Kristen Stewart Wanted to Do the “Gayest F***ing Thing” for Her Rolling Stone Cover Shoot

Tatiana Tenreyro
·5 min read
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Kristen Stewart wanted to do the “gayest fucking thing” for her March Rolling Stone cover.

In the cover story, Stewart talks about her desire to flip gender roles with her spread. “If I go through the entire Twilight series without ever doing a Rolling Stone cover, it’s because the boys were the sex symbols,” she says. “Now I want to do the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a fucking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would. Guys — I’m sorry — but their fucking pubes are shoved in my face constantly, and I’m like, ‘Ummmm, bring it in.'”

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The photos feature a mullet-clad Stewart wearing jock straps and basketball shorts, shot in a way that has more in common with Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein campaign than Rolling Stone’s past bikini-clad covers. The spread quickly went viral on social media, as fans marveled over the opportunity for a queer celebrity to get a hyper-sexualized photoshoot that isn’t catered toward the male gaze.

Stewart stars in the upcoming steamy queer thriller Love Lies Bleeding alongside Katy O’Brian. She tells Rolling Stone that as an “openly gay movie star,” she’s happy to star in a film that doesn’t rely on clichés, such as the “coming out” narrative.

The actress sees playing gym manager Lou as a return to her “first setting,” taking on a role that fit her own aesthetic. “It is a really weird, kind of moving return to form in some way. Kind of like who you are when you’re 11 — physically, the clothes you choose to wear — before you’ve just been pummeled by male expectation,” she says.

Stewart shares that when it comes to the queer celebrity spectrum, she sees herself as being in “the middle” between Jodie Foster and Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker’s supergroup boygenius. “Jodie had such a hard time [as a gay actor], and I’m not speaking for her — I am objectively analyzing the time and place in which she was being her, and that is not easy — I would say fucking near-impossible if you wanted to continue doing what you love,” explains Stewart.

She adds, “For me, it wasn’t a problem. But that’s probably because of the sort of space that I inhabit and the parts that I’m attracted to and the filmmakers that are attracted to me and the audience that exists for those movies. Had I really wanted to carve out more commercial space and maintain that, I don’t know if that would’ve worked.”

Even as she’s able to star in films that are more aligned with who she is in real life, Stewart has struggled to create her own projects surrounding queer stories. She explains that for years, she’s been trying to adapt Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water, which delves into the author’s experiences with abuse, the death of her stillborn daughter, failed marriages, BDSM relationships with women and addiction — topics that Stewart calls “so taboo it’s almost horny.”

With Yuknavitch’s approval, Stewart wrote a screenplay, cast Imogen Poots as the author and sought out to make the film. However, she’s learned that making a film that is “radical in a million ways” is tougher than expected, as she’s struggled to find someone to finance it. “And it makes me fucking angry. And not in a way that’s like, ‘I’ve been doing this for so long, and so therefore I deserve it.’ It’s really more like, ‘If I were a man, you would fucking believe me!'” she explains.

Stewart also delves into her Twilight days, opening up about the negative effect the stardom tied to starring in the vampire romance franchise had on her.

She recalled having constant anxiety attacks, which would escalate to the point of having to lie on bathroom floors, and she was once hospitalized. “They were like, ‘She’s dehydrated.’ I was like, ‘I’m not dehydrated. I’m fucking flipping out.’ They gave me an IV and a mild sedative, and I started calming down and my hands started opening up, because you fucking atrophy,” Stewart says.

The actress adds that for years, she couldn’t go into a room without knowing the location of its exits and would need to know where the bathroom was in case she would “spontaneously combust in a puddle of puke.” Additionally, Stewart had severe issues with insomnia, and at one point was concerned she would die from not sleeping. “I loved to be sad and shit,” she admits. “Oh, my God. I made a complete art project out of it: my whole life.”

Stewart also spoke out about continuing to field questions about her Twilight co-star and ex-boyfriend Robert Pattinson.

“Rob and I can’t just keep talking about that shit, because it’s fucking weird,” she says. “It’s like if someone kept asking you — I mean for literally decades — ‘But senior year in high school?’ You’re like, ‘Fucking A, man! I don’t know!'”

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