JoJo Siwa has opened up about coming out to the public at 17.
The Karma singer said while she initially thought the internet’s reaction to the news in 2021 was “great,” she soon came to realise there was a lot more below the surface.
”I was like, ‘oh my God, I got 90,000 comments, I’ve never had this’,” she said on the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast.
“I read the comments and it was like the cast of Grey’s Anatomy, and I love Grey’s Anatomy, so I was, like, s–tting bricks, and Ellen. Like, I’d never had any contact with her before… crazy, crazy people.”
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“Then I scrolled past about 200 comments and the other 89,800 remaining were awful, horrific,” she told podcast host Alex Cooper.
She recalled some of the comments left on her post – “I’m never letting my kids watch you again”, “I’m throwing away all of our bows today”, “Ugh, another one down the drain”, just to name a few.
Siwa said she went to her close friends Chrishell Stause and G-Flip for advice, quickly coming to realise that if people weren’t happy with her sexual orientation, “that’s their problem, not mine.”
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Siwa came out in 2021 when she posted a picture of her and her then-girlfriend to Instagram.
It wasn’t just public backlash the former Dance Moms star had to deal with. At the time, she was still signed with Nickelodeon and shared that the president of the company asked her, “What are we going to do?”
The company was concerned about their relationship with retailers stocking the iconic JoJo Bow, and asked the singer to get on a call with them so she could “reassure them I wasn’t going crazy.”
Siwa individually called each retailer and shared that they were all stoked for her, but she added that it was “psychotic” she even had to do that.
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Although she still receives constant backlash on the internet, Siwa shared that her experience coming out was one of the worst.
“t was really really tough, I didn’t understand it,” she said.
“I was just like, ‘Why, why take the time to comment that?’ It’s scary, the world is still a scary, mean, unaccepting place.”
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