Michelle Visage reflects on her open marriage with author David Case as she reveals the brutal way her ex ended their four-year relationship

Michelle Visage has opened up about her marriage to author David Case as she revealed the brutal way her ex ended their four-year relationship.

The former Strictly Come Dancing star, 55, who has two daughters with David, said their unconventional open marriage arrangements ‘makes them stronger’.

She confessed about the origins with Kiss Jumbo podcast in which she thought she had found “the one” when she was just 21, but ended up breaking up over the phone.

And after a ‘summer of debauchery’ she met her life partner David in Central Park and married in 1997.

Michelle, who is from New Jersey, said, “He works drag cons with me, and he comes to all these things with me, and listen, my husband is pretty good looking, so the gay men have let it be known that he it’s quite good to look at.’

Cush added, “I imagine they don’t mind David showing up.”

She joked: “So he’s beaming with pride. He’s got that thing downstairs. I think you call it compression.

“We live openly so he would come away knowing that I was so happy and whatever it is that I do, and I don’t just talk sexually, whatever it is, I don’t know if I have any pity in me to be very excited when he does something with another woman, but I know it exists and he is one hundred percent.’

Cush said, “It’s like being given the opportunity to have the space to feel like you never have to hide a piece of yourself.”

Michelle, who has a flat in Belsize Park, London, for when she visits Britain, finished: ‘And I don’t, and neither does he. Sometimes it hurts, but that makes us stronger.

‘The complete transparency of the way we live our lives. Completely and sometimes it is not even necessary.

‘It just means we don’t do anything. It’s just the ability to do it. […] And that’s what works for us.’

Before David, Michele was engaged to a “beautiful” man from Antigua and admitted she thought they would have had “beautiful babies.”

She told the host: “He was Antiguan and Filipino, but I was too young. I was 21. We would have had beautiful babies.

“You know, you learn as time goes on and I realized he was a nice man. I just wasn’t ready at 21. I had to live my life.

“So when I met David I was 26. I got married at 27. Still young.

“But this is how long ago. We’ve been together for 28 years now and I met him in New York City in Central Park and I just got out of a relationship that was like the love of my life and he destroyed me.

“He broke up with me on the phone after four and a half years.”

Michelle has won three Primetime Emmy Awards as producer of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

She also applauded the impact the show has on the lives of children today, revealing that she believes she “wouldn’t have struggled like she did.”

Michelle, a celebrity judge on the show, said: ‘I don’t want to waste my time on this planet with the darkness, do I? There can be no darkness in the presence of light, and we must continue with that.

“So that’s what Drag Race is to me, if I had that growing up I don’t think I would have wrestled the way I did and again, I’m not a queer man, I’m a cis, mostly heteronormative being human, and I struggled with who I was, with my identity, with my body. Oh my God, I still do that.

‘But I’m now at the point where I’m learning all about self-love through therapy.

‘I can’t do it alone. It takes a lot of work.

‘You must be willing to let the old self die in order for the new self to be reborn. And that is a difficult matter.

“So to have something like Drag Race on TV for these kids, it’s not just about these kids dressing up in pretty colors.

“It’s about determination, and grit, and heart, and tenacity, and vision, and love, and kindness, and how your words impact these kids.

“You hear these stories and a lot of it has to do with, and I’m a parent, again of a child on the spectrum, in the community, you name it.

‘This child has been through it all and I think it happens very often that parents do not understand their child and so unconsciously, parents, I don’t say consciously, it comes back to you and you don’t know what to do with it.

“So instead of understanding or grieving the loss of the children you thought you were going to have and loving them for who they are right now, everything will change and I think parents will either blame themselves or thinking there is something wrong with the child still blaming themselves.”

Michelle was also a contestant on British reality shows Celebrity Big Brother in 2015.

Michelle had a successful run on the show, entering the house on the first day and finishing in fifth place.

The Drag Race judge, who stepped into the spotlight in the United States in the late 1980s as a member of the girl band Seduction, became popular with the general public in the 2010s as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

But after crossing the pond to Britain in 2019, Visage, who joked she was “a gay British man” in a past life, found a new fan base by taking part in Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother UK and live in the house for a while. 30 days.

Four years later, she became an instant favorite when she took to the Strictly stage with Giovanni Pernice in 2019 after making a celebrity cameo in The Only Way is Essex, where she surprised her old friend Bobby Norris.

At the launch of Drag Race UK, she came into contact with Graham Norton and Alan Carr and became an honorary Briton in the eyes of the public.

Michelle, who quit her work as a presenter for CBS radio to become a house judge on Drag Race, went on to win over more fans on Radio 2.

Origin With Cush Jumbo is available wherever you get your podcasts.