Gay, Straight, Fluid: Was Prince’s Sexuality His Identity or Marketing?
In 2008, the New Yorker writer Claire Hoffman asked Prince what his thoughts on gay marriage were. She reported ‘Prince tapped his Bible and said, ‘God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like enough.’
This exchange caused one of the last great controversies in Prince’s career. The ‘homophobe’ label attached itself to him, accompanied by the bitter shock of many fans.
The question of how someone whose art once seemed to preach the very idea of ‘sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever’ could become so conservative is both fundamentally unanswerable and very simple. People change, and who knows why?
In short, Prince wasn’t gay. But was he straight? There’s no debating that his sexually ambiguous persona throughout his career had a concrete influence on queer people, and they on him.
So, what’s the real truth behind Prince’s sexual orientation, was there a time when it was in flux or was it just marketing at a time when gender bending popstars were all the rage?
In a 1997 interview on VH1, comedian Chris Rock posed a question to Prince no one had really asked before. At least not as bluntly. ‘The androgynous thing,’ he said. ‘Was that an act, or were you searching for your sexual identity?’ Prince responds, ‘I don’t suppose I was searching really, I think I was just — being who I was. Being the true Gemini that I am. And there’s, um, there’s many sides in that as well.’ He pauses before acknowledging. ‘And there was a little acting going on, too.’
While brief, it was perhaps the best — and most honest — explanation he’d given on the topic. His androgynous persona was real (he was “being who [he] was”); but it was also a performance, a calculated branding decision.
This paradox, of course, was not always understood by the American public. In the early stages of his career, people frequently conflated his artistic persona, gender identity, and sexual identity. The operating assumption in the early 1980s was that Prince was gay. In a 1983 interview with Musician magazine, Prince was asked do you think people think that you’re gay? Prince replies, ‘Well, there’s something about me, I know, that makes people think that. It must stem from the fact that I spent a lot of time around women. Maybe they see things I don’t. Men are really closed and cold together, I think. They don’t like to cry, and I think that’s wrong, because that’s not true’.
Prince, that is, was not comfortable with the expectations of American masculinity. It didn’t allow for vulnerability, intimacy, or open expression. People thought he was gay, not because of any evidence about his sex life, but because he sometimes wore makeup, heels, and flamboyant clothes; because he didn’t conduct himself as a ‘real man.’ For his fans, of course, his difference and willingness to transgress boundaries was a large part of his appeal. Mainstream America, however, was not quite as understanding.
When Prince and his band, the Revolution, opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981 at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, the artist’s difference was suddenly the target of a burst of intolerant rage. Prince hit the stage in his signature black bikini briefs and trench coat expecting a similar enthusiastic reaction to what he was getting in the smaller venues on their tour. It was quickly apparent, however, that the predominantly white, rock-oriented crowd wasn’t feeling it. The music wasn’t the main problem — although the artist’s new wave-inflected funk may not have made sense to the older crowd. It was Prince’s androgynous appearance.
The crowd began booing and shouting racist and homophobic epithets. Prince tried to adapt, injecting more rock into the performance. But before long, trash, food, and bottles were being hurled onto the stage. The artist remembers looking out at the audience and zeroing in on one man near the front with ‘hatred all over his face.’
After submitting to the abuse for several songs, Prince had had enough. Mick Jagger and others tried to persuade the artist to give it another try and he reluctantly came back for one more show, but again was met with intense hostility. This time he flew back to Minneapolis and refused to open for the Stones again.
Prince was wounded by the experience. But he also refused to be intimidated or reformed. A brilliant performer and marketer, he recognized that the crowd at the Coliseum represented the past; he — and his multi-racial, multi-gender band, the Revolution — represented the future.
Rather than retreat from controversy about his gender and sexuality, he embraced it. His 1981 album, appropriately titled Controversy, fully leaned into the rumors and speculation about his identity. The title track poses provocative questions (Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?) but answers none of them. Such blurry lines might incite animosity, as he learned at the Coliseum; but they could also be wielded to his advantage. On I Would Die 4 U the artist declares his androgyny as a badge of honor, singing: ‘I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you will never understand.’ In this way, his gender fluidity accentuates his mystique. It eludes our ability to control or comprehend, allowing him an almost trans-human identity.
Prince continued to play with gender expectations throughout the decade. Amidst the rise of misogynistic-prone heavy metal and hip hop in the late 1980s, Prince released the decidedly alternative album, Lovesexy. The cover shows the artist in the nude, petite, androgynous figure against white and lavender flowers — a contemporary take on Sandro Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The imagery could not have been more different than the hyper-masculine posturing of popular acts like N.W.A, Bobby Brown, or LL Cool J.
Perhaps his most controversial move of all was his infamous name transformation in 1993 to the iconic motif known as the Love Symbol. Once again, the decision had to do with the artist’s identity as well as branding.
On the one hand, the Love Symbol was symbolic. It was a fusion of both gender signs. Male and female are intertwined, fused by alchemy. This is how Prince chose to identify — not as a man in the traditional sense, but as an androgynous motif that signified beyond the strictures of gender labels or even language.
Yet it was also a more practical attempt to liberate himself from the contractual bondage of his record company, Warner Bros. They might own the brand, ‘Prince,’ but they couldn’t own him. They could have the name, he determined. He would move on under the new symbol.
The decision was widely criticized at the time. Yet once again, Prince’s branding genius proved salient and forward-thinking. The Love Symbol is now internationally recognized and affiliated with Prince. Perhaps no other artist in the history of music created such an iconic logo.
There were, of course, many other artists before Prince who played with the boundaries of gender, including Little Richard and David Bowie. The 1980s is a decade now heralded for its unprecedented mainstreaming of gender-bending in popular culture, from Michael Jackson to Annie Lennox to Boy George. But no artist subverted the gender binary in as many ways as Prince.
Following his death, hundreds of thousands of fans wrote tributes praising Prince for such trailblazing — for showing people, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, that it was okay to be different. It was okay to resist labels. It was okay to march to the beat of your own drum machine.