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Came out as a lesbian
At age 18, Chaz came out to both parents as a lesbian.
“As a child, I always felt there was something different about me. I’d look at other girls my age and feel perplexed by their obvious interest in the latest fashion, which boy in class was the cutest, and who looked the most like cover girl Christie Brinkley,” Chaz wrote in his book Family Outing: A Guide to the Coming Out Process for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families.”
For Cher, who would later become an icon among the LGBTQ community, it wasn’t “easy” for her to deal with her daughter coming out as a lesbian.
“When I found out Chaz was gay, I didn’t go through it that easily,” Cher said in an interview with PrideSource.
But according to Chaz himself, his mom actually “went ballistic” when he originally came out to her.
Then, at the age of 39, Chaz began his transition to the male gender.
Transition into a man
It wasn’t until 2010 that Chaz officially became a man, when a California court granted his request for a gender and name change.
In the documentary Becoming Chaz, which was shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and aired on Oprah Winfrey Network, viewers got the chance to follow Chaz’s transition into a man.
“My mother went through a kind of mourning period. It was difficult for her, and we didn’t see each other for about the first year of my transition,” Chaz told SBS Australia.
Just as Chaz said himself, his mother Cher had a tough time in the beginning.
“It was very unlike me to, in the beginning, have a problem with Chaz being gay, and it disappeared like that,” Cher told CNN in 2020, as she recalls her initial reaction.
“Then we talked about [whether Bono was] transgender for many years. And he would say, ‘No, I don’t want to [transition]. And then he went and said, ‘OK, I want to do this.’”
