While JoJo Siwa is only getting better, not everyone is along for the ride with her.
In January, the 17-year-old YouTube star and TV personality came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, proudly sporting a T-shirt that read "Best. Gay. Cousin. Ever." amid speculation about her sexuality. She has since gone public with her new girlfriend, Kylie.
While Siwa has proclaimed on her Instagram that she's "the happiest I have ever been," it hasn't all been easy for the teenager since revealing to her millions of young fans something she's been aware of for years.
"I've known since I was little," she confirmed in a new interview with People. "I have a lot that could have gone away because of my love life."
She came face to face with that reality after coming out when she mistakenly read comments online. "I never should have done that," she told the magazine. "I was thinking that all the comments were going to be nice and supportive, and they weren't."
"A lot of them," Siwa continued, "were, 'I'm never buying your merch again. My daughter's never watching you again.'" The backlash took a toll on the young star. As she recalled, "I couldn't sleep for three days."
And, while that's not to say the response has only been bad, Siwa's personal revelation has weeded out the haters.
"My thing is," she told People, "I don't want people to watch my videos or buy my merchandise if they aren't going to support not only me, but the LGBTQ community."
As for more specific labels, that's a work in progress for Siwa. "I still don't know what I am," she said. "It's like, I want to figure it out. And I have this joke. Her name is Kylie. And so I say that I'm Ky-sexual. But like, I don't know, bisexual, pansexual, queer, lesbian, gay, straight. I always just say gay because it just kind of covers it or queer because I think the keyword is cool."
"Technically I would say that I am pansexual," she said, "because that's how I have always been my whole life is just like, my human is my human."