I Dated A Celebrity Who Kept Me A Secret Because I’m Trans

And he agreed, after two years, to talk to me about why.

The year was 2016. We talked on the phone, facetimed, met whenever I would travel and no one ever knew. During that time, he publicly dated cis women. Although in the beginning of our budding relationship, I often wondered if it would go anywhere. It was a rather effortless relationship, sometimes up to a month would go by between our phone calls, but we always circled back around and experienced marathons of a month or more where we’d talk every day.

In 2018, I began to hear less from him. Messages went unanswered, texts not returned.

He ghosted me.

And I was generally okay with that. I hadn’t even been on a proper date with him, although we met up and had dinner in his hotel room from one coast to the next- the last time when I was in New Orleans on a reunion for a reality show I had been on. I ditched it to go spend a few days with him. We were never photographed together, he was especially paranoid about that. I figured it had more to do with prying eyes than it did me, and I accepted that, perhaps naively as an unfortunate byproduct of his job.

I wasn’t starstruck by him or some random groupie chasing a film star for roll-off clout. He had reached out to me on Facebook when an…