Everything Cynthia Erivo Has Said About Her Sexuality

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Cynthia Erivo prefers to keep the public focus on her work and artistry. But she doesn't hide the fact that she's a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. Though that's a part of her identity she embraces, Erivo believes her dating life has no place in the spotlight. "I'm very tight-lipped with my relationships, 'cause I don't think that my relationship is for anyone else but for me," she told Vanity Fair in 2024. She doesn't mean to be aloof, but there are parts of Erivo's life that we don't know — and she wants to keep it that way.

"I spend so much of my life sharing everything — whether it's my work or my soul or my life in speeches. I think I give enough of myself that I'm allowed to keep something for me," the "Wicked" star said. However, she's comfortable sharing that she has relationships with both men and women. When Erivo burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s, she was with fellow British actor Dean John-Wilson. Following the end of that relationship, Erivo got together with Mario Martinez.

Erivo and Martinez dated for about two years between 2017 and 2019ish. In May 2022, Erivo seemingly went public with her relationship with "The Chi" creator Lena Waithe, marking the first time that she was linked to a woman. "Today is when we celebrate a woman whose heart is bigger than the body that houses it. Happy birthday @lenawaithe I ....... You know the rest!" she captioned an Instagram carousel. Erivo and Waithe's rumored relationship is seemingly still going strong.

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Cynthia Erivo first shared that she was a member of the LGBTQ+ community following the release of the music video for her 2021 song "The Good," which features a romance between two women. "It's not necessarily autobiographical," she told The Standard that year. "But I am queer." It was never a secret, but she also didn't feel it was anyone's business to know about her sexuality. "It's just ... I have never felt like I necessarily needed to come out — just because no one ever really asked," she said.

The following year, she went fully public with her identity when she was featured in British Vogue's 2022 Pride issue. "[LGBTQ+ people] still feel the need to be constantly justifying why we deserve to be treated as equal beings, when really the only difference is that we love differently and we express ourselves differently," she argued. Erivo may not have felt she needed to come out, but she is glad she did.

After embracing her queerness publicly, she began to move more freely in her surroundings. Erivo made more room for creativity to flow when she stopped caring about whether people knew about her sexuality. "You don't realize you're doing that, putting so much energy behind it. And once you take the energy away from concealing something that is so a part of you that you can't hide it, you can put it elsewhere," she said on "The Kelly Clarkson Show" shortly after the Vogue feature.