"Growing up, I didn’t fit in for a lot of reasons in my childhood," Taylor said. "I grew up in a very predominantly white area, and being a little Black girl, I already stood out so much to my peers and took that on a lot more than I feel like I realized."
That kind of pressure tends to make self-discovery less like a clean personal essay and more like a long, confusing group project nobody asked for.
Taylor said she can now look back at small moments from her younger years and recognize what she did not fully understand at the time.
"I always had these thoughts and I kind of laugh about it now," she said, recalling watching Pretty Little Liars. "I would watch, like, Shay Mitchell kissing a girl. I was like, ‘Wait, why is that hot?'"
How representation helped her understand herself
Taylor said those early feelings did not immediately translate into clarity. For a long time, she questioned whether her attraction to women was real or temporary.
She said seeing queer people represented around her eventually helped her recognize that what she was feeling was not strange.
Once she had examples she could point to, Taylor said she could begin telling herself, "OK, this is normal."
Before getting married, she said she still wondered whether her sexuality might be "just a phase." Taylor shares two children with her ex-husband, Clayton Wessell. The former couple divorced in 2025.
For Taylor, going public seems less like a dramatic reveal and more like finally letting her public life line up with her private one.
"I would just kind of underplay it for a long period of my life," she said. "I just feel like I’m finally in the era that I’m over not being truly myself and I’m over not showing every part of Layla to the world. I’m very proud now to be out."
What her castmates knew before the interview
Taylor also said her Secret Lives of Mormon Wives castmates did not know about her bisexuality before the podcast episode.
She explained that this was not the kind of news she wanted to send in a quick message to the group chat, which is fair, because some conversations deserve more than a notification bubble.
"I feel like me coming out, it’s not really a text," Taylor said. "I feel like I want to see them in person to let them know. So they might see this before and then I’ll talk to them in person the next time I see them. But yeah, for right now, no one from the group knows."
The comment points to one of the show’s central tensions: women balancing faith, image, relationships, motherhood and the internet’s endless appetite for personal revelations.
Who Layla Taylor is dating now
Taylor said she is currently dating a woman, though she chose not to share her name publicly.
The update comes after Taylor’s breakup from Mason McWhorter earlier this year. She said the woman she is now seeing has been patient as she moves through a new chapter in her life.
"[Women are] already more emotionally aware about certain things and very patient," Taylor said. "I feel like at least who I’m talking to right now, she’s just been very understanding and letting me take this at my own pace because it is just still foreign to me and it is so new. [It’s the] level of understanding and just being there for me."
For viewers who know Taylor through the polished chaos of reality television and MomTok, the interview felt like a more grounded coming-out story: not a branding pivot, not a stunt, just a person saying the quieter part of her life out loud.
