Melissa Etheridge had long had a very strong relationship with the LGBTQ community and planned to announce to the world that she is a lesbian after the release of her 1992 breakthrough album, Never Enough. For years, she’d had what she felt was an “unspoken” bond with her most loyal fans, even though she was not publicly out at the time.
“When my first album came out it was that unspoken thing,” Etheridge, 64, told Joel Madden on his Artist Friendly podcast on Wednesday (April 29) about the wink-wink understanding in the late 1980s. “I would go do a show and my first two rows would be women losing their minds, right? And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. You know. What’s this?’”
Then, when she dropped Never Enough around the time grunge was starting to take over mainstream rock in the early ’90s, the singer figured, “‘hey, I can wear flannel, I’ve been wearing flannel for a long time,’” thinking that it was her time to reveal her true self to the wider world. Then, she was the subject of a cover story for England’s legendary New Musical Express magazine and was shocked at the final product.
“I was on the cover and he [the writer] changed every pronoun that I used,” she recalled. “He changed it to my ‘boyfriend’ and I was like … and it horrified me. Because there was an underground … the gay community was really strong, but it was underground, right? And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna think that I did this!’”
Worried that she would offend or turn off her core audience, Etheridge said she planned to right the wrong done to her by going on the then red-hot Arsenio Hall Show to officially come out. Before that could happen, though, she worked on the Bill Clinton/Al Gore presidential campaign in 1992, where she was surrounded by a lot of “really important, strong, powerful gay leaders.” She said she saw them putting “everything on the line” to speak out about the AIDS crisis and gay rights and when they started to invite her to events and include her in their work she realized she had to speak her truth.
“I finally came out at the inauguration,” she said of her public announcement at the Jan. 20, 1993, Triangle Ball, the first-ever gay/lesbian presidential inaugural ball. “I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be truthful to myself and then speak about it,” she said.
Etheridge released her seventeenth studio album, Rise, in March. She will play a show at the Factory in St. Louis on Friday (May 1) as part of her tour in support of the LP.
Watch Etheridge on Artist Friendly below.
