Cynthia Nixon is leaning into queer joy, art, and family between protests

It’s late March in New York City, and Cynthia Nixon honors sapphics throughout the decades at the storied lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson for this cover shoot. She stands tall on the street outside the bar of the historically queer West Village in a power suit, arm akimbo in one photo; in another, she’s clad in a vintage femme leather jacket while posed on a worn wooden bench. Perhaps most strikingly, there’s another pose of her relaxed beneath the neon pink Henrietta Hudson sign in a simple tee with “dyke” emblazoned on it, a hint of quiet defiance in her gaze.

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“It felt very empowering. The elders on the wall felt so great,” Nixon says of being photographed at Hen’s (as Henrietta Hudson, which opened in 1991, is lovingly called). “It also felt like just a fun place to be.”

Cynthia Nixon in Tibi White Active Knit Zipper Detailed Track Jacket, White Active Knit Winslow PantEmilio Madrid

This could be any photo shoot over the past 20-plus years since the Sex and the City star fell in love with her wife, Christine Marinoni, and began to speak publicly about her queer identity. The white trench coat with the cinched cuffs she dons while under the bar’s disco ball and the slouchy tracksuit she sports beside a sign that reads “built by DYKES” are vintage and timeless.

But this shoot falls at the time of year when winter turns to spring, and this year, revolution is in the air. About six weeks before slipping into that “dyke” tee, the actor who stars in the third seasons ofAnd Just Like That... and The Gilded Agethis summer, was wrapped in a parka and a scarf to deliver a call to action to protect trans people’s rights to gender-affirming care at a protest outside NYU Langone hospital. That was early February, a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, and Nixon spoke of the public as personal, because it is.

“It felt particularly personal because it was pretty much in our backyard. We live in the shadow of NYU Langone, and it was the place where my son got his first treatment and got his surgery,” Nixon says of her 28-year-old transgender son, Sam. “He received such wonderful care from such an amazing surgeon. So that seemed very personal.”

Cynthia Nixon in Salon 1884 Patent Leather Osuna Trench Coat; Jimmy Choo Isa 95 Black Leather Pumps; Odette New York Earrings; Lionheart Jewelry RingEmilio Madrid

An Emmy, Tony, and Grammy winner, Nixon was a child actor whose first TV appearance was on the game show To Tell the Truth, where her mother worked. Dressed in a yellow cowboy hat and gear, it was the then-second-grader’s mission to convince a panel of celebrities that she was someone else — in this case, a junior horse-riding champion. Watch the clip Nixon posted on Instagram in 2022 of her on-screen debut and signs of her acting prowess are already evident as she deftly answers questions about the identity she’s assumed. Though impelled to lie in that game, Nixon is a truth teller in life, art, and activism from an early age.

“I have photos of our tiny little protests outside my elementary school against the Vietnam War. And my parents took me to actual big people protests,” Nixon recalls. “Long before I fell in love with Christine, my parents always had lots of gay people, particularly gay men, in our life.”

Nixon has fought for LGBTQ+ rights and education, and as a cancer survivor, she’s spoken up to help erase stigma. In 2018, a lifelong New Yorker, she ran for governor of her home state against Andrew Cuomo years before his nursing home scandal amid the pandemic. But the issue that galvanized her as an activist is abortion, she says.

Cynthia Nixon in Salon 1884 Black Suit; Church’s Shannon WR Brushed Calfskin Derby Lace-Ups; White Space Earrings; Jennifer Zeuner RingEmilio Madrid

“[It] seemed like my mother planted that seed very early as a very personal thing,” Nixon says.

As a kid, she learned about abortion from her mother who told her about “when it was illegal and how awful it had been and how important it was to not let that happen [again]. It’s just always been a thing that’s in my consciousness,” she says. “It just seems to me you have to fight for these things. But even before you fight for them, you have to embrace them and acknowledge them and say, ‘I had an abortion. This is nothing to be ashamed of. I have cancer. This is nothing I want to hide from the world. I am queer and I’m in love with a woman, and we have a life together, and I’m not going to not walk down the street with her? Or have her photo on my desk?,’ that kind of thing.”

Though Nixon has been marching for causes since she can recall and still is (she rallied on the Transgender Day of Visibility days before this interview), there is much to celebrate ahead of the release of her two vastly different series set in New York City. And Just Like That… finds her Sex and the City character, Miranda Hobbes, rife with opportunities in career and love, especially since she came out and moved on from her first queer love, Che. The decision to expand Miranda’s sexuality in the reboot was part Nixon’s. “You have [this] homegrown queer character, why not go there?” she told creator Michael Patrick King at the time. Miranda in the reboot is not her first queer role. Notably, she starred as Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion (2016).

Cynthia Nixon in RÙADH Pale Gray The Archer Jean; Heather Gray The Jura Sweatshirt Leather Belt; Proenza Schoule Ecru Sabina Belted Double-Breasted Glossed-Leather Trench Coat; Christian Louboutin Neutral Patent-Leather Pumps; Odette New York EarringsEmilio Madrid

“I think that it was messy, and I really liked the fact that it was messy,” Nixon says of her longtime character’s coming out. “That’s part of it. Just because we’re queer doesn’t mean we have to be perfect too.”

“Miranda had these experiences a lot later in life than I did, but it wasn’t a kind of, Oh, I’ve always been this thing, and I can’t believe all the time I’ve wasted before discovering this one true part of myself, she says. “I feel like for me, it was a very happy evolution, and it was a happy evolution for Miranda, although I think with a lot more drama and mess.”

At the center of that happy evolution for Nixon is her family and life with Marinoni, an education and LGBTQ+ rights activist. Marinoni happened to own the Brooklyn queer-leaning pub Rising (1996-2003), Nixon shares, after recently spending part of a day in various lesbian looks at Henrietta Hudson.

A crowd revels at Henrietta Hudson in NYCMolly Adams

“It is a very big love. It’s just a very full partnership. And certainly, it’s a very domestic partnership, but we’re talking politics every day. Not all day, but every day,” Nixon says. “Some part of the day we’re figuring, we’re strategizing.”

Nixon is a Tony winner for Rabbit Hole (2006) and The Little Foxes (2017) and an Emmy winner for Sex and the City (2004) and a guest role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2008). Her list of roles in life expanded to director in 2015 when she directed the play Steve for the New Group. In 2023, she stepped behind the camera for two episodes of AJLT. Regarding the intersection of her art and politics, Nixon says, “Essentially, I see them as separate, because if I’m fighting for things, political things, it’s a much more two-dimensional story most of the time.”

“That’s not at all what I want from when I’m acting or directing [or producing]. I want there to be nuance and ambiguity and contradiction, and it’s a great thing if you go see something that I’m in, I’ve directed, and you’re not sure what side I’m on,” she says. “Whereas in politics, I always want you to know what side I’m on.”

A crowd revels at Henrietta Hudson bar in NYC Molly Adams

In a setting more than a century earlier than AJLT, Nixon stars as Ada in The Gilded Age, the addicting series from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. The show delves into the upstairs/downstairs of New York’s blue bloods versus new money. This season, the dynamics are sure to shift as soft-spoken Ada now holds the purse strings in the house where her sister, Agnes (Christine Baranski), had long held power.

“There is humor and there is also pain. But as Ada tries to find herself, I think, Miranda has a lot more experience being bumped around in the world. And Ada has lived a very protected life in which she never had to be the person in charge of anybody, even herself really,” Nixon says.

Something both series share is the lifelong friendships she’s built with her costars. Nixon made history in 1984 when she appeared in two Broadway shows simultaneously — David Rabe’s Hurlyburly and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. The latter is where she first worked with Baranski, playing that actress’s daughter nearly 40 years before they would play sisters on The Gilded Age.

“Christine said this wonderful thing about our playing these sisters — ‘intimacy is the hardest thing to fake,’” Nixon relays.

Cynthia Nixon in Salon 1884 Misha Leather Track Jacket, Black Skirt; Jimmy Choo Isa 95 Black Leather Pumps; Odette New York Earrings, RingEmilio Madrid

“That’s a good launching point for me and Kristin [Davis] and Sarah [Jessica Parker],” she adds of her Sex and the City/AJLT costars. “Kristin and I have known each other for whatever it is now, getting up to 30 years. Sarah and I have known each other since we were 11 and 12.”

“There is a thing about intimacy. ... Somebody you just [know] their mother, their siblings, their spouse, the soil that they come from,” she says. “You’ve seen them through decades of triumphs and losses. There is very much, I think, a shorthand, because you don’t only know the person, [but] the context of the person.”

The Gilded Age and AJLT’s third seasons arrive in time for Pride Month, six months into Trump’s fresh attacks on myriad groups of marginalized people. For this second Trump term, Nixon is balancing family, art, and politics by “not allowing the president to live rent-free in my head,” she says, adding that things are “exponentially more harmful” but that “rage and despair are not consuming us in the same way.”

“My kids are thriving; my wife is beautiful. I am happy and have these wonderful projects that are about to come out,” Nixon says. “Queer joy and trans joy — I do think that these are political acts. You may be controlling a lot of the levers of power, but you are not controlling the levers of me.”

This cover story is part of the The Advocate's May/June "Pride" issue, which hits newsstands May 27. Support queer media and subscribe— or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting May 15.

talent: CYNTHIA NIXON@cynthiaenixon
photographer: EMILIO MADRID@emiliomadrid
photography assistant: ERIC HODGMAN@erichodgmanstudio
photography assistant: LEANDRA WORTH @leandraworthphoto
stylist: ALICIA LOMBARDINI @alicialombardini
stylist assistant: CYRENAE TADEMY@chanelncrocs
glam: MATIN@itsmatin with TRACEY MATTINGLY AGENCY@traceymattinglyagency
hair: REBEKAH FORECAST@rebekahforecast with THE WALL GROUP@thewallgroup
manicure: SONYA MEESH@sonyameesh with FORWARD ARTISTS@forwardartists
video: STUART SOX@sox_andthecity
shot on location at HENRIETTA HUDSON@henriettahudson