Alanis Morissette was nearing the end of a podcast interview when Fortune Feimster asked about her sexuality. The singer had a straightforward answer: “I’m pansexual, so yeah.”
The 52-year-old musician made the disclosure during the November 3 episode of Handsome, hosted by Feimster, Tig Notaro and Mae Martin. She was the show’s first in-person guest, joining the comedians for a conversation about courage, relationships and her career.
Pansexuality describes the capacity for romantic, emotional or physical attraction regardless of another person’s gender. GLAAD includes the term under the broader bi+ umbrella, alongside other identities describing attraction to more than one gender.
Morissette and musician Mario “Souleye” Treadway married in 2010 and share three children, Ever, Onyx and Winter.
Tig Notaro Wanted the News at the Beginning of the Interview
Feimster had been praising the songs Morissette wrote about heartbreak. She expressed sympathy for what the singer had experienced with men, then jokingly asked whether it had ever made her want to be a lesbian, according to PEOPLE.
Notaro stopped to check that Morissette was serious, and the singer confirmed that she was. “How did I not know this?” Notaro asked before turning to Feimster to see whether she had known.
She teased their guest for waiting until the closing stretch instead of opening with the information. “You know, I like to leave it for the epilogue,” Morissette replied. She also joked about confusing people on her way out.
Morissette Discussed Her Experiences With Women in 2008
While promoting Flavors of Entanglement, Morissette spoke to The Advocate about comments she had made on Howard Stern’s radio show. Asked to elaborate on her experiences with women, she said, “I think it’s a beautiful rite of passage for everyone to play with their sexuality at some point, so I did exactly that.”
In the interview, published June 4, 2008, she also recalled feeling close to the LGBTQ+ community long before her commercial breakthrough. Her first manager was gay, and she accompanied him to New York nightclubs when she was 14. She spoke warmly about the curiosity and openness she found among her friends.
The conversation extended to her role as Poppy, the girlfriend of Roma Maffia’s Dr. Liz Cruz, on Nip/Tuck in 2006. Morissette said she approached the characters’ commitment, conflict and power struggles as she would those in any relationship.
She also explained the twist in her 2005 “Crazy” video: her pursuit of a man turns out to be driven by jealousy over his girlfriend, who is her former partner in the story.
She and Sarah Jessica Parker Revisited Their Sex and the City Kiss
Morissette returned to the subject of her television roles during a September 9 appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. A fan of Sex and the City, she said she had contacted its producers to suggest a same-sex encounter for Carrie Bradshaw. They told her they had been considering the idea themselves, according to Entertainment Weekly.
She was reluctant to take sole credit for the scene, saying she and the writers appeared to have arrived at the thought around the same time. When Cooper described the appearance as groundbreaking, Morissette questioned that assessment rather than claiming it for herself.
In the 2000 third-season episode “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…,” she plays Dawn, a friend of Carrie’s younger boyfriend, Sean. Carrie is wrestling with Sean’s bisexuality when a party game of spin the bottle leads her to kiss Dawn.
Speaking separately to Stern in June 2025, Parker recalled the location and what she had worn for the scene. She described the kiss as professional and comfortable, and remembered being excited that Morissette had agreed to appear on the series.
Morissette’s Butterfly with a Machete residency began November 5 at YouTube Theater in Inglewood, California. The remaining performances are scheduled for November 10 and 11.