Elvira Says 'Horny Old Men' Ditched Her After She Came Out

When Cassandra Peterson, best known as Elvira, came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community last September, she knew the news would make waves. However, the horror icon wasn't prepared for how big a deal it ended up being, she said on a recent episode of the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast. "[It] flipped everybody out," she recalled. "Nobody was ready for that."

And while plenty of people celebrated her coming out, Peterson said not everyone was thrilled -- particularly, as she described them, the "horny old men" of her fandom.

"I knew that there were going to be some horny old men out there who were just not going to like the fact that they didn't have a chance with me anymore," Peterson joked. "And I hate to tell them they already didn't have a chance of me anyway."

According to Peterson, she lost about 11,000 followers across her social media when the news broke that she had been in a relationship with her partner, Teresa "T" Wierson, for the last 19 years.

"People just said 'Elvira, you lied to me. I don't respect you anymore. Goodbye'," she recalled. Truthfully, though, Peterson was less concerned with the response from her straight fans than she was about how her queer audience would handle the fact that she had kept her relationship a secret for almost 20 years.

"Honestly, I worried more about my gay fan base," she said. "Because I hope they embraced it, but I was feeling like: 'What if they think I'm a big fat hypocrite, and I was lying to them?'"

Luckily, Peterson didn't need to worry, as she was quickly embraced by fans who were thrilled she finally felt safe sharing her truth with the world. And those 11,000 followers who fled after she came out? They hardly held a candle to the 60,000 new ones Peterson says she ended up gaining that same day. Love truly is stronger than hate, even for the Mistress of the Dark.