Six years after he first publicly identified as bisexual, Jason Mraz is looking back on his path to living truthfully.
The two-time Grammy winner and “Dancing With the Stars” contestant appeared on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s on Me” podcast Tuesday and explained why he kept quiet about his sexuality early in his career.
“I didn’t have too many sexual experiences in high school,” said Mraz, who grew up in Virginia. “I was bullied and was just ready to get out of town. So that’s why New York City was great and then, even eventually, California was great.”
He continued: “The romance in my songs was just copying other romance in songs ― these are things that you sing about to please others or something. It wouldn’t be probably until I got to California that I met a community of people that would see me in a new way that I’d never fully been seen before. And I liked how I was being seen and heard.”
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Mraz, now 47, catapulted to global fame with the 2002 album “Waiting for My Rocket To Come,” which featured the smash single “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry).” Despite his rising profile as a musician, however, he said, “I still took with me the conservative street that I grew up on.”
He added, “In the ’90s, being gay was like [the] punch line of a joke, and I didn’t want to be the punch line of a joke.”
The singer-songwriter initially alluded to his sexuality in June 2018 as part of a Billboard feature celebrating Pride Month, in which he wrote a short poem featuring the line “I am bi your side.”
About a month later, he told Billboard that he hadn’t intended for the poem to be interpreted as his coming out. Still, he noted, “I’ve had experiences with men, even while I was dating the woman who became my wife.”
At the time of that interview, Mraz was married to Christina Carano, his second wife. The couple divorced in 2023.
Elsewhere in his “Dinner’s on Me” chat, Mraz described himself as a “late bloomer” in many aspects of his life, and acknowledged that “other people my age might be more experienced.”
“I can’t say that I have found love yet,” he said. “I have been in amazing relationships and I’ve always learned and grown. And hopefully I don’t have bad karma woven through those relationships, but I love where I am and I feel so much love for myself, finally.”
Listen to Mraz’s “Dinner’s on Me” interview below. His comments about his sexuality begin around the 23:30 mark.