Pam St Clement’s bisexual awakening as she makes Rivals cameo
Pam St Clement is a bisexual icon (Getty Images)
EastEnders icon Pam St Clement returned to screens recently in the latest season of Disney+ show Rivals.
The actress, best known for playing Pat Evans on BBC soap EastEnders in more than 2,300 episodes, only has a brief cameo, but it was definitely memorable. She got an eyeful of Declan O’Hara (played by Poldark hunk Aidan Turner) as he got caught in a hotel after a moment of passion with his wife.
As it turns out, Rivals showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins and producer Alexander Lamb had worked with St Clement on EastEnders and stayed in touch. Lamb recently told TechRadar: “For this little cameo park, we needed an actress. So we said, ‘What about Pam?'” And the rest is history!
Speaking of history, the actress’s return to the small screen got us thinking about her own.
In her 2015 memoir, The End of an Earring, St Clement revealed that she’d fallen for a woman while she was married to her husband during a 1975 tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Australia.
She wrote: “The distance allowed me an objective view of my marriage – especially after we landed in Sydney. It was a pretty gay city even then, a mecca of fun and outrageous alternativeness.
“And I fell, not for some bush-whacking hunk, but for a woman. It was a time of discovery and abandon, of excitement and freedom. I wanted to woo and be wooed and felt no guilt.
“That month in Sydney went all too quickly and we were soon saying our farewells at the airport with promises of reunions back in the UK. I nearly missed the plane, I was so bereft at leaving.”
‘It was a new experience, exciting and different in every way’
She went on to divorce husband Andrew Gordon in 1976, and St Clement had another relationship with a woman.
The soap star said: “I fell for an attractive woman who was intelligent, witty and fun to be with. Diana and I settled into a happy and stable relationship.
“Looking back, I wonder if I should have stayed on my own. I want to love and be loved but I am fiercely independent.
“But this was a relationship I couldn’t resist. It was a new experience, exciting and different in every way. We had our own professions but made a home together.
“Our life together was not destined to last.”
St Clements has also been a vocal campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights, having previously worked with Stonewall to fight against Section 28.
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