I wouldn’t have been so direct about this last year, because I’m a coward, but now that he’s dead (and you can’t be sued by a dead person), I’ll just say it: Luther Vandross was gay. Or, as The New York Times put it in their obituary, “While in high school, Mr. Vandross developed an affinity for the legendary Motown label’s all-female acts, and for the gospel-soul sounds of artists like Aretha Franklin and Cissy Houston.” Or, as Ebony put it, “A lifelong bachelor, he is survived by his mother.”
The reason to say this, to out a dead man, is that there remains a certain conspiracy of silence, all the more unnecessary after his death, to keep Luther non-gay, and it’s objectionale (yes, I said it — objectionable! — and I’ll say it again if I have to).
Not all the posthumous press has been oblique. Jason King’s loving tribute in The Village Voice offers this: “Though he never came out as gay, bisexual, or even straight, you had to be wearing blinders — as many of his fans, particularly female, must have been — to overlook his queerness. The sequined Liberace suits were a clue, as were the highly publicized bitch fights he waged on tour with Anita Baker and En Vogue. The dead giveaway for me was his admission that his high school grades plummeted because he was in anguish over Diana Ross leaving the Supremes.”
Craig Seymour, author of Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross, was asked The Big Question (everything with Luther was Big, don’t y’know) in an interview with The Sacramento Bee: “He put information out there for people to read what was likely the truth. … Luther never came out and said that he was gay. But at the same time, he wasn’t hiding things.”
The question remains unanswered, though. Why was Luther, and why is the media, so coy? Luther was coy, we can assume, because he was older, and of a generation not so comfortable as ours with being openly gay. He was also coy because he wanted to sell records, and while the entertainment-industrial complex has known that closeted gayness is marketing gold since King Tut first dabbed on some blue eyeshadow and sang “Don’t Cry For Me, Egyptina,” open gayness remains largely a handicap (or at least a perceived handicap) in selling love songs to the masses.
As to why the media’s so quiet about Luther’s sexuality, some of it has to do with the gentleman’s agreement the press has with the entertainment industry (i.e. with itself) to keep mum about the homosexuality of celebrities who haven’t made a point of coming out. This silence has held, however, even after death, which is when it typically breaks, largely because of race.
The history of the idea of black male sexuality, and how it’s been deformed by a white America bent on maintaining racial privilege and on projecting its sexual insecurities, is not a pretty one. And the sad result, now, is that Black America, if I can generalize — and if I couldn’t, there wouldn’t be much left to my existence — is still more uncomfortable with black male homosexuality than white America is (not that white America is any great shakes). Not only that, but the predominantly white mainstream media never wanted to discuss Luther’s sexuality because it felt, with some justice perhaps, that it should defer to the black media in the representation of someone, like Luther, who never fully made the passage from black American popular culture into mainstream American popular culture.
It would have been nice if Luther could have resolved all this for us by simple coming out, but I can’t find it in me to blame him too much. As I’ve said before, and will say again, artists get moral and political allowances the rest of us don’t get. Their art is their get-out-of-jail-free card. “Luther’s only politics,” wrote Jason King, “were music and love: he lived for the love of music and believed resolutely in the power of music to heal by affirming love. In that sense, Luther was an ethicist who taught any of us who would listen as much about love as did James Baldwin or Marlon Riggs or Marianne Williamson any other seer for whom Love with a capital L is the ultimate act.”
