Tiger King star and owner of Big Cat Rescue Carole Baskin has revealed that she is bisexual in an interview with Pink News.
The former Dancing with the Stars contestant told the news outlet that she "could just as easily have a wife as a husband" and explained that she discovered her sexuality while engaged to a psychologist in the 1980s.
Baskin told Pink News: "I was engaged to a psychologist, and that was his entire field, dealing with the LGBT+ community.
"It was during the period when AIDS was just wreaking havoc around the world, and people were losing their loved ones, and so I became very close to people in that community then."
Watch Carole Baskin reveal that she is bisexual to Pink News:
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Baskin said that she has "always considered herself bisexual".
The owner of Big Cat Rescue even said that as she was growing up, she felt that she was "probably born into the wrong body” because she was such a "tomboy".
"I was always very male-oriented in the things I did… I never had any mothering instincts or anything, you know, I never played with dolls. And so I always thought that there was something off there, that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
"But it was during the '80s that I discovered that through dealing with the LGBT+ community that I [realized] I had just as equal feelings for women as I did for men.
"Even though I've never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband.
"As far as the way I feel about us, I think we are all one and I just don't see us as being different genders or different colors or anything."
Cast your mind back to Baskin's debut performance on Dancing with the Stars:
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When asked about her thoughts on Joe Exotic as a representation of the queer community, Baskin did not mince her words.
"I think he's an embarrassment to the human community," she told the news outlet.
"It's not a matter of what your sexuality is, this man is just a deviant in the way that he treats human life and animal life.
"I think he's a malignant narcissist, and that it's all about him. It doesn't have anything to do with any of the communities that he may associate himself with."
This comes after Baskin was recently eliminated from Dancing with the Stars after just two performances, and she told Pink News that she appeared on the show to help fund her rescue.
"When COVID-19 hit, we had to cancel tours because there's no way to take people around the property without them being all packed together… So that's over a million dollars of our income that we're having to find other ways to augment, which was part of going on Dancing with the Stars," she said.
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However, the stress of the pandemic was not the only thing affecting Baskin earlier in the year.
"We closed our gates on March 15, and then I think Tiger King came out on March 18," she said.
"So in the same week, we had COVID-19 hit and Tiger King portraying us as this God awful place that abused animals, and I mean, all of the crazy things they said about us.
"That made people call me up and say they were going to burn the place to the ground, they were going to turn the cats loose, not understanding that you can’t raise a cat in a cage and then just release it into the wild.
"That's not legal. And you don't want me doing it in your neighborhood, I'm sure."
She added: "My phone started ringing, and it rang every two minutes for three months straight, with people screaming at me how much they hated me."
While Exotic is now imprisoned, Baskin said that she still fears for her life as a result of her involvement with him.