Gloria Estefan reflects on her daughter’s hesitation to share her sexuality: “She was very scared”

Gloria Estefan wasn’t surprised when her daughter Emily told her she was a lesbian. However, she was quite shocked to learn that Emily felt uncomfortable telling her the news.

The singer and star of Father of the bride65, spoke in a new interview with the Sunday News about her 27-year-old daughter’s hesitation to open up to her five years ago when she first came out.

“It was a bit of a surprise to me that she didn’t feel comfortable enough to say what she was feeling right from the start,” Gloria said of her daughter, who is also a musician. “But she’s a private person, like me, so I understood. She was very scared.”

Gloria said she and Emily went to therapy together to work on their relationship.

“Sometimes it’s just important to have an objective ear that isn’t emotionally involved in your pain,” she explained. “For Emily and I, having someone there while we discussed and pointed things out was incredibly helpful. It was healing.”

However, breaking the news to Emily’s grandmother, who was ill at the time, proved a little more difficult. While Gloria wanted Emily to introduce her grandmother to her partner, Gemeny Hernandez, before she died, Emily interpreted this as an attempt to keep her from revealing her sexuality at all.

“I told her, ‘Take it slow so you don’t shock her, because the last thing I want is for something to happen to her – because that’s going to happen anyway – and you feel like her blood is on your hands forever,'” Gloria said. But Emily felt this was rejection and was hurt by her mother’s statement.

“Em remembers it very differently and I can understand why, because for her she was completely unprepared at the time,” said Gloria.

Later, mother and daughter took their experiences to a public forum and shared their journey in a podcast episode. Of course, getting to this point proved not to be easy. In 2020, during an appearance on an episode of Red Table Talk: The EstefansBoth women reflected on Emily’s first attempt to tell her parents about her sexuality.

“We were sitting in the car and you leaned over excitedly and asked your dad and me, ‘Guys, do you think I might be gay?'” Gloria remembers.

Emily remembered her mother’s answer.

“You said, ‘Only you know,'” Emily said. “But when I asked you that question, it was like testing the waters because I was scared. I was having conversations in my head, trying to figure out… who am I? What is this? Where do I fit in? I learned that I prefer women.”

Emily felt like “something was wrong” with her, and her strained relationship with Gloria caused her to suffer suicidal thoughts. “The things I was facing at that moment were so paralyzing that I couldn’t see anything other than the pain,” she explained.

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