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Dancing With the Stars 2020 contestant Carole Baskin has come out as bisexual, saying that she has always considered herself to be bisexual but had never come out publicly, according to Pink News.
Two weeks after she was eliminated on DWTS, Baskin did an interview with Pink news where she shared that she is bisexual.
“I have always considered myself to be bisexual,” Baskin told the outlet. “Even though I’ve never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband.”
She added that she always felt like she was a “tomboy” growing up and she felt as though she was “probably born into the wrong body” when growing up.
Carole Baskin Says She Discovered Her Bisexuality in the 1980s
Though she said she has always felt like she may be bisexual, Baskin said that she truly discovered it in the 1980s. At the time, Baskin was engaged to a psychologist who worked with patients in the LGBTQ 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 the people in that community then.”
She added that it was through that community that she discovered she is bisexual.
“It was during the ’80s that I discovered through dealing with the LGBT+ community that I [realized] I had just as equal feelings for women as I did for men,” Baskin told Pink News.
Baskin has been married twice, both times to men. Her first husband, Don Lewis, disappeared on August 18, 1997 and has never been found, though he was later declared dead.
Currently, Baskin is married to Howard Baskin. The two have been married for 16 years.
On the Big Cat Rescue website, the couple wrote an article titled Refuting Netflix Tiger King, laying out information the show left out about Joe Exotic’s trial and conviction. The article also painted Don Lewis as an abusive husband.
Some Tiger King viewers came away from the documentary believing that Baskin actually killed her first husband. Celebrities like O.J. Simpson, who was tried for the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman, in 1995, has said he believes Baskin killed her husband.
“One thing I will say. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that that lady’s husband is tiger sashimi right now,” Simpson said. “I’m just saying.”
Baskin Says She Doesn’t See People as ‘Being Different Genders’
During the interview with Pink News, Baskin said that she believes people are “all one.”
“As far as the way I feel about us,” she started. “I think we are all one and I just don’t see us as being different genders or different colors or anything.”
Baskin was then asked if she thought Joe Exotic, the person convicted in a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin, was a good representation to the LGBTQ+ community, to which she responded, “I think he’s an embarrassment to the human community. It’s not a matter of what your sexuality is, this man is just a deviant in the way he treats human life and animal life.”
She said she believes that Joe Exotic is a “malignant narcissist.”
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