9 things to know about former 'Sex and the City' star Cynthia Nixon, who's running for governor of New York

Cynthia Nixon has confirmed long-standing rumors that she’s running for governor with a Twitter announcement.

“I love New York, and today I’m announcing my candidacy for governor,” the former Sex and the City star tweeted Monday, along with a link to make a campaign donation. In an accompanying video, the 51-year-old said, “New York is my home. I’ve never lived anywhere else. … I was given chances I just don’t see for most of New York’s kids today. Our leaders are letting us down.”

Nixon stands for ending mass incarceration, fixing a “broken” subway system, and improving health care, among other issues. “I’m running for Governor because we want our state back,” she wrote on her official website, Cynthia for New York. “We want our government to work again. We’re tired of the corruption and dysfunction in Albany, and we’re tired of politicians who campaign as Democrats but govern like Republicans.”

If Nixon wins, beating out two-term New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, she’ll be the first openly gay woman to hold the position, reports People. Here are other interesting facts about Nixon.

1) She’s a true activist. According to the Guardian, Nixon was political as far back as the early 2000s, when former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed huge budget cuts to the board of education, which affected the school her daughter attended. At a protest outside city hall, she was arrested, along with others, and was given a summons and released. Nixon has also fought for same-sex marriage, lobbying lawmakers long before the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. And years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, according to Today, she became an ambassador for the breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

2) She has three children. Nixon shares two kids with Danny Mozes, her schoolteacher ex-boyfriend of 15 years: Samantha, 22, and Charles, 15. The actress’s current wife, Christine Marinoni, gave birth to the couple’s first child, Max, who is 7, in February 2011. “Maybe I’m just lucky, but I feel like Christine is so amazing with our kids — because they’re our kids,” Nixon told The Advocate in 2010. “I feel like falling in love with her is part of being amazed at how she makes our family so much better.”

3) Her wife is the only woman she’s ever kissed. In 2017, Nixon told U.K. website Radio Times that before meeting Marinoni, “I had never dated a woman before or even kissed a woman or anything, and so when we started seeing each other, Christine kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for me to panic about what this would mean — to my career or to myself — as if somehow I just hadn’t noticed that she was a woman.” She added, “And then she met my mother, and that was when she stopped worrying about it.”

4) She’s a natural blonde. Her SATC character, Miranda Hobbes, was known for her bold red hair, but Nixon is a real blonde. “The recognition factor is so much higher when I’m a redhead, so when I’m a blonde I can pass under the radar a lot more easily,” Nixon told Marie Claire in 2010. Hair color isn’t the only look with which Nixon has experimented — in 2012, she shaved her head to play a cancer patient in the 2012 Broadway production of Wit.

5) She once called homosexuality a “choice,” upsetting her LGBTQ fans. In 2012, during an interview with the New York Times, Nixon said, “For me, [homosexuality] is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group, and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.”

After a backlash, Nixon released a statement to The Advocate, saying, “While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice; it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship. As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.”

6) She’s not a fan of President Trump. In a January op-ed for CNN, Nixon wrote, “President Trump‘s first year in office has been a dark year for many in America. For those of us who value equal rights for all, or economic and racial justice, or want to combat climate change, we’ve taken huge steps backwards.” Citing “malicious deportation policies and an ongoing mass incarceration crisis,” “a systematic effort to weaponize health care as a political tool,” and “crushing student loan debt,” Nixon asked readers to hold our leaders “accountable.”

7) She has said that Sex and the City set unrealistic beauty standards. During the interview with Radio Times, when asked if she believes the hit show pressured women to conform to a certain look, she said, “I totally do. … And I wish that women would understand — or understand more – that it’s a fictional TV show. No one should be expected to walk around looking like that in life — other than on the red carpet! But what I would say is that high heels are high heels — if you buy expensive ones, they’re OK, and if you buy cheap ones, you won’t last an hour in them.”

8) She’s already received some pushback. Since Cuomo backed New York’s Marriage Equality Law of 2011, which allowed gay New Yorkers to marry, he has lots of support from the gay community. Earlier this month, the New York Post reported that Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a gay Congress member, said in a statement about Nixon’s then-potential candidacy, “Many of us in the community, who have been fighting for equality for decades, are recommending she reconsider. I can say unequivocally that the LGBTQ community has not had a greater champion than Governor Cuomo. He has not only been on the right side of our issues but has delivered results that have changed the trajectory of our nation’s progress toward LGBTQ equality. Simply put, I owe my marriage to leaders like Andrew Cuomo.” The Post also reported that several gay leaders wouldn’t vote for Nixon over Cuomo.

9) She walked in multiple women’s marches. Nixon hit the streets of New York City during the January 2017 Women’s March and again in 2018. “I am not just afraid for my daughter’s future, I am afraid for us all,” she told Page Six in March 2017. “Being a female … I do feel added pressure. Because I feel like when you have a benevolent presence in the White House, it is one thing, and you take a lot of stuff for granted. But when you have Donald Trump in the White House, you have no choice but to step up.”

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