I don't believe in 'gender labels,' says Sting's daughter Eliot Sumner

The singer has opened up about her sexuality and said she does not identify with a particular gender
No labels: Eliot Sumner is dating Austrian model Lucie Von Alten
Jeffrey Boudreau
The Weekender

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Sting's daughter Eliot Sumner has spoken for the first time about her sexuality — and said she does not identify with a particular gender.

She reveals in an exclusive interview with ES magazine that she has been dating Austrian model Lucie Von Alten for two years.

Asked if she had come out to her friends and family, she said that she hadn’t because “no one had ever asked”.

“They knew already,” she added. “So I didn’t need to. I’ve never come out to anyone. My friends always knew and I always knew”.

Family affair: Sumner with her parents Trudie Styler and Sting in 2004 Carlo Allegri/Getty
Carlo Allegri/Getty Images

The singer, 25, is the third of Sting and Trudie Styler’s four children and is due to release her second album, Information, a darker, sharper follow-up to 2010’s I Blame Coco next month.

She said she did not believe in gender “labels” and preferred to dress down, shunning the glamour attached to some singers.

Asked whether she identified with a particular gender, she replied “no”, saying she defined herself simply as a “musician”. “I don’t believe in any specifications,” she said.

“I think forever I was trying to figure out maybe … what I am. But I don’t think anyone should feel pressured to have any kind of label or tag on them.

“We should treat everybody the same. Me, I don’t like to be put down to a specific thing. We’re all human beings.”

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Asked what had made her uncomfortable in the past, she said: “Sexuality, to the way I looked, to who I was, where I come from …’”

Next month she will also be unveiled as the face of a major international fashion brand — but cannot say which.

Some of the songs on Information are about Von Alten, with whom she shares a flat in Belgravia. On the track Species, she sings: “I’m not sure about species, I’m not sure about gender, I’m not sure about the breed.”

In her newer songs her voice has been compared with her father’s. She said: “That’s something that’s developed. I can’t really control what I sound like, that’s [come with] more practice. And the songs I’ve been writing have more of a lower vibe.”

Sumner went to the private Bryanston School in Dorset before moving to London to study at the Fine Arts College sixth form in Belsize Park, but never completed her studies.

Of her famous family, Sumner said: “I think I’ll always be in the shadow of my parents. But that’s OK. Everyone has a challenge. If I’m proud of the music I am making, that’s all I can ask for. If I put it out into the world, it’s not up to me any more.”

Information will be released on January 29 on Island Records.

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