“It was hard for me at first. It was hard because I was repeating him saying he was gay until it sounded right in my head.”
Lele Pons has revealed how she first found out about her father’s sexuality when she was a young girl.
On the latest episode of her YouTube docuseries “The Secret Life of Lele Pons” — which chronicles her life with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette syndrome, and other mental health conditions — the 23-year-old internet star recalled the moment she first learned her father, Luis, is gay when she walked in on him in bed with another man.
Lele Pons Talks Life with OCD and Tourettes, Overcoming Shame (Exclusive)
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“When I really, really found out he was gay was when I came to his room and I saw him actually, like, sleeping with a man,” Lele began. “And I was, like, 10 years old, and that for me was, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. Like, I saw… my dad.'”
“That was very traumatizing because I didn’t have to see that so vividly,” she continued. “But still that’s why we’re so close, so close because I’ve seen everything. He’s seen everything!”
Lele also pointed out that her dad once found her in a similar situation.
“That happened to me too — I think he came in one time, to me,” she quipped. “So, we owe each other, okay? We’re even.”
Though the Latin pop singer noted that she felt “kind of proud” learning her dad is gay, she struggled to understand what was happening at the time — not only because she was a child, but because she was a child with OCD.
“It was hard for me at first,” Lele recalled. “It was hard because I was repeating him saying he was gay until it sounded right in my head.”
“So what happened was that I openly said he was gay … in my Catholic school,” she continued. “Impulsivity is a huge part of OCD. And when I found that my dad was gay, I said it during a presentation in my class. And everybody was like, ‘This has nothing to do with what’s going on.'”
The YouTube star said her teacher, who she described as “very Catholic,” confronted her after class.
“She was like, ‘Come here. I need to talk to you,'” Lele explained. “Everybody, after I told them my dad was gay, they were like [raising their hands] ‘My aunt is a lesbian…'”
“When my dad told me he was gay, it was a surprise, but I didn’t judge him,” Lele later added. “I tried so hard to understand him and eventually I did. I was like, ‘Okay, you’re gay. I want to understand how you feel and what made you decide to marry my mom, what made you decide to tell me now? I just want to understand everything.'”
Lele, who got her start on Vine back in 2013, recently opened up to TooFab about her docuseries, explaining why now is the right time to share her mental health conditions with the world.
“It was when I realized that I wasn’t really ashamed anymore,” she told us. “And it wasn’t a negative thing to have, you know, I always thought it was just like, ‘Oh my God, what are they going to say if I have this.’ But I think it was when I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed to have [OCD.] And when I started meeting other kids that had it and their stories and how inspired they were. So I was just saying, ‘How many people can I inspire if I show that I have OCD?'”
“It’s an accumulation of a lot of things,” she continued. “Throughout the years, people that I told that I had OCD, they didn’t even care … and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’ And there’s other people that actually didn’t even know what OCD was. It’s so hard to educate because it’s so difficult, right? So everything was accumulating in that sense.”
Check out our full interview with Lele Pons in the video, above!
New episodes of “The Secret Life of Lele Pons,” a five-part docuseries, will drop every Tuesday on YouTube.
