Rainbow Network
Who’s That Girl?
Matt Newbury
August 16, 2004
Photo: Lynn Goldsmith
Once upon a time there were no gay role models (and many would argue that there still aren’t) so we would invent them from these women.
Time for a quick history lesson: The birth of motion pictures gave us celebrities -and where would gay men, the 3AM Girls and Heat magazine be without them? Films created a common experience and homosexuals would, of course, find their icons in the movies, just like everyone else.
Without doubt, the first celebrity to be famously considered a gay icon was Judy Garland. Gay men of the 1950s and 1960 would use the phrase “friend of Dorothy” taken from her role in the Wizard Of Oz as an undercover password to denote their sexuality. Her film and stage appearances electrified and unified gay audiences while her personal struggles with dugs and multiple husbands (at least one of whom was gay) gave her yet more tragic appeal. Even her death became part of gay-rights history! According to legend, the famous 1969 riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn broke out on the night of Garland’s funeral. The drag queens were indeed revolting.
In his 2000 biography of Garland, Get Happy, author Gerald Clarke sums up that appeal: “homosexuals of that closeted era identified with Judy because they, too, were the objects of demeaning jokes and casual contempt . . . and they derived comfort and inspiration from her ability to survive similar assaults. As many times as she fell down, Judy always managed to pull herself up – and they hoped that they would do the same.”
Bette Midler’s link to the gay community was more direct – she started her career performing in New York’s gay bath houses, earning her gay-icon immortality and the nickname “Bath House Betty.” Bizarrely, Barry Manilow was her piano player at the time while Midler managed to be funny, camp and entertaining – qualities that would have appealed to the gay community when they weren’t in a cubicle shagging.
Cher received her first gay nod during her television days with then-husband Sonny Bono, confidently cracking jokes while draped in outlandish Bob Mackie gowns that transformed her image from hippie to glamorous. Cher took gay men from the 60s to the 80s and still remains as glamorous and as outrageous today. A mistress of reinvention, she also manages to stay the same – a natural evolution, if you will.
And so to Madonna. In many ways she shares nearly all of the qualities of the role models before her. She’s had her share of tragedy, from the death of her mother to cancer at an early age and the majority of her film career.
“I’ve had so many lives. How many times I’ve died,” crooned the blond maestro and we can all relate to that.
She’s had the relationship break-downs, dabbles with insanity (“call me Ester, god damn it! Right, where’s my gun, I’m going hunting?”) and can be as bitchy as the best of us – we almost felt sorry for Kevin Costner in In Bed With Madonna. Almost. She’s overtly sexual, offends Christians and can be as camp and glamorous as pop princesses half her age. And as for Reinvention? Well that’s the name of her tour.
