MUMBAI: JoJo Siwa is a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community.
In a new interview for 4D With Demi Lovato, the 18-year-old YouTuber spoke about her sexual awakenings.
“I’ve been figuring out my ‘gay awakenings’ recently,” she said. “I think I realized that my very first gay awakening was Jenna Dewan’s performance on Lip Sync Battle. I think that was one of them.”
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Siwa also looked back at Demi Lovato’s 2015 music video for their hit “Cool for the Summer.”
“Do you remember your dancer?” the Nickelodeon star asked the 28-year-old singer. “Her name is Jojo Gomez and you did ‘Cool for the Summer’ together…I remember seeing that and just being a little too interested.”
Lovato then shared what the song meant to them. “When I did ‘Cool for the Summer,’ that song for me was actually my way of sharing with the world without confirming that I was bisexual. Because like I said, I didn’t come out until 2017,” they said. “But ‘Cool for the Summer’ was like 2014, 2015. So, like, that to me, it was my way of saying, ‘I’m not ready to come out but…'”
Siwa came out in January, and introduced the world to her girlfriend Kylie Prew, 18, a few weeks later in February.
“The only thing that held me back from telling the world right away was my girlfriend’s family and my girlfriend because I wanted to make sure that, like, she was ready,” she said. “You always know. I always knew with me, but I always said I’m not going to do anything with it or be like, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m gay, but I’m not in love with a girl yet. But I’m gay and I know that.’ I was always just like, ‘I’ll wait until I actually have a girlfriend or I have a girl that I’m in love with and then I’ll do something with it.’ And then that happened.”
Siwa, who Prew met on a cruise ship, went on to recall their first encounter. “I knew right once I saw her like, ‘Woah, she’s really, really pretty. I really like her,'” the “D.R.E.A.M” artist remembered. “But I was just thinking like, ‘Oh, like a friend’…As we became best friends, I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s that.'”
Then, over Christmas break, Prew came to visit Siwa and her family in Orlando. “In that time, I couldn’t avoid my feelings,” she continued. “The tension was, like, you could cut it with a knife. It was insane.”
When Prew asked Siwa if she had a crush on anyone, the social media star said she did but didn’t say on who. “She says that right then she knew it was her and she had had a crush on me,” Siwa said. “But I was like, ‘I can’t tell her because she’s my best friend.’ And why I didn’t want to tell her is because I didn’t want to lose her friendship.”
But as Prew told Siwa, “‘If that was to ruin our friendship, I wouldn’t be a good friend.'”
“If you are secretly feeling something for your best friend or somebody close to you, and you tell them and it makes something else go away, they’re not a true best friend,” Siwa said. “It shouldn’t affect anything. You’re allowed to have a crush on anybody you want to have a crush on. It’s up to them if they do something with it.”
Prew ended up telling Siwa she had a crush on her, and Siwa then identified Prew as her crush. And the romance appears to be going strong today, as the couple celebrated their six-month anniversary last week, with Siwa calling it “the best 6 months ever.”
“Everything will end like it’s supposed to,” she told listeners. “If someone exits your life because of something that you told them, you can’t hide for forever. It’s better to just say it now. It’s better to say it. And you’ll also know when the time is right. And when the time is right, don’t chicken out, just do it.”
