Rosie O’Donnell offered an unusually personal explanation of the isolation she experienced in an early same-sex relationship, telling actress and comedian Amy Poehler that the end of that relationship left her grieving without the family support she wanted.
During an appearance on Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, O’Donnell discussed a former partner named Corby, whom she described as one of her first serious relationships.
“The thing that got me the most cuz I was with a woman who has recently passed away. Her name was Corby,” O’Donnell said. “She was a bunch of years older than me, probably like 10 or 12 years older than me.”
O’Donnell said they remained together for seven years.
When that relationship ended, she said, the breakup was intensely painful. But there was another problem: Although her relatives apparently knew about the relationship, O’Donnell felt she couldn’t openly discuss what she was experiencing.
“And when we broke up, the pain of it was so intense. And I couldn’t even tell my family,” she said.
Rosie O’Donnell: Being gay is no different than being left-handed or having blue eyes. People don’t choose it. Who would choose it? It’s not an easy life, but it’s a true life. pic.twitter.com/TndON3RUIB
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 11, 2026
According to O’Donnell, her family knew she had been living with Corby and knew when that arrangement ended, but nobody asked what had happened or how she was coping.
“My family didn’t want to hear about it,” O’Donnell said. “No one brought it up. Nobody said, ‘Are you okay?’”
She described that silence as “very, very isolating and lonely.”
It was in explaining that experience that O’Donnell used the word “doomed,” although her full remarks make clear she was describing the emotional isolation she felt rather than saying gay people are literally doomed.
“And it makes you feel that you’re sort of doomed by being gay, which is no different than being left-handed or having blue eyes,” O’Donnell told Poehler.
She then made her position on sexual orientation explicit.
“Like you people don’t choose it. Who would choose it?” she said. “It’s not an easy life, but it’s a true life if you know that that’s who you are, you know?”
The conversation later moved to O’Donnell’s family and her 13-year-old child, Clay, whom O’Donnell has described as nonbinary and refers to using they/them pronouns.
Poehler praised O’Donnell for correcting herself when necessary while talking about Clay.
“I know. And I love that you’re constantly correcting in real time like we all do,” Poehler said. “It’s really beautiful.”
The exchange combined two subjects that have become considerably more public during O’Donnell’s decades in entertainment: her experiences as a lesbian and her approach to her child’s gender identity.
O’Donnell’s comments about her earlier relationship also came from a different period of her life, when openly discussing same-sex relationships could carry different professional and family consequences than it does in many settings today.
Her larger point was straightforward. She regarded her relationship as real and the breakup as painful, yet believed the people closest to her did not treat that loss as something they were willing to acknowledge.
For O’Donnell, that silence produced the feeling she described as being “doomed.”
