By Stacey Patton

Some years ago, I was a personal fitness trainer at the New York Sports Club’s Sheridan Square location at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street. One evening, a well-scrubbed young gay white guy named Alan meandered into the free weights section with bad posture, low eyes, and all kinds of insecurities shut up in his bones.

Alan could have chosen any of the more beefy and experienced male trainers to help whip him into shape, but he selected me. And so began our relationship, one that would strengthen his body and elevate his sense of himself, and simultaneously give me some insight into one gay man’s affinity for strong women.

During one of our sessions, between sets of leg curls, Alan shared a story from his closeted boyhood. His seventh-grade English teacher gave his class a creative writing assignment in which each student was asked: “If you could come back as someone or something different in your next life, what or who would it be?”

Alan wanted to be reincarnated as a black woman.

“Why?” I chuckled. Though he was gay, he was still a white man. Those are some big social and political advantages, right?  And how could a gay white man possibly see pieces of his own identity in black women?

He said: “I wanted to come back as a black woman, and I still do, because they can sing. They can wear hats. They are strong. And nooo-body,” he paused, waving his finger in front of his face, “ever tells a black woman to shut up!”

Looking back, I’m not sure if Alan wanted to literally morph into a woman. Instead, I think he just wanted some black woman moxie.

Alan explained that his parents owned a house in Brooklyn right across the street from a black Baptist church. Every Sunday morning he poked his head out of the bathroom window to watch all those church ladies walk by wearing their Sunday “crowns.” Those ladies’ voices sounded like they were singing into an abyss, and Alan, a member of an ostracized group pushed to the margins of American life, could feel their pain, vulnerabilities and strength in the face of unspoken adversity.

After reading his essay, Alan’s English teacher called his parents in for a conference. Concerned and confused, his parents put him through intensive psychotherapy, and he spent the rest of his childhood confined in a closet with his feelings, unlocking it only with the help of a some divas – those black church ladies and a few other Hollywood icons that helped him forge his identity and ultimately embrace his sexuality.

Paying Tribute

I thought about Alan this past Monday evening as I attended a lively Barnes and Noble panel discussion and reading of a newly-released book: My Diva: 65 Gay Men and the Women Who Inspire Them. Many of the attendees, myself included, wanted to know: what is this thing that some gay men have with divas? Why is it that a certain segment of the gay male population identifies so strongly with ladies like Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Cher, Wonder Woman and Princess Leia?

Even as I write this piece, I’m having flashes of dancing in the arms of some of my gay male friends and hearing them gleefully singing “I Will Survive,” the gay man’s anthem: “At first I was afraid, I was petrified . . .” I feel my body being twirled around as they hit their favorite verse in the song: “Go on now go, walk out the door, just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore.”

Folks standing on the periphery or many miles outside gay culture may be inclined to view such relationships between gay men and certain kinds of women as yet another form of queer spectacle, with all the trappings of big hair, makeup, glitz, glamour, flamboyance and kitsch.

Some of us might even project heterosexist assumptions and boil diva worship down to just comedic gay stereotype. From our armchairs, we could also summon Freudian analysis and say that gay men’s fascination with these female cultural icons is merely a side effect of their internal gender conflicts or evidence of some burning desire to be a woman.

But the diva phenomenon is not that simple. It’s complex. My Diva illuminates the bond between gay men and their fabulous female icons. Of course the book includes plenty of standards: Bette Midler, Liz Taylor, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor. But there are also some surprising choices too: Queen Elizabeth I, Virginia Woolf, Mahalia Jackson, Julia Child, and Björk.

Michael Montlack, editor of My Diva: 65 Gay Men and the Women Who Inspire Them, at a book event.

The book’s editor, Michael Montlack, explained that the contributing writers, who are from various backgrounds, range from age 20 to 80, and hail from England, Ghana and New York to California, tapped into something deeper than any “campy stereotype.”

These women are singers, actresses, writers, politicians, chefs, and comediennes who have risen to the top of their fields and left their marks on society. But in the process they have also managed, unknowingly, to make an impact on the gay community, as well as on individual gay men and the closeted boys they once were. The book explores just how these women have helped to forge the identities of the writers and guided them through difficult self-discoveries and insecurities.

“They all share something in common,” said Montlack. “This special kind of love or connection, or relationship, to women they have never even met, women who have shaped their lives, inspired them to come out, given them strength, acted as role models for them, or just plain made them laugh.”

Writer Jim Elledge says, “I never wanted to be Tina Turner; I just wanted her strength, her self-assuredness, and a body I wasn’t ashamed of.”

Forest Hamer says about Mahalia Jackson, “I was listening in her voice for some sense of who I would finally be.”

And when it came to learning hard lessons about love, certain divas played the role of older sisters. For Jeff Conway, Mary J. Blige taught him how to survive love loss and how to live without love. “In my despair, there she was. My sober black sister who, apparently, had been seeing the exact same type of man . . . Together we made it through.”

In some cases, these women literally saved their lives. For editor Montlack it was the singer Stevie Nicks. Instead of turning to drugs and alcohol to deal with homophobia and ostracism and the fears of coming out, he listened to Nicks’ music and found solace in her public battles with drugs and loneliness.

“Even her struggles as a woman in a male-dominated music industry would inspire me to never limit myself because of social restrictions,” said Montlack.

Gay men idolize divas because they are vulnerable, strong, defiant, dominant and because they have the ability to liberate themselves as a new persona, above and beyond the constraints of a patriarchal misogynist world.

“The women who the gay community celebrates balance the strong and the weak, the defiant and the dominated,” says Sam J. Miller whose diva is blues singer Bessie Smith. “At once demanding and desperate, powerful and powerless, this persona has particular resonance with gay men who can identify with the sensation of victimization by patriarchy, and who can spend a lifetime developing a strong, gutsy, take-no-s#$! Attitude in spite of it.”

Of course the word diva, which derives from the Latin divus meaning “god,” the feminine being goddess, used to refer solely to female singers, the prima dona, on an opera stage. Women like Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli, all divas of the cinema, held those titles around the turn of the century. But the term has evolved, taking on new meaning and is today applied to deserving women such as Beyonce and even Britney Spears. This is to the chagrin of some who think the term has become bastardized in a rapidly deteriorating popular culture, rife with the proliferation of stock celeb reality stock characters void of any real talent.

My Diva challenges assumptions and raises interesting questions about gender identity and social politics. Now that issues such as gay marriage and adoptions are being pushed to the fore in a very public and contentious manner, will gay men continue to have a need for divas to help them escape from antagonistic surroundings? Are there male versions of the diva who inspire gay men? And what of lesbians? Do they have the same kind of fascination with popular male icons?

All of us, my friend Alan (who eventually fell so in love with his body that he couldn’t resist checking out his reflection in store windows and puddles on the ground), and the 65 men who pay homage to their divas, in many ways live vicariously through others who face adversity and have to fight to become the people we want to be.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Senior Editor/Writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday – A Memoir.