Portia de Rossi opened up recently about when she came out as a lesbian and how nervous she was to do it. After dating Ellen DeGeneres for only a month, she knew that the 2005 Golden Globe Awards was where she would take her first steps in public as a gay woman, and she was extremely nervous about it.

“Ellen and I had been together for a month, and I was very, very nervous going to that, because I knew I was going to meet up with her after the show. And that there was press,” she said in an interview with her “Arrested Development” costars. “That was the first time we stepped out together as a couple, but for me, it was the first time I stepped out as a gay woman, really.”

The Australian actress says that when she was younger, she rejected the idea of being a lesbian because there was no one for her to take guidance from.

“I just didn’t want to be a lesbian,” she told Amanda de Cadenet earlier this year. “I’d never met one for a start, and I just thought they were strange and that they hated men and they were very serious, and I had these ridiculous images in my head and there were no out celebrities or politicians or anybody that I could look to and go, ‘Oh, I could be like that’…. I didn’t like people thinking of me as a sexual being, and I was just terrified that people would know that I was gay.”

Now, however, de Rossi has been with Ellen DeGeneres for nine years; the two married in 2008 but moved in together after just a couple of weeks of dating.

“When you feel it, you just know it,” DeGeneres said.

Image: Hulu