The world of JoJo Siwa, the child star who became a pop star who became a TV star, is even smaller than it appears onscreen.
Her homebase, Studio Siwa, is perched on an indiscreet corner in Burbank, California. Next door to a gun store, it’s a bare, black dance studio with a green room that smells like sweaty feet. Curious passersby can easily squint through the tinted windows to catch Siwa, at work in her unglamorous fishbowl.
Siwa holed up there recently with her dancers and team to prepare for a European tour. The other day, while she was scrolling through her phone to play the new track, “I’m Still Dancing,” a survivor’s anthem in the vein of Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing,” something creaked in the cavernous studio.
“We have a ghost,” she said, as her four backup dancers giggled politely. “Her name’s Veronica.”
Seconds later, Siwa was back to performing a song about her haters, wearing a homemade jersey bedazzled with her own name.
Siwa has teetered between niche fame and lucrative stardom for more than half her young life. As a child, she bore the brunt of coachzilla Abby Lee Miller’s rage on “Dance Moms” before abandoning reality TV for the orange pastures of Nickelodeon, presiding over an extremely successful merchandising empire. At 17, at the peak of her toy-selling earnings, she came out as queer in a TikTok set to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” She appeared on “The Masked Singer” and the endurance competition show “Special Forces.” Last year, at 21, she embarked on a slightly more grown-up phase of fame during which she described “gay pop” as a “new genre of music” and painted her face like a KISS Kewpie doll.
“It’s hard, because some stuff I look back at and I’m like, ‘JoJo, what were you doing?’” she said.
Siwa and those in her small, sparkly orbit swear that now she’s more herself than ever; happier, too. So, who is the new and improved JoJo Siwa she’s desperate for the world to know now — on tour, on TV, on TikTok?
“Here’s what I know about myself: I know that I’m 22. I know that I’m about 5-foot-8, 5-foot-9 on a good day. I know that I have a right foot and a left foot. I know that I have blue-green-hazel eyes. And I know my teeth are fake. And I know that my name is JoJo. Everything else is just a human life and is ever-changing. Everything else. And it’s beautiful,” she said.
An afternoon spent in Siwa’s company is full of rambling, unrealized observations about the person she is or wants to be. It is rare that, at 22, someone’s got their whole “thing” figured out, and she’s been a lot of things: A workhorse, a starlet, a role model, a self-proclaimed “bad girl,” a perma-kid, an anxious adult begging people to take her seriously.
The only thing consistent about Siwa is that she’s very good at making people mad.
Gay pop gets a pivot
Last year, she tried to drag her music into adulthood in what she envisioned as her own version of Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz” era. But rather than twerk on MTV or film a nude music video, Siwa took long pulls of Fireball onstage at Pride concerts and wore decapitated teddy bears on her head while singing about lesbian heartbreak. She made several goofily sweeping statements about “a new genre of music … called ‘gay pop’” and claimed that no other star of her generation had “made this dramatic of a change” artistically. She released an EP of new, slightly more adult music that even a polite review in Rolling Stone likened to an “identity crisis.”
“Everything makes you who you are tomorrow, all your experiences,” her mom reminded her, nearly quoting Siwa’s song “Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s Today,” a confusingly named relic from this bygone era.
Siwa agreed that she has little to regret, particularly since this period forced people to take her seriously: “I remember before I did that, I was looked at as a kid. And I completely broke that.”
Still, overall unhappy with the results of that rebrand, Siwa set out for this year’s reinvention. She’s traded spiky hair and face paint for sparkly jerseys and soft glittery eyeshadow — and she’s not gyrating onstage or yelling the c-word at her audience.
The new new JoJo is even more divisive, mostly because she started dating a man. She’s toned down her vocal advocacy for LGBTQ rights, alienating some queer fans in the process. And she released a poorly received cover of “Bette Davis Eyes” and an accompanying visual that earned “tradwife” comparisons.
Just months later, Siwa can hardly say the song’s full title without rolling her eyes.
“Trust me, I’m the biggest hater on that one now,” she said. “No one can out-hate ‘Bette Davis’ than me.”
Siwa covered the song, made popular by Kim Carnes in 1981, earlier this year in concert, and “people loved it,” she said. Then she recorded it, teasing its release with a clip in which she’s dressed in a curly blonde wig, pearls and floral crop top, a far cry from the sporty ensembles she wears on and offstage. When they weren’t bashing Siwa’s gritty vocals, critics focused on the marked departure in aesthetics, comparing the look to that of a “tradwife.”
“It was basically a Halloween costume,” she said of the so-called tradwife getup. “People really thought I was changing everything — like, damn, it was a good wig! I don’t know where ‘tradwife’ came from.”
But the song stayed on the tour setlist, because she won’t completely capitulate to the haters and because some people still like it. Siwa said she dreads it every night.
“Now when I sing ‘Bette Davis Eyes,’ it’s just like, ‘Here the fuck we go.’”
Rebooting in rhinestones
While Siwa was rehearsing, the machine behind JoJo Siwa™ was rhinestoning. Siwa’s mother, Jessalyn, and father, Tom, were painstakingly gluing the glittering stones on every inch of her tour costumes, down to her Nike Air Force 1s. They’re aided by a small team of assistants who double as dogsitters when Siwa’s poodle Clyde gets too riled up in the dance studio — he’s been known to nip the ankles of men.
After last year’s failed “bad girl” phase, Siwa “cleaned house,” Jessalyn said, paring back the number of members on Team JoJo. She also postponed a planned US tour weeks before it was set to start.
“I think it’s just been really good for her to just be able to do what she wants, how she wants it, and be who she wants to be, and not have all these people talking in her ear and feeling like she has to listen to be polite and try this and try that,” she said.
“I feel very light,” Siwa said. “I think I finally have the right mentality again.”
She credits that switch to her time on “Celebrity Big Brother.” It was in that weird playhouse mansion that she met her now-beau, Chris Hughes, an alumnus of “Love Island UK.” They struck up a friendship first, when he consoled her after castmate Mickey Rourke lobbed several homophobic insults at her. Rourke told Siwa that, after four days together in the “Big Brother” house, she “wouldn’t be gay anymore.” Hughes held her as she cried. Siwa announced they were dating earlier this summer.
Their relationship surprised fans, particularly because Siwa was in a relationship with nonbinary actor Kath Ebbs when she started filming “Big Brother.” On a podcast in September, Siwa said she felt like even her “own family turned a little bit” when she started dating Hughes.
“Now when I meet somebody that is very clearly a member of the queer community, I almost shell up really quick,” she said now. “I don’t know if they’re going to be kind or if they are going to be ruthless. I’ve had both experiences and I’m okay with both, but I’m just learning to protect myself.”
She’s also distanced herself from identifying as a lesbian. When she initially came out at 17, she identified as pansexual before eventually embracing the lesbian label; she adopted it because she felt pressure to do so, she’s said. On “Big Brother,” she said queer feels like the most comfortable descriptor. (Or, as she put it, “Fuck the L, I’m going to the Q!”)
“I will always make everyone around me know that they’re accepted for who they are,” she said. “The people who are criticizing me for saying that I’m moving away from the queer community — which literally is not possible for me to do — those people are not doing the same for me.”
But the fact that she’s dating a man doesn’t seem to be what’s disappointing fans — plenty of famous queer women have dated and married men. It’s that Siwa’s previously loud LGBTQ advocacy has quieted this year.
She’s been honored by LGBTQ organizations like GLSEN for her advocacy and was named West Hollywood’s “Next Gen Pride Icon.” Last summer, she was performing at Pride celebrations and singing about romantic relationships with women. Even earlier this year, she wore a (bedazzled, naturally) jacket to the GLAAD Awards that read “trans rights are human rights” and “protect trans kids.”
This June, Siwa pulled out of a planned performance at a Chicago Pride event due to “scheduling conflicts.” That same month, Siwa was the butt of a joke from Miley Cyrus, her idol, at WorldPride. In a video filmed in front of a closet, Cyrus said she was going to “find JoJo Siwa and bring her back out.”
Her new relationship was even cause for celebration among some conservative firebrands. Right-wing personality Benny Johnson celebrated Siwa’s “rebrand from a radical lesbian activist to a straight, trad-girlfriend” as a victory for the death of “woke.” At a Turning Point USA event this summer, conservative commentator Michael Knowles announced “JoJo Siwa is no longer a lesbian” to enormous cheers from his student audience: “Nature is healing!”
“I will fight for the queer community until it’s over,” Siwa said. “It’s my people.”
Then she got defensive.
“I think that people might be quick to forget — the way that I came out, the age that I came out. The next generation that saw me be okay and saw the world be okay and then all of a sudden the moms and dads of these kids were okay, because, yeah, ‘JoJo Siwa’s a good person’ — that changed so many lives.
“So what, I’m in love with a man?” she said. “That doesn’t discredit my past at all.”
Hate as a commodity
Siwa’s dancers took a break for lunch, leaving her alone in the studio to reflect on why she makes people so mad.
It’s a skill she inadvertently perfected as a child. She’s been shamed and humiliated on screen since she was 9. It’s a marvel she’s still subjecting herself to it now, as a consenting adult.
“People grew up watching me get bullied by my peers or get harsh critiques. Or they watched me get hated when I was younger on the internet,” she said. “In a weird way, people know how to hate me. People are conditioned because they’ve seen it.”
Siwa said she’s comfortable being disliked, that she’s unfazed by the torrent of comments on every post she’s ever made commenting on her talent, her relationship, her identity. She knows it’s a “fucking blast” to hate her, she said. She even wrote a song for her haters, “Raspy,” that doubles as a self-diss: “Don’t want the songs, but I’ll keep them comin’,” she sings.
But a career cannot be sustained on hate alone. Siwa clearly wants to win people over: In the choreography for “I’m Still Dancing,” her typically jubilant dancers form a mob of detractors that march toward her, stiff and unsmiling, unconvinced by her pep. One by one, she converts them, and by the final chorus, they dance in unison, with Siwa in the lead.
As a performer, Siwa is a relentless force of positivity, but offstage, she’s less convincing. Her setlist is split between bubblegum pop she made as a tween plus songs recorded during an era she’s all but disowned. She swears she doesn’t let the hate ruffle her but also she recently kicked a fan out of a concert for wearing a sweatshirt that appeared to make fun of her hairline.
She dreams of becoming “a little more carefree, a little less worried about others’ opinions.”
How’s that going? “Not doing a great job at living up to it, though,” she said.
By the end of the interview, our star had mere minutes to finish a bowl from Tender Greens before it’s time to rehearse again. Siwa sat on the stinky green room couch, eating her bowl in silence, scrolling through TikTok and willing her boyfriend to text her back from across the Atlantic Ocean. She danced late into the night, after the gun store locked up, until hers was one of the only lights on down her stretch of Magnolia Boulevard.