Cyndi Lauper’s Farewell Tour Has Throwback Thursday Remembering Her Allyship

Cyndi Lauper's Farewell Tour Has Us Remembering Her Allyship

She is getting in shape for a short tour that will run this Fall. She has a new documentary Let the Canary Sing that just landed on Paramount+. She is one of the LGBTQ+'s most enduring and endearing allies, and she's 70. SEVENTY! She is Cyndi Lauper, and she just wants all of us to have fun!

Back in the mid-eighties, she was a force to be reckoned with, though MTV and record companies had a hard time pigeonholing her, which is something they really like to do with artists. As she said on her best-selling album at the time, "She's so unusual!" Sometimes too unusual for some. And she often didn't get the recognition she should have alongside other pop luminaries such as Madonna and, well, Madonna, whose debut album came out the same year. As reported by Amanda Hess in a recent interview in the NYTimes:

 “It was like apples and oranges,” Lauper told me. Or as she put it in Newsweek in 1985: “She’s just doing her thing. My thing happens to be different.” It was a shame, Lauper said: “I would have liked to have a friend.”

But her "thing" resonated quickly and she's been an 80's icon, a flashback powerhouse, and a tireless and headstrong proponent of the gay community and especially LGBTQ+ youth for decades. Which might have held her back a bit, but only at first. As she puts it, “I know that I probably lost business because I talked about AIDS a lot...I ought to stand up like any good Italian and stick up for my family, you know?” Her 1986 hit "True Colors" was inspired by a friend's death from AIDS.

 

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In 2008 she founded True Colors United, a foundation to support homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Yer boy Hank here saw her True Colors tour in suburban Detroit that summer with B-52's, Tegan and Sarah, and others, and, wow, I still get shivers and maybe a tear in my eye remembering the sheer power of this tiny woman's voice and message. Especially when she appeared on stage before the lights ever went down or any of the acts had played a note, to invite all the folks on the wet lawn of Auburn Hills to come down to the pavilion seats and fill in those which hadn't been sold. "No seriously, pick up yer sandwiches, yer baskets, yer blankets, and come down. Come on. No, yeah, come down here. I asked security and they said it was fine!" I'll never forget it; she was a consummate host and friend to that audience.

She won the 1985 Grammy for Best New Artist for that debut album, with hits like "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," "Time After Time," and "All Through the Night" securing her place for decades. And she's always had a place in our queer hearts. Her songs sometimes had playful nods and winks to gay life and sex positivity. Her subtle ode to female masturbation, "She Bop" (yes, that's what it's actually about!) opens with the lines "Well see him every night in tight blue jeans/In the pages of a Blueboy magazine." And at the time, only us gays knew that Blueboy magazine was a twink-centric gay porn mag!

One of my personal favorite moments of Lauper's work with the gay community was her appearance in the dramatic fifth-season climax of the US Queer As Folk. She appears as herself, singing her 2002 hit "Shine" off the same-titled album, at the fictional Babylon club when a bomb explodes. She gets to not only show her singing talents but her acting talents as well. (The extended mix video is below, sans bomb!)

Speaking of acting talents, she has quite the list of screen and stage credits, from the goofy film Vibes to The Simpsons to her cameo in The Goonies and as Cousin Ira's ex-wife in the series Mad About You. On Broadway, she appeared in a reprisal of The Threepenny Opera, and oh yeah, she's the first woman to solo win the Tony Award for Best Score as the songwriter and lyricist for the multi-Tony Award-winning Kinky Boots. If there's a Gay EGOT just give it to her already!

 

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Ms Lauper, thank you for your music and your commitment and support to the LGBTQ+ community for the past 4 decades. I know I'll be seeing her (for the third time!) at the Chicago appearance. Tickets for her upcoming shows go on general sale Friday the 7th, but pre-sales are up now. Info in that IG post above.

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