JoJo Siwa says she felt like the LGBTQ+ community turned its back on her when she entered a relationship with her boyfriend, Chris Hughes.

Siwa was a guest on the podcast Reign with Josh Smith, where she talked about her experience dating a man and changing her identity from “lesbian” to “queer.” The “Karma” singer had previously identified as a lesbian when she went on Celebrity Big Brother UK. There, she met television host Chris Hughes and started a relationship with him.

“I think that’s the thing, I’ve always told myself I’m a lesbian, and I think being here, I’ve realized: ‘Oh, I’m not a lesbian, I’m queer.’ And I think that’s really cool,” she said. “I’m switching the letters. Fuck the ‘L,’ I’m going to the ‘Q!'”

While some people reacted to her remarks with biphobia, others felt hurt about Siwa’s “fuck the ‘L'” comment, especially as it came during Lesbian Visibility Week. At the same time, many people in the queer community wrote defenses of Siwa and her sexuality and called out the biphobia against her.

On the podcast, Smith said that as “an outsider looking in,” he was shocked at the “amount of hate” Siwa got after entering her relationship with Hughes.

“It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s hard because it feels like my own family turned a little bit,” Siwa responded. “And I think we are the LGBTQIA+ family, not the LG community, and it’s a beautiful rainbow. And the number one saying of the queer community is, ‘Love is love.’ And that goes both ways.”

Siwa said that when she started dating Hughes, she felt like she now gets “to be an example of somebody who is in the queer community that is in a heterosexual relationship.”

“And I think that’s beautiful, because it just shows once again, love is love,” she said, adding, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that just because you’re in a heterosexual relationship, that doesn’t discredit my past. You now what I mean?”

According to a 2024 Gallup survey, more than half of LGBTQ+ Americans identify as bisexual, compared to 21 percent who identify as gay and 15 percent who identify as lesbian.

On the podcast, Siwa also said she bonded with queer singer Fletcher, who announced she was in a relationship with a man around the same time as her and also experienced some backlash.

“She and I have a very similar story at a very similar time, and I saw people doing the same thing to her,” Siwa said. “And her and I have kind of been able to talk and be there for each other and be like, ‘Dude, this is crazy.’ And she’s like, ‘I get you, you get me.’ Like, what’s happening? Like this is from inside our own house.”

As a cultural remedy, Siwa encouraged people to listen to Michael Jackson’s 1988 song, “Man in the Mirror.” “And if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change,” she said, quoting the lyrics. “Because anybody who’s judging anybody else for any sort of love is just… just take a second, take a breath.”

When asked about biseuxal erasure, Siwa says that “older people in the community” need to realize that when they criticize her relationships, they are actually hurting “people who are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years younger” than her.

She proposed hypothetical situations about two different 22-year-old girls – one who falls in love with a boy for the first time and one who falls in love with a girl for the first time – and says that they will think “you can’t change your mind, you can’t fall in love.”

Additionally, Siwa said that now, when she meets a queer person, her “guard comes up” and she worries that they are judging her. “That has never happened before with any group of people before,” she said, before clarifying she used to be afraid of teenagers as child.

Siwa specifically cited “women-loving-women couples” flipping her off, rolling their eyes at her, laughing at her, and otherwise bullying her in public. “That to me, has made me be so aware of how brutal hate can be and how brutal bullying can be from outside the community, and from withinside the community,” she said.