Nixon is currently starring in a revival of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Wit,” on Broadway, directed by Lynne Meadow. (It opens Jan. 26.) The play, which had its first New York staging Off Broadway in 1998, is an actor’s tour de force about an exacting poetry professor who undergoes a brutal — and by now outdated — experimental treatment for Stage 4 ovarian cancer, a woman who excelled all her life by analytical brainpower suddenly forced to grapple with extreme, unwelcome emotions. 
 
 Nixon herself discovered she had breast cancer during a routine mammogram in 2006 (it was caught at an early stage and required a lumpectomy and radiation but no chemotherapy; she still takes Tamoxifen). Her mother, Anne Knoll Nixon, 82, has had three bouts with it, the first when Nixon was 12. 
 
 An only child whose parents separated when she was 6, Nixon has stayed close to her mother her entire life. To succeed at both acting and academics required discipline and obedience in equal measure, and Nixon was guided with a strong hand by Anne, a classmate of Paul Newman’s at the Yale School of Drama, who seems to have functioned more as a constructive acting coach than as an insatiable Mama Rose. The way Nixon carries herself, with easy confidence and a lack of drama, seems to derive from having been the glowing center of the world for a mother who managed to do no harm. 
 
 Nixon is a mother herself; her two oldest children are Samantha, 15, and Charlie, 9. Their father is Daniel Mozes, a classmate of Nixon’s at Hunter College High School, where he now teaches English. The couple never married and split in 2003. 
 
 As Nixon has grown older, she has allowed herself to start coloring outside the lines. A year after splitting with Mozes, she began a relationship with Christine Marinoni, now 44, whom she met while campaigning to increase financing for New York City public schools. With the help of a male friend Nixon will not identify, Marinoni conceived a child. She gave birth to their son, Max Ellington Nixon-Marinoni, on Feb. 7, 2011. 
 
 On this late December afternoon at Fairway, Nixon was armed with a holiday-meal shopping list. She gathered ingredients for rugelach, reaching gracefully around an old woman crouched in the dairy section to grab a block of Philadelphia cream cheese and a container of sour cream. Nixon is a brisk, focused shopper who knows the store’s geography well, parking her cart in strategic places while charging the aisles. She tossed a challah into it — “French toast” — and a large bottle of vanilla. She was expert at blending into the crowd without calling attention to herself — the whirl of purpose served her well — and when she was recognized, it was adulation New York-style: delight at spotting a celebrity tinged with self-congratulation for being at the right place at the right time. 
 
 We headed upstairs to the organic department, where she filled bags with Fuji apples and Idaho potatoes. Then she gathered up some red kale. “My girlfriend juices for me, which is really nice. It’s a cancer thing.” Nixon seems extremely matter-of-fact about the “cancer thing.” “I feel that between my experience and my mother’s, breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door,” she said. “I know what that person looks like and what their daily habits are. I mean, I get my ultrasounds and stuff, so I think I’m less scared than if I didn’t do that.” 
 
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 Loaded down with bags, she took the stairs to the street. It was quite a feat to have made it through 40 minutes of shopping with only a handful of people aware of her presence. She seemed proud, unlike her 9-year-old self, of going almost unnoticed. “Hats help,” she said. 
 
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 When I arrived at Manhattan Theater Club to talk to Nixon during rehearsals of “Wit,” she was busy making herself tea — no assistants. Emanuel Azenberg, the veteran Broadway impresario and a producer of “The Real Thing” in 1984, told me: “Cynthia overcame success. She was this nice kid who went on to this extraordinary career and remained a well-balanced person with real equilibrium. She treats people well; it doesn’t matter who they are.” 
 
 Nixon does have a practiced air of civility that comes from having been a public person from childhood. She is professionally lovely, though she rarely allows herself to lapse into intimacy. As with many former child actors, there is a persistent echo of herself as she was when she began; you can see her switch into engaging mode — standing up midconversation to act out a scene, banging on the table for emphasis — displaying just enough exuberance to set herself apart and make a favorable impression. Maybe all actors tend to audition. But because Nixon genuinely connects, it feels sweet somehow to see her eagerness to please. 
 
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 “Both my parents were always careful to say, ‘You’re doing this for now,’ ” she recalled. “Most child actors, once they hit 18, once they hit 21, that’s it. Even teenage kids often don’t make the transition. Unlike me, a lot of child actors are very short, which is why they work. So when they’re 15 they can play 11 or when they’re 18 they can play 14. They look young for so long, they have abilities a much younger kid wouldn’t have.” 
 
 Nixon’s father, Walter, a radio journalist who she says was often unemployed, died in 1998. Though her mother’s own acting ambitions went unfulfilled, Nixon says there was never any sense of competition or jealousy between them. “It just felt for so long like we were in cahoots,” she said. “The plan was, ‘I’m going to act until I’m 18, earn as much money as I can while still going to school and not jeopardize my school, not go to California and pay for college.’ So I think I always had the sense that acting wasn’t the centerpiece. I’ve always had a left hand to balance the right hand. When Laurence Olivier was asked what the most important thing is for a young actor to learn, he said, ‘How to become an old actor.’ I didn’t know that back then, but I wasn’t looking for height, I wasn’t looking to hit it really big. I was looking to stay close to the ground. 
 
 “As a child,” she continued, “I only worked with my mother. She still will come nowadays and give me a note here and there. It’s why to me the director is the person I care most about, because I’m so used to working with my own personal director. Some friends of mine who are actors feel directing shuts them down and kills all their impulses, but the worst thing for me is if I feel a director hasn’t noticed. That makes me feel like God isn’t watching. Maybe it’s an only-child thing. Like in order for something to be important or real, my mother has to see it happen, particularly if it’s something good.” 
 
 When Nixon was 28, she studied briefly with the legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen, who also taught her mother. “That was great, but hard,” she said. “I had been acting for how long at that point? Like 16 years. So you can learn some things, but it’s hard to undo stuff. It’s like you built your house with whatever materials you had available to you, and then time passes and now you have the money to buy the proper materials but the house is already built so maybe you’ll retile the kitchen. But the house is built.” 
 
 Nixon manages to keep a similarly cleareyed perspective on her relationship with Marinoni, despite the titillation it has caused in the tabloid media. She has less tolerance for the skepticism she says her relationship has sparked among some gay activists who find her midlife switch in sexual orientation disingenuous. 
 
 “I totally reject that,” she said heatedly. “I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.” 
 
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 Her relationship with Mozes is good, she says. He married a widow, a child psychiatrist with twins, who are now 7, and they all share parenting duties. Two days before the first preview of “Wit,” I met Marinoni, who came to the theater with 11-month-old Max to show support for Nixon as she had her head shaved for the role. As she sat down for her transformation, Nixon wore a T-shirt her mother gave her, which read: “I am the celebrity you think I look like.” She seemed calm, though the extra loud baby noises she was making at Max, redheaded and adorable, betrayed her anxiety. Marinoni, 44, also a redhead, is self-possessed and understated. “She hates dealing with her hair,” she murmured, looking at Nixon. “I’m afraid she won’t want it back.” 
 
 Nixon’s own Miranda-red hair is long gone; her natural color is dark blond. She sat stoically as the hair supervisor for the show cut steadily until one side was off. “Max, look!” Nixon cried. “Where did it go?” The other side went, with a few sprigs left at the top of her head. “Bald Alfalfa!” she yelled. Marinoni smiled. “You look fierce,” she said. The first shave took place. “Oh, it’s so weird to the touch!” Nixon said. “It feels like tiny little wounds, tiny little nicks. It feels exposed.” 
 
 She expressed surprise at the clear outline of follicles that remained. “It does not want to come off,” the hair supervisor said, buzzing harder. That discovery seemed to temper Nixon’s nerves, making her mindful that, unlike someone undergoing chemotherapy, she still had her eyebrows, eyelashes and radiant pink cheeks. Meadow, her director, came in with a pair of long hoop earrings, each anchored by a pearl. Nixon, who has the actor’s gift of the chameleon, put them on and voilà! Giggling, she was soirée-ready. She took the earrings off and tried on a red baseball cap that is part of her costume. Its visor obscured her eyebrows and cut the light on her face, which went chalk white to match her unnaturally exposed scrawny neck. She looked instantly like a cancer patient. Jolted, she removed the cap. One step at a time. 
 
 Before the second shave, Nixon’s scalp was steamed with a hot towel, then slathered with Edge gel. As she cooed at Max, her bald head covered in a light green foam, while he, held tight in Marinoni’s arms, gnawed on a bottle of nail polish, I remembered the phrase Nixon used to describe what she regarded as her greatest achievement in life: Relative sanity. 
 
 “I know everybody says their kids are their greatest achievement,” she said, “and I think my kids are wildly impressive and great, but I don’t feel like they’re my achievement, really. They’re their own people. My relative sanity, I feel, has created a pretty good world for them. Not a perfect world by any means, but a pretty good one.” ||||| Oh dear… 
 
 Back in 2004, Cynthia Nixon bravely came out as a lesbian and introduced the world to her partner Christine Marinoni. 
 
 In a new interview, though, Cynthia reveals that being gay was a "choice" for her. 
 
 Hmm, not sure we're satisfied with those choice of words. 
 
 The actress said: 
 
 "I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line 'I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.' And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not." 
 
 She added: 
 
 "Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with." 
 
 We totally hear her out and true, we cannot define her "gayness," but it wasn't a choice for us. We were BORN gay. And millions of gay people around the world feel the same way. 
 
 [Image via WENN.] 
 
 Tags: choice, christine marinoni, cynthia nixon, gay, lesbian, straight ||||| Cynthia Nixon, of Sex & the City fame, tells the NYT today that being gay is a choice. What she means is that she's bisexual, and doesn't quite get that most people aren't able to have sexual romantic relationships with both men and women because they're just not into both genders. She is into both genders. And that's fine. But she needs to learn how to choose her words better, because she just fell into a right-wing trap, willingly. When the religious right says it's a choice, they mean you quite literally choose your sexual orientation, you can change it at will, and that's bull. 
 
 
 
 It's not a "choice," unless you consider my opting to date a guy with brown hair versus a guy with blonde hair a "choice." It's only a choice among flavors I already like. And if you like both flavors, men and women, you're bisexual, you're not gay, so please don't tell people that you are gay, and that gay people can "choose" their sexual orientation, i.e., will it out of nowhere. Because they can't. And when you tell the NYT they can, you do tremendous damage to our civil rights effort. Every religious right hatemonger is now going to quote this woman every single time they want to deny us our civil rights. Thanks. 
 
 
 
 From the NYT: 
 
 
 
 "I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not." - Sex And The City actress Cynthia Nixon, speaking to the New York Times. 
 
 I've heard some lesbians make this comment before, and I think it's somewhat bassed in the different between women and men, whether it's biological or societal, in that women's sexuality seems to be more fluid than men's (or at least women are more willing to admit it). But again, that doesn't mean that women find the idea of sex with other women repugnant, but then suddenly say "hey, maybe it would help my career if I dated another chick," so they "choose" to find other women really hot sexually, and voila!, they now DO find other women really hot sexually. It doesn't work that way. In the same way you don't choose to prefer blondes over brunettes, or even choose what kind of sex you enjoy once in you're in the sack. It's the way you're wired, it's not a choice.Finally, a "certain section of our community" is concerned? Yeah, that would be the people whose asses are on the front line fighting for your civil rights, who actually know how all of this works. Who know, first hand, that everything you say can and will be used against you by the gay-haters. And when you say things like this, using incendiary buzzwords that don't really mean what you're trying to say - when you try to define the rest of us by your incredibly poorly chosen, and incorrect, words - you hurt us all.This was an incredibly irresponsible interview.And finally, she's right. It shouldn't matter if it's a choice. But wake up, Mary. Lots of things in life shouldn't matter, and they do. The entire reason we have to have a civil rights movement is because it shouldn't matter but it does. Words matter too.I've written a bit more about this over on the main AMERICAblog site
– Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon stirred up some controversy with her interview in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in which she said that homosexuality is, for her, "a choice." Nixon, promoting her appearance in a Broadway play opening Thursday, explained that she recently gave a speech to a gay audience that included the line, "I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better." She was asked to change it because "it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice," she said. "I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me," she continued. She notes that the idea is controversial, but in her view, "It doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. … Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate?" Perez Hilton was less than satisfied with her choice of words, and gay blogger John Aravosis says Nixon is actually bisexual, "and doesn't quite get that most people aren't able to have sexual romantic relationships with both men and women because they're just not into both genders." Click for more on Nixon's relationship.