Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (34 page)

So Elen was always a huge inspiration for me. And my involvement with trying to bring an end to AIDS began when Gregory told me he had AIDS in 1985 (after he was in the “She Bop” video). Then he just got sicker and sicker, and he was in the hospital and he couldn’t swallow, so the doctors had to puncture his stomach with a bag thing
so they could feed him. It was so messed up. Since there wasn’t much information about AIDS at the time, I didn’t know if he would get sicker if I visited, but I couldn’t stay away. And then when I came back from seeing him, all my friends and everybody were so freaked out and frightened of me, like I was carrying something. I remember one time I cut myself and I was bleeding when I was around Gregory and thought, “Oh my God, I’m bleeding, what about germs? Is he going to get something from me? Am I going to get something from him?” It was just bad.

It was heartbreaking. I just wanted to have our life the way we had it. The whole thing was awful. I saw firsthand what AIDS does to people, so I wanted people to know that they gotta use a condom, they have to have safe sex. Is it worth your whole life? For me, getting involved was the right thing to do. There were other great singers who were loved by the gay community who did not come out to help, and I decided I wasn’t going to be like that. I do remember, though, that Liza Minnelli, Yoko Ono, Kate Pierson, Jean Paul Gaultier, and tons of others spoke out.

So I did things like the Gay Games and the Pride Parade, and my activism was reflected in my music, like everything else in my life. I played the first AIDS benefit in 1985 in Los Angeles. And when Rock Hudson died later that year, Elizabeth Taylor spoke out, and I was like, “Okay, that’s good, because we all need to speak out.” And MAC, the cosmetics company, helped in the beginning, too. We were losing a whole generation of great designers, hair people, and makeup artists.

In 2002, when actor Harvey Fierstein was getting a Human Rights Award, he asked if I would sing “True Colors” at his award dinner, and of course I said yes. I brought my violin player at the time, who was touring with me for the
Shine
CD—her name was Denny and she was new. I asked her to play “True Colors” with no accompaniment. I
thought in this echo-y old bank the sound of a violin and a voice over might be really beautiful. So I sang for Harvey and then he accepted his award and Harvey, being an advocate for the LGBT community, spoke with eloquence and reason. That night it really hit me that I needed to do something, too. I had been working and singing in the clubs promoting
Shine
and seeing everyone in the audience with no shirts on, and high on cat tranquilizers and ecstasy and speedball, just having unsafe everything. The drugs made them lose their inhibitions.

And as Harvey spoke of new infections among young gay men and the rise in deaths from AIDS-related complications, he said that happy people don’t self-destruct. There was a new expression in the late nineties and early 2000s: “barebacking”—not using a condom when you have sex. They thought you couldn’t die anymore, because people were living with AIDS. But as I said, people were dying from “old AIDS,” because the drug cocktails were so harsh.

So I thought, “Why don’t we make a pride T-shirt and use the proceeds to help fight AIDS?” So on the T-shirt, I put a picture of me from the Cher tour holding the rainbow flag with the words “pride” and “respect.” Because if you respect yourself and your partner, then you won’t put them or yourself in danger. All the proceeds went to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). During the Cher tour, I would wrap myself with the rainbow flag at concerts and tell the story of how when I was growing up, my mother always said that no matter what we did, we’d always be her kids. We were lucky that way. On Cher’s tour, everything was timed for the visuals she had, so I only had a certain amount of time to talk between songs. That would drive me out of my mind (you know me).

That’s also the time when I heard of the Stay Close campaign through Carmen Cacciatore from FlyLife, a company that does press and promotion in the dance world and gay clubs. Carmen connected
me to PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), who came up with the campaign. I was on the PFLAG fire-engine float for the Gay Pride Parade in the summer of 2001—I had on a headdress and my sister was also on the float, dressed as a fireman. Elen wanted to wear a T-shirt that said “Butch” on it and we looked everywhere but couldn’t find one. Finally I said, “Elen, you’re dressed as a fireman—people are going to know.” My mother was also on the float with a little sun hat, waving. It was the first time that we had done Pride together as a family.

In 2002 I was also in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, and I sat in a champagne glass. We were sponsored by a fantastic gay bar called the Abbey. I sang all my dance songs over and over and over.

So that’s why I did the T-shirt. We created it and sold it at the Prides, and the money went to gay nonprofits. I thought that maybe if we promoted gay pride and gay respect, we could put the message out that we’re not trash. The thing about being gay that my sister told me is that you’re made to feel dirty, like you’re having dirty sex, not regular sex. So there’s self-hatred and shame. But an inclusive society is much stronger than an exclusive society. If you keep cutting yourself off at the knees, you’re never gonna stand strong. You can’t just weed out people because they’re gay. You never know who it is who’s going to have the brilliant idea to cure cancer or fix the economy. How ridiculous are we going to get here?

At the time, I was touring for the
Body Acoustic
CD, and I stood onstage and I said, “Listen, you can ask lawmakers to do whatever you want, but basically, I don’t think they’re in it for us. We’re in it for us. We’re the people that really change things.”

So I decided maybe there was a way to inspire people without exactly telling them what to do, and instead just bring everyone together. I was inspired by doing PFLAG’s Stay Close campaign with Elen and
by my meeting with Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard. So we started to think about doing a “True Colors” tour.

Matthew was the University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998. He was picked up at a bar by homophobic kids and was beaten and killed. The night he was killed, we didn’t just lose Matthew; three lives were absolutely ruined—Matthew’s and those of the two men that killed him. And why? Because if you raise your kid with fear and hatred, that’s what wins in the end, and it’s a lose-lose situation. I have a kid, and sometimes he gets bullied, like a lot of kids, and I wrote this song for him called “Above the Clouds.” The message of the song was something that Pat Birch told me once. She is a wonderful choreographer that I met when I went on a show called
Friday Night Live.
(They never put me on
Saturday Night Live,
for one reason or another.) She said that when she worked with Martha Graham, Martha told her something like, “When you walk with your head above the crowd, you can see far, but then you are also a target. You stand out.” I always remember that when I want to do something different and I get grief for it.

Jeff Beck wrote the piece of music for “Above the Clouds,” and I wrote the song over it. Jeff had been working in a little studio that was in the basement of the Sunset Marquis with keyboardist/writer/producer Jed Lieber. As soon as I heard the music, the lyrics came so fast I almost couldn’t write them down quick enough. My friend Kevin was there with me too and if I stopped, he’d say, “Just keep going, shut up and write it as it is.” The chorus is what I tell anyone who’s going through something like being picked on for being different. “There’s a place where the sun breaks through / And the wind bites cold and hard / Stings my ears and tears my eye / When the day starts to shout out loud / Stand tall / And glide / When you’re all alone in the crowd / Don’t fall / Don’t hide / When you walk above the clouds / When you walk above the clouds.”

The thing is, when I was made fun of in high school, it was hurtful. I felt totally like an outsider. Although everyone is different, for me the outside started to feel otherworldly—more thoughtful. And after a while I didn’t give a hoot what anyone thought about me, just what
I
thought about me. In that space I could educate myself. I walked around a little crazy sometimes. You’d be surprised how afraid people get if you look a little crazy. Maybe I was mad at some of my schoolmates, but I wanted to experience a bigger world rather than the tiny-minded one that laughed at me because I was so different. Was I weird as a kid? Hell yeah. But I wanted to grow and change into what I wanted to be, not what I was told I was suited for by someone with no imagination, especially because all I had was imagination. That’s how I lived. And I got through by imagining living the life of an artist. Hey, Walter Mitty had nothing on me. What can I tell ya?

All I want to convey to anyone who is suffering while they’re young is that sometimes you get a reprieve when you’re older. Maybe it’s just your perception that changes, but somehow it eases up, because life ebbs and flows. When you’re ebbing, maybe you’re strengthening your perspective on the world. And when you’re flowing, maybe you can use everything to create, to write, to sing, act, and eventually stand taller and see farther. I guess it’s up to the individual if they decide to rise to the occasion. For me, being part of the fray might have made my vision a little shallow. So I don’t regret my experience.

When I performed that song in a live show, I would go out into the audience and stand on the arms of the seats. I stood on the wrong end of one of those folding chairs once or twice and fell. After that I stood on the arms of the chairs. They were much more stable. And after a while I learned to move side to side and use my legs for balance. I moved my body and arms while I was singing as if I was surfing
above the crowd. I felt that had a nice effect to it with the spotlight on me in the dark.

I’ll never forget in 2005, when I was presented by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil-rights organization, with their highest honor, the National Equality Award, for my advocacy for equality for the community. When I accepted the award I decided to sing “True Colors” because I’m not a speechmaker. Afterward, I went backstage and there was a woman just sitting and staring. And she looked at me with her big eyes and roundish face, and it was Judy Shepard. We locked eyes, and Judy started crying, and we hugged for a good moment. When we were done hugging I said, “You look like you could use a drink. Hey, you got any vodka here?”

Like I said, it had been so profound to hear her speak about the son she had been robbed of. We started talking and what we eventually did was take the Matthew Shepard Foundation’s purple “Erase Hate” bracelets and put them on special cards that shared information about Matthew and the foundation, with a special message from me. Matthew had said he wanted to get into politics, and in the end, through his mother, he did.

I’ve always been a strong and engaged supporter of LGBT equality, and of course I always knew that the community was not equal, but I didn’t know the full extent of how bad it was until I heard some of the hard-core facts. By 2006, Lisa and I started working closely with the HRC and we listened to stories of how gay couples’ lives were impacted by still being denied the opportunity to marry. In fact, my sister raised her partner’s two sons with her before anyone was open about doing that. They had no rights. We heard how people can still be fired in thirty-eight states for being LGBT, how hate crimes continue to take place at an alarming rate, and how these crimes aren’t covered by hate-crime laws.

So when it came time to do my own tour, I decided it would be nice to bring everybody together. If the tour was going to be the “True Colors” tour, then damn, let’s make a real rainbow. Let’s include everyone—straight, gay, transgender, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, young, and old. I remembered when music was mixed like that when I was a kid. I kept thinking, “When I have my own tour, I’ll mix it up, too.” I have a friend, Iffath, a brilliant doctor who delivered my son. She’s Muslim. As part of her religion, she gives a portion of her salary every year to charity. So I thought, “That’s not a bad idea. Let’s have some fun, do some good, and raise some money for charity, too.”

The “True Colors” tour raised money for the Human Rights Campaign, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, PFLAG, and CenterLink. We never made a profit from the tour, but we did raise a lot of money and awareness for those nonprofits. And I think we changed some perceptions about the community by talking about what was going on. You see, the only thing that the LGBT community wanted and still wants is to be full-fledged citizens, with the same rights as any straight American. They pay the same taxes but they don’t have the same rights.

In the 2007 “True Colors” tour we showed a short HRC film in between setting up performers. We also had postcards at every show in support of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act for people to send to their senators and congressmen. If they felt strong enough about it they could use the postcard to urge that hate-crimes protection be extended to the LGBT community (it wasn’t then). And we would mail them. That year we toured sixteen cities and collected over fifty thousand postcards.

We didn’t have a lot of money for the tour. My partners were me, my manager, and my agent. We had to put up money for production and stuff, but we didn’t have squat. I’m not rich (people think I’m loaded, but I’m not—I didn’t do the Cyndi dolls and clothing line
when I maybe should have). My manager isn’t rich because if I’m not rich, then she’s not either, right? Poor bastard. So we had to think of things that looked visually good for cheap—which is what I feel like I’m always doing, by the seat of my pants.

So my agent Jonny Podell said, why don’t we make the stage look like the Delano, the Miami hotel that has these sheer white curtains that float when the wind blows? It’s very sensual and pretty and picks up the light well. I thought it was a really good idea but I wondered how we could keep the sheets away from the musicians. What if they wafted in their faces?