JoJo Siwa’s sexuality has been treated as a public puzzle ever since she came out at 17. Her latest answer is both brief and more nuanced than the usual celebrity-label debate allows: she once identified as a lesbian, but that is not how she describes herself now.
The clarification came in a July 31 TikTok with Dancing With the Stars professional Ezra Sosa. While the pair were backstage at a recent DWTS Con, Sosa said he had thought Siwa “was lesbian, but is clearly not anymore.”
“She was,” Siwa replied.
Two words, and somehow still enough to require a full timeline.
How Siwa’s labels have changed since 2021
Siwa publicly came out in January 2021, initially avoiding a fixed label and also describing herself as pansexual. Later that year, she made Dancing With the Stars history by joining the show’s first same-sex competing partnership.
In 2022, she explained that “lesbian” had never felt like the most natural word for her, even when other people used it.
“I don’t hate the word ‘lesbian,’” Siwa said in a TikTok at the time. “Whenever someone talks to me about my sexuality, I just say that I’m gay.” She added that lesbian was “not the word that flows off the tongue for me.”
By 2025, Siwa was speaking more directly about the pressure she felt to adopt and retain that label. She told the Daily Mail that she had been “boxed” into calling herself a lesbian, with some of that pressure coming from people within the LGBTQIA community and from past partners.
“You just get put in this world where you feel like, because you now have said, ‘Oh, I’m a lesbian,’ you have to be a lesbian,” she said.
Siwa previously dated Kylie Prew, Avery Cyrus and Kath Ebbs.
Where queer, bisexual and pansexual fit
During Celebrity Big Brother U.K. in April 2025, while she was still dating Ebbs, Siwa said she had realized she was queer rather than lesbian. She later described queer as an umbrella term that allowed her to be herself without narrowing her identity to one category.
“The most beautiful term now is queer,” she told E! News in 2025. “Queer is an umbrella of, ‘Look, I’m just me.’”
She also emphasized that sexuality can include identities people are still learning how to describe, calling queerness “a lovely rainbow that has all different places.”
Her more recent comments show that queer is not necessarily the only term she accepts. In an April 7 interview with Us Weekly, Siwa said queer, bisexual and pansexual can all describe her. If required to choose one label, she said, “I would say I’m probably pansexual.”
That distinction matters. Dating a man does not automatically make a bisexual, pansexual or queer woman straight, just as her earlier relationships with women did not require one permanent label. Coverage that treats each partner as proof of a new orientation risks erasing the identities Siwa has repeatedly stated for herself.
How Chris Hughes entered the picture
Siwa met Chris Hughes on Celebrity Big Brother U.K. in 2025. Hughes, who is about 10 years older, recently marked one year since their first meeting by recalling his opening words to her: “You’re very colourful.”
Siwa replied that the year felt “like yesterday and 10 years ago.”
Their close bond developed on camera, but the timing remains emotionally complicated because Siwa entered the show in a relationship with Kath Ebbs. Siwa has said Hughes had “absolutely nothing to do with” that breakup.
Ebbs has offered a sharply different account. They told followers that Siwa ended their relationship at the show’s wrap party and described watching Siwa’s connection with Hughes develop as an “awful, horrific” experience, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Those accounts have not been reconciled publicly. What is clear is that Siwa and Hughes confirmed their romance on June 2, 2025. Siwa called it a “beautiful connection” and said they were “absolutely head over heels.”
As of August 4, 2026, the pair continue to present themselves publicly as a couple. Neither has announced an engagement or breakup.
Why her brief clarification carries weight
The attention around Siwa reflects a familiar problem for queer public figures: audiences often expect identity to remain easily categorized, even when the person involved says it is more fluid or expansive.
Siwa’s answer to Sosa did not deny her past. “She was” acknowledged that lesbian was once part of how she understood or presented herself, while leaving room for the words she uses now.
Her current position is not that labels are meaningless. It is that several labels, including queer, bisexual and pansexual, can describe her, and that pansexual may be the closest fit when she is pressed to select one.
For viewers who have followed Siwa since her teenage years, the larger story is less about which person she dates and more about her insistence on defining herself. Public understanding may move more slowly. Siwa, at least, appears comfortable refusing to wait for it.
