JoJo Siwa took to social media on Friday (July 29) to shut down accusations that she allegedly claimed to find “lesbian” to be a “dirty word.”
Dressed in a red, white and blue tie-dyed hoodie, the newly installed So You Think You Can Dance judge hopped on her TikTok account and directly addressed a commenter who had written, in part, “She called it a dirty word. She did nothing but insult us, my sexuality is not a dirty word.”
“OK, I’ve been going through my comments and I just want to make something super clear,” Siwa began. “I never said that ‘lesbian’ was a dirty word and I never, ever would say that it’s a dirty word because it is not. It is not a bad word, it is not a slur and it is especially not a word that I am ashamed of saying or ashamed of identifying as by any means.”
She continued: “Now, if you look at the comment that this is commented under if that makes sense, it says, ‘I’m sorry that people are trying to cancel you for not liking the sound of a word. And that’s exactly it. I don’t hate the word ‘lesbian.’ I just … whenever somebody talks to me about my sexuality, I just say that I’m gay. It’s not the word that flows off the tongue for me, if that makes sense.”
The backlash aimed at Siwa comes on the heels of the former Dance Moms star’s public feud with Candace Cameron Bure, whom she named as the “rudest celebrity [she’s] met” as part of a recent TikTok challenge. While the conservative Hallmark star tried to make things right in a one-on-one conversation, Siwa has since claimed that Bure “didn’t share all the details” of their private chat.
Watch Siwa explain her feelings about the word “lesbian” below.
