And though Louisiana-bred Tilley was coming to terms with the fact that she was attracted to both men and women (“It would be like, ‘Oh I have a girl crush,'” she noted in a 2023 Instagram Q&A, “but isn’t that just a crush on a woman?”), she still feared her new romance would be met with a thorny reception.
“Most of my followers are conservative, and it’s going to be shocking to them that this person that they viewed as a ‘role model’ is now dating a woman,” she explained on Make It Out. “Like, it’s gonna be a weird backlash.”
So she and Kiyoko struck up a compromise they could both cheers to.
“I made a promise,” she explained. “I was like, ‘I never want you to feel hidden’ so it will always be that it’s private in the terms of it’s not on social media, but if we were out and someone came up and said, ‘Oh my gosh, I love your podcast,’ I would be like, ‘Oh, this is my girlfriend, Hayley.'”
