Carole Baskin, 59, of Tiger King fame and recent star on Dancing With the Stars has come out publicly as bisexual. In a PinkNews interview, the big cat rights activist and owner of Big Cat Rescue shared that “I’ve always considered myself to be bisexual. Even though I have never had a wife I could have just as easily had a wife as a husband as far as the way I feel about us. I think that we are all one. I just don’t see us as being different genders and different colors in anything.”

Baskin disclosed that she knew she was bisexual in the 1980s after dating a psychologist who worked with LGBTQ folks.

“It was during the period when AIDS was just wreaking havoc around the world, and people were losing their loved ones,” she told PinkNews, “and so I became very close to people in that community then.”

But the Big Cat Rescue owner said she had always felt different even as a child and was “probably born into the wrong body” because she was such a “tomboy”.

“I was always very male-oriented in the things I did,” she said. “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.”

Speaking of her Tiger King arch-nemesis, Joe Exotic, who is an openly gay man, Baskin said, “It’s not a matter of what your sexual preferences are, this man is just deviant in how he treats human life and animal life and that it’s all about him, that it doesn’t have anything to with any of the communities that he associates himself with. He’s an embarrassment to the human community.”

The decades-long feud and hatred between Baskin and Joe Exotic is well-documented in the Netflix film Tiger King. Baskin has accused Joe Exotic for mistreating many of the wild animals in his care. Joe Exotic has hardly hid his dislike for Baskin, making various videos questioning the mysterious death of her first husband, mimicking her death in several videos he made and even hiring a hitman. Exotic has since been incarcerated and is serving 22 years in prison for attempting to kill Baskin as well as various animal abuse charges. In a ruling in June, a federal judge gave Baskin control of Joe Exotic’s zoo and she was awarded a $1M trademark dispute.

Baskin was recently ousted on September 29th from Dancing With the Stars along with partner Pasha Pashkov.