Miley Cyrus made a joke about bringing JoJo Siwa “back out” of the closet amid the latter’s newfound relationship with Chris Hughes.
“Oh, my God, I haven’t been in here since sixth grade,” Cyrus, 32, said in a video message filmed inside a closet as she celebrated Pride Month.
“Enjoy coming out of the closet if this Pride is the time for you. It shouldn’t be a month — it should be a year, it should be infinite,” Cyrus continued in the video, footage of which circulated on social media on Sunday, June 8.
The “Easy Lover” singer concluded her message by referencing Siwa, 22. “I’m going back inside to get more pretzels and find JoJo Siwa and bring her back out,” she quipped.
Siwa recently went public with her relationship with Hughes, 32, after they met on the U.K. edition of Celebrity Big Brother in April. During her time on the reality show, Siwa said she discovered more about her sexual identity.
“I’ve always told myself I’m a lesbian, but … I think being here, I’ve realized, ‘Oh no, I’m not a lesbian. I’m queer,’” she said on the show. “I think that’s really cool. I’m switching letters.”
Siwa broke up with her then-partner Kath Ebbs after leaving the Big Brother house. The “Karma” singer and Hughes fueled speculation that they were involved romantically after developing a close relationship on the reality show.
On June 1, Hughes shared a selfie via Snapchat showing him and Siwa in bed together. The following day, Siwa confirmed that she and Hughes are dating after initially describing their relationship as “platonic.”
“It’s not platonic anymore, and it’s been a beautiful development, a beautiful connection, and I’m absolutely head over heels for him and he’s the same way,” Siwa, 22, said in an interview with The Guardian published on June 2.
“It’s a beautiful journey,” Siwa elaborated on her new relationship on the Friday, June 6, episode of the “Rosebud With Gyles Brandreth” podcast. “I don’t know how the universe [aligned] for Chris to come into my life.”
Recalling her strong bond with Hughes on Celebrity Big Brother, the Dance Moms alum said, “I wasn’t looking to fall for him. He wasn’t looking to fall for me. We just were having so much fun together.”
“We were having a laugh together. Whenever one of us was down. It was the other one of us that helped,” she added.
It wasn’t until after she left the Big Brother house and broke up with Ebbs that Siwa realized her feelings for Hughes may be more than just platonic.
After the reality show, Siwa said, “I knew all these realizations [about] my life … things that I wasn’t happy and things that I was being OK with that I should never have been OK with.”
Siwa said that “over a little bit of time, I realized that I started to feel something for Christopher that I never intended to, but I couldn’t not feel.”
