Sophia Bush comes out as queer, confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris
"One Tree Hill" star Sophia Bush addressed her recent divorce and rumors of infidelity in a candid personal essay for Glamour magazine. In the cover story for the fashion magazine, Bush also came out as queer and confirmed that she is dating retired U.S. Women's National Team soccer player Ashlyn Harris.
In the essay, she described the cold feet she experienced before tying the knot with Hughes in July 2022.
"In April of 2022 I was close to calling off my wedding. Instead of running away, I doubled down on being a model wife," she wrote.
Bush said she kept trying to tell herself that "relationships are hard" and that "marriage takes compromise" but that the "heartbreak of the fertility process" led her to reassess her marriage.
"Six months into that journey, I think I knew deep down that I absolutely had made a mistake. It would take my head and heart a while longer to understand what my bones already knew," she wrote.
Bush filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August 2023 after a year of marriage. A month later, Harris filed for divorce from her former teammate Ali Krieger. Shortly after both divorces became public, it was reported Bush and Harris were dating.
In her essay, Bush said the decision to file for divorce took time – and came after many conversations with "groups of women in my life [who] started opening up about issues they were going through in their own homes." Harris, she said, was one of those women. They had met in 2019.
"She's been such a kind ear for those of us who opened up about our problems during a shared weekend of speaking engagements at a fancy conference in Cannes, and soon it became clear that she needed our ears too."
Bush said she didn't expect to find love in this support system and felt her feelings for Harris developed slowly and simultaneously overnight.
"And I think it's very easy not to see something that's been in front of your face for a long time when you'd never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option," she wrote in the essay.
Elsewhere, social media viewed their love as an affair.
"The online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways. There were blatant lies. Violent threats. There were accusations of being a home-wrecker," she wrote in the essay. "The ones who said I'd left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women — my partners have known what I'm into for as long as I have."
She added: "The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous — that, to be crystal-clear, never happened — rather than having taken over a year to do the most soul crushing work of my life? Rather than realizing I had to be the most vulnerable I've ever been, on a public stage, despite being terrified to my core? It feels brutal."
Elsewhere in the essay, Bush said that while she sort of hates the notion of having to come out in 2024, she is acutely aware that "we are having this conversation in a year when we're seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history."
"There were more than 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills proposed in state legislatures in 2023, so for that reason I want to give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves. I've experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home."
As for a label, Bush said her sexuality exists on a spectrum and believes the word that best defines her at the moment is "queer."
"I can't say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great," she wrote.
