25-year-old singer-songwriter Alex G has known about her bisexuality since she was 13, but due to her “weird religious background” decided to “hide it away.” “I thought that it was dirty and wrong and disgusting,” she shared in a moving YouTube video yesterday for National Coming Out Day. Her family never talked about sexuality, she remembers, so she just kept wishing and hoping that she’d “get over it.” But, of course, she couldn’t. She kept having crushes on female celebrities, for example, and eventually this brought her to about two years ago when she had to start facing an element of herself she always feared was sinful. She journaled, she cried in therapy, wrote a lot of songs — yannow ,the usual.

At the start of 2017, she had a breakthrough after watching Evan Rachel Wood speak for the HRC in an online video. “Seeing Evan Rachel Wood talk was the first time I had seen myself in someone else who claimed bisexual as their identity,” she remembers. “And I was like, whoa, I guess it’s like, okay to say that I’m bisexual? That makes sense to me. This makes sense for who I am.”

Alex wants to embrace and promote the label of “bisexual” specifically, in order to combat bisexual invisibility. “In the LGBTQ community there’s not a lot of people coming out saying ‘I am bisexual,'” she declared. “And I wanted to do that because it really has been helpful for me to see other people out there with influence talking about their sexual orientation in a way that made sense to me.”

With over 1.5 million subscribers, her coming out as bisexual will make Alex G one of the top ten most popular LGBTQ women YouTubers. She launched her channel in 2010, playing covers including some especially popular covers of “Roar” and “Thrift Shop,” and quickly gained a massive following. She released her first EP, “Found,” in 2012, and her debut album, “Growing Up,” in 2014, which reached #24 on the iTunes Pop Chart. Her concept EP “Share Your Story,” released this year, featured five songs based on personal stories fans shared with her.

Here, watch this perfect cover of “Younger Now” with (DREAMer!) Gustavo Guerrero that she did last month:

Welcome to the team, Alex!

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