Actress Amber Heard recalled her struggle to come out as bisexual to her religious parents during a South by Southwest panel called “Making Change On and Off the Screen” on Saturday.

“I’m from Austin, Texas. My dad is ‘out of central casting’ Texan. Big barrel hat, handlebar moustache, loves his guns, good Southern man. And I was raised in a religious home. Naturally, being an outspoken, militant feminist, lesbian, atheist, vegetarian. I remember when I told them about my relationship, that I was in love with this woman. I remember at the beginning of that it was just tears. It was tears,’ Heard says.

“They didn’t know how to process it because we hadn’t built the infrastructure for acceptance and tolerance. For them, it was being thrown into a binary system of processing it: negative or positive,” she continued.

Heard publicly came out in 2010 at GLAAD’s 25th anniversary event. She explained that her parents finally supported her sexuality after a few years.

“I was getting an award and I asked my parents to drive out to Dallas. And I look up and I see them sitting front and center, my dad with his cowboy hat, and here I am getting this ‘gay’ award,” Heard says. “I was giving a speech and I had written something and I just looked at them and I said “Here’s everything. I don’t need a speech, this is the speech right there: My parents, in five years, look at the journey.”‘

Heard has been involved in high-profile relationships with both men and women. She dated photographer Tasya van Ree from 2008-2012. She began dating Johnny Depp in 2011 and the couple married in 2015. Heard filed for divorce from Depp in 2016. She also dated Elon Musk from 2016-2018.