all that crap over there.”) It was a nasty, rainy day, but on the ferry ride to the island Sykes spotted an intriguing woman. “She had on this black trench coat and was carrying a computer bag,” she says. “I was like, We’re going to Fire Island -- what the hell is she doing with her laptop?”

It wasn’t so much the trench coat or the laptop, though, that sparked Sykes’s attention. “She just caught my eye,” she says. And that’s when something happened that she’d never experienced before. “It was like a voice inside me saying, See? That’s what you need, Wanda. That’s what you need.” Sykes’s eyes well up with tears as she tells the story. “She’s beautiful, but there was just this aura about her. We’ve been inseparable since.” Inseparable and protective: Sykes, walking a tightrope, will not say what her wife does for a living. In fact, she tells the whole story of their meeting without once uttering her wife’s name. Later Sykes decided to give us her first name, Alexandra, for the article. “She’s not in show business. I want her to have as much of her private life as she can.”

Two years later, emboldened by the California supreme court’s ruling in favor of marriage equality, she and Alexandra decided to make it official. “This was it,” Sykes explains. “We’re in love and we want to spend the rest of our lives together. That’s why you get married.” So they rented a small hotel in Palm Springs and were married in a simple ceremony before about 40 friends and family members. “We had an amazing weekend. I don’t like to talk about it. It was a very special moment for us, for our friends. I like to keep that.” Sykes is happy—and obviously sentimental: “Even looking at the pictures, I just go back to that moment and get all teary-eyed.”

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