Country singer Maren Morris marked LGBTQ Pride Month by publicly announcing her bisexuality, only a few months after finalizing her divorce with singer Ryan Hurd.
In an Instagram post on Monday, the 34-year-old star declared herself the “B in LGBTQ+.”
“Happy pride,” she wrote. “Happy to be the B in LGBTQ+.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Morris declared her leave from country music last year “over concerns surrounding its conservatism.” Additionally, she had a public disagreement with Brittany Kerr, wife of Jason Aldean, over transgender ideology.
“I’ve always been an asker of questions and a status-quo challenger just by being a woman. So it wasn’t really even a choice,” Morris told Los Angeles Times of her country genre exit.
“I didn’t think of myself as a political artist. I just wrote songs about real life through a lens of deep respect for my country heroes. But the further you get into the country music business, that’s when you start to see the cracks. And once you see it, you can’t un-see it.”
“Country music is a business, but it gets sold, particularly to young writers and artists who come up within it, as almost a god. It kind of feels like indoctrination. If you truly love this type of music, and you start to see problems arise, it needs to be criticized. Anything this popular should be scrutinized if we want to see progress,” she added.
Earlier this year, Morris stood by her decision to bring her toddler to a family-friendly drag show.
“We were doing a benefit at Bridgestone last year when they were doing the drag ban in Tennessee,” Morris said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “There were drag queens like, throughout, entertaining as well, and one actually danced with me when I was singing my song, ‘The Middle.’ And it was just amazing and fun.”
“My son loves watching me, like, sit in the makeup chair and just is, like, fascinated with the colors, and so it was just, like, completely harmless,” the singer continued. “But I think it’s just such an amazing expression of artistry, and so, I just think, like, normalizing it and making it seem like these are just people that love dressing up, too, is an amazing thing. It was an all-ages show so, it was, like, completely family-friendly.”
