Carole Baskin comes out as bisexual "I could just as easily have a wife as a husband"
Tiger King star Carole Baskin has said she is bisexual.
The big-cat activist, who recently appeared in Dancing with the Stars, said she discovered her sexuality in the 1980s.
“I've always considered myself to be bisexual,” Baskin, 59, told Pink News.
“Even though I've never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband.
“I just see us as being all one don't see us as being different genders or colours or anything."
Baskin has been married three times to men. She has been the subject of fierce internet conspiracy theories after her second husband Don Lewis went missing.
Her rival Joe Exotic accused Baskin of killing her ex-husband and feeding him to tigers. Baskin has repeatedly and strenuously denied any involvement in her husband’s disappearance, and has never faced any charges.
She explained: "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.”
Baskin added that she was always a "tomboy" when growing up and that she felt she was "probably born into the wrong body".
"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.”
The eight-part Tiger King made something of an anti-hero of Joe Exotic, who is currently serving 22 years in prison on two counts of hiring someone to murder Baskin and multiple violations of animal welfare laws.
Exotic was shown in the Netflix series marrying two husbands, but Baskin believes he is not representative of the gay community.
"I think he’s an embarrassment to the human community”, she sneered. “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.”
Baskin married third husband Howard Baskin in 2004, who also featured in Tiger King, and they run Big Cat Rescue together in Florida.
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