Animal rights advocate and Tiger King star Carole Baskin has come out as bisexual.
She recently opened up to the UK news site PinkNews about her sexuality, saying that “always considered” herself to be queer. “Even though I’ve never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband,” the 59-year-old said.
As the owner of the non-profit Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida, Baskin was thrust into the spotlight this year following her appearance in the Netflix documentary series Tiger King. The show followed the years-long rivalry between her and gay exotic animal breeder Joe Exotic, who was convicted in April on federal charges of animal abuse and murder for hire for attempting to kill Baskin through a hitman. Though much of the show’s controversy swirled around Exotic and his eccentricities, as well as the show’s misgendering of the transgender zookeeper Saff, Baskin also garnered headlines over the mysterious disappearance of her second husband.
Baskin explained to PinkNews that she always thought of herself as a “tomboy” growing up. But she first realized she was bisexual in the ‘80s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. At the time, she was engaged to a psychologist who worked with LGBTQ+ people, which led her to be immersed in the queer 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,” she explained. “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.”
When asked if she thought Joe Exotic was a “good representation of the queer community,” Baskin answered with a resounding no.
“I think he’s an embarrassment to the human community,” she told PinkNews. “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.”
Besides getting Big Cat Rescue through the COVID-19 pandemic, Baskin was recently a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. She got to do three cat-themed dances before she was eliminated. Check out her performance to “Eye of the Tiger” below.
