Dancing with Luther

As a mainstream male R&B artist, Vandross plays to the market, which means feminine pronouns and love duets with female vocalists. But in 1994 he recorded the Roberta Flack standard, "Killing Me Softly," without changing the masculine pronouns. "I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd. I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud."

He sang it ravishingly, and the message could not have been clearer: there was more to him than he had told us, and he would not be pigeonholed. It was a gutsy move, because virile male vocalists are not supposed to sing heart-wrenchingly about other men.

Now he has done it again. In "Dance With My Father," the intimate title song of his fifteenth and possibly final album, Vandross movingly evokes childhood memories of his late father.

"I’d love love love to dance with my father again" is not a sentiment we are used to hearing from mainstream male singers. Once again he breaks a taboo concerning masculinity, which says that boys don’t dance with their daddies. And this time, he didn’t just record the song; he made it the title track.

"And I knew for sure I was loved." The new song is all the more poignant because its author has been in intensive care since suffering a massive stroke on April 16, four days before his 52nd birthday. His friends and family are not saying much, but they assured his fans that the tracheotomy that became necessary was done so as not to damage his vocal cords.

It feels presumptuous to demand career-risking revelations from a public figure when so many ordinary folk still avoid the challenge. For example, little notice is taken of the incongruity in the organizers of Black Lesbian and Gay Pride Day shortening the name in their printed materials to the closeted "Black Pride" and having a Down Low party. If Luther is a creature of his time, he has enriched it extravagantly with what he knows best. It seems oddly fitting that someone driven to conceal his own desires has provided musical accompaniment to so many other people’s lovemaking.

Too often we use our penchant for classifying as a way of keeping things safely segregated. Author Richard Rodriguez, in a recent commencement speech, mentioned how far his shelf in the Borders bookstore is from those of his own favorite authors. He is stuck in the back under Latin American while James Baldwin is across the room under African American and someone else is under Literature, each relegated to a different arbitrary category. He said that at night after the clerk is gone they all get together under the espresso machine.

No art or music belongs exclusively to a particular group; that is not how human beings work. Legally or not, the borders have long since been crossed, in art as in love. An extraordinary voice strikes a chord in us and we are seduced, whether we are men or women, straight or gay—and regardless of how love moves the man behind the voice.

It is hard to accept how fragile virtuosity is, how quickly it can be taken away. Luther’s impeccable phrasing, his crisp articulation and silken tone, his sinuous melismas, his sheer sensuality and eloquence—all of that may be gone forever because of a stroke in the night. Yet here is his voice beside me in the dark, as if his head rested on the next pillow. Like familiar ghosts in a darkened bookstore, he will continue to inhabit many strangers’ rooms, his caressing tenor bearing us up and finding just the right words and the poise to deliver them when we are at a loss.

As I write this, the news says Luther is slowly emerging from his coma. That’s it, guy, come on back. I won’t care if you are fat, aging, and cannot sing a note. I want the next dance.