LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out |
by Rawley Grau |
Who Is k.d. lang?
With her boyish looks and gender-bending style, combined with her continual hedging about her personal life, it was hard not to assume that Canadian country singer k.d. lang was a lesbian. So when Advocate feature writer Brendan Lemon finally coaxed her into coming out in print, no one was especially surprised by the revelation. The bigger news was that at last a major figure in the entertainment world was talking about being gay. In the early 1990s, this was still a rare event. Mainstream pop stars had come out before: in 1976, Elton John told Rolling Stone he was bisexual, and in 1982, crooner Johnny Mathis came out in Us Magazine. But the flamboyant British rocker was widely perceived as attempting to obscure his homosexuality, and Mathis was no longer a performer who commanded attention. But in June 1992, with two Grammys, an acclaimed crossover album, and a hit single, 30-year-old k.d. lang was among the most prominent women in music. Other semi-closeted entertainers, notably, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres, and even Elton John, followed lang's lead over the next several years. Breaking through boundaries was nothing new for Kathryn Dawn Lang. "I thrived on being different," lang recently told The Advocate, speaking of her childhood in Consort, Alberta, a prairie town with a population of 650. "In small towns eccentricities are considered part of the norm." Her parents, in fact, were very supportive not only of her musical ambitions, but also of such tomboy inclinations as motorcycles, marksmanship, and butch drag (she wore hiking boots with her senior prom dress). As an adolescent, lang was comfortable with her sexual orientation and, at 17, came out to her mother, a schoolteacher. (Her father had abandoned the family five years earlier.) After a couple of years of studying music, lang moved to Edmonton in 1981, the year she turned 20. She had grown up loving rock 'n' roll, but now she began listening seriously to country-western music, especially the songs of Patsy Cline. And she had an epiphany. "It just went click," she later said. "I saw myself, how I was going to dress, how I was going to move. I saw the kind of singing I was going to do." So obsessed did she become with Cline that she started saying she was the reincarnation of the 1950s star (even though lang was almost 2 years old when Cline died in a plane crash). In 1983, with the help of manager Larry Wanagas, lang formed a band called the reclines, named in tribute to her idol, and started performing her unusual brand of country music as "k.d. lang"lowercase, in emulation of poet e.e. cummings. Lang's offbeat stage persona played with gender as it mixed country-western style with performance art: a spiky haircut, no makeup, a full skirt embroidered with plastic cowboys and Indians, and cutoff cowboy boots. But lang's pure mezzo voice won over not only alternative-music fans, but also traditional country audiences. Word spread quickly, and soon she was getting bookings throughout Canada. Over the next two years, lang cut her first album, won a Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy), and made her debut in New York. And she became the first country singer to sign with Warner Brothers' Sire Records, whose other artists included Madonna and the Talking Heads. By the late 1980s, lang had established her country-music credentials. She had collaborated with venerated producer Owen Bradley; she had recorded with giants Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, and Brenda Lee; and she had won two Grammys in 1988 for her pairing with Roy Orbison on his song "Crying," and in 1989 for her album Absolute Torch and Twang. Meanwhile, she had garnered a string of Canadian honors. But still, lang's androgynous image didn't sit well with the homophobic Nashville establishment. Year after year, she was shut out of the Country Music Association Awards, and country radio stations across the United States avoided playing her. The rift widened in 1990, when lang, a committed vegetarian, made a televised public service announcement urging people not to eat meat. Nor were the good ol' boys pleased when she starred as a half-Eskimo lesbian in the movie Salmon-berries. With 1992's Ingnue, a cycle of sultry torch songs, the break with country music was virtually complete. So when the Advocate asked for an interview soon after the album's release, lang, who for years had declined to talk to gay media, was ready. To lang's own surprise, there were few immediate repercussions after the interview. Ingnue soon went platinum, and the single "Constant Craving" rose to the top of the pop charts, winning lang her third Grammy, for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. In subsequent work, lang has seemed more comfortable with herselfno more hedging pronouns. In 1996, she became involved with rock singer Leisha Hailey. Although the relationship has recently ended, it inspired lang's 2000 release, Invincible Summer, an album suffused with sunny love. But whether coming out has impeded her career in the long run is harder to tell. Possibly, she is now more likely to be viewed as a "niche" performer, appealing primarily to other lesbians. In any case, none of the four albums she has released since 1992, has come close to the success of Ingnue. Rawley Grau has won four Vice Versa Awards for his writing on gay and lesbian culture. He can be reached in care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at GayNestor@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 11, No. 6, June 1, 2001. |