‘What are we gonna do about the gay thing?’ asked an Island Records executive at a meeting with Melissa Etheridge.
The awkward moment came as Island prepared to release Etheridge’s 1988 self-titled debut album, as the trailblazing rocker tells Ryan J. Downey in a free-speech discussion for FIRE and SPIN.
Etheridge started her career singing “heterosexual music” in Kansas bars, she explains, before broadening her repertoire in lesbian bars – but the was still not “overtly lesbian” when the label picked her up. “It was self-censorship,” she says.
So when the Island exec raised the “gay thing”, Etheridge and the label came to a compromise. “I was like, ‘What do you mean?'” says Etheridge. “‘I’m not gonna pretend I’m something else. I’m not going to go find a guy to take pictures with, and pretend he’s my boyfriend. I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna be me.'”
The Island response, Etheridge says, was: “As long as you don’t flag wave.”
Despite no shortage of gossip and rumors, Leavenworth’s rockstar did not come out publicly until 1993: the year she released her fourth album, Yes I Am, with its anthemic hit single, “Come To My Window“:
I don’t care what they think.
I don’t care what they say.
What do they know about this love, anyway?
Etheridge also talks about her defense of Emimem’s right to trash-talk gay people at a time when many in the LGBTQ community were calling for a boycott of the rapper.
“I said, ‘No, no: it works both ways,'” Etheridge says. “We want the freedom to be ourselves, to say what we like, even though it offends some other people. I gotta let him be who he is and say what he likes, even though it offends me, because that’s freedom.”
Enjoy the conversation!