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Was Prince Gay Really or It’s Just a Rumour [ Here is The Proof ]
Was prince gay : In a 1997 VH1 interview, comedian Chris Rock asked Prince a question that no one had ever asked him before. At the very least, not in such a direct manner. He explained, The androgynous thing.
Was Prince’s androgyny a matter of branding or identity?
“Was that an act, or were you trying to figure out who you were sexually?” Prince says, a mischievous smile coming across his face, “That’s a good question.”
His eyes are veiled beneath dark-shaded sunglasses as he pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts. “I don’t think I was looking for anything,” he says.
“I believe I was simply being myself. I’m a true Gemini, after all. And there are a lot of sides to that as well.” He smiles and pauses again before acknowledging. “There was also a little acting going on.”
It was possibly the best — and most honest — explanation he’d given on the subject, despite its briefness.
His androgynous identity was genuine (he was simply “being himself”), but it was also a performance, a determined branding strategy.
Of fact, the American public did not always grasp this dilemma. People commonly confused his artistic persona, gender identity, and sexual identity in the early phases of his career.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was widely assumed that Prince was gay. Prince was asked about it in a 1983 interview with Musician magazine:
Musician: Do you believe others believe you’re gay?
Prince: I’m sure there’s something in me that makes people believe that. It’s probably due to the fact that I spend a lot of time with women. Perhaps they see things that I don’t.
Musician: Everyone usually talks about a man’s feminine sensitivity as though it’s a flaw. However, most women find it incredibly appealing. As if it were sensitivity.
Prince: I’m not sure. For me, it’s appealing. I mean, I’d like to be a more kind person who can cope with other people’s difficulties more effectively.
I believe that men are really closed and frigid when they are together. To put it another way, they don’t like to cry. And I believe it is incorrect, because that is not the case.
Prince, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with American masculinity’s standards.
It didn’t allow for openness, intimacy, or vulnerability. People assumed he was gay because he liked hanging out with women; he wore makeup, heels, and flashy clothes on occasion; and he didn’t appear to be a “genuine man.
” The epithets “freak,” “pervert,” and “faggot” were among the more popular labels used to describe him. Of course, his admirers were drawn to him because of his uniqueness and eagerness to push limits.
Mainstream America, on the other hand, was less understanding.
When Prince and his band, the Revolution, opened for the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1981, the artist’s difference became the object of an outburst of intolerant hatred.
Prince took the stage in his customary black bikini briefs and trenchcoat, expecting a similar enthusiastic response as he had received in the tour’s smaller venues.
The mostly white, rock-oriented crowd, on the other hand, was clearly not having it. Although the artist’s new wave-inflected funk may not have made sense to the older population, it wasn’t the main issue. Prince’s androgynous appearance was the cause.
The audience began to boo and yell racist and homophobic epithets. Prince tried to adjust by include more rock music in his set.
However, trash, food, and bottles were tossed onto the stage before long. Looking out at the audience, the artist recalls focusing on one man near the front who had “hate all over his face.”
Prince has had enough of the abuse after enduring it for numerous songs.
Mick Jagger and others sought to persuade the artist to give it another shot, and he grudgingly agreed to do so, only to be hit with a barrage of abuse.
He flew back to Minneapolis this time, refusing to open for the Stones once more.
The encounter left Prince scarred. He refused to be intimidated or reformed, though. “I hope those who aren’t aware of it become aware,” he remarked.
“Because I’ll remain here for a while until something strange happens, like a thunderbolt or something.”
Prince turned out to be prescient. He was a brilliant performer and marketer who understood that the Coliseum crowd represented the past, while he and his multi-racial, multi-gender band, the Revolution, represented the future.
Rather than avoiding the debate over his gender and sexuality, he embraced it.
His album Controversy, released in 1981, relies heavily on the allegations and speculation regarding his identity.
The title track raises challenging questions (“Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?”), yet none of them are answered in the song.
As he had discovered in the Coliseum, such hazy lines could arouse enmity, but they could also be used to his advantage. The musician declares his androgyny as a badge of honour on “I Would Die 4 U,” singing: “I’m not a lady.
I’m not a man at all. You’ll never grasp what I’m talking about.” His gender flexibility adds to his mystique in this sense. It eludes our control and comprehension, giving him a quasi-transhuman identity.
Throughout the decade, Prince continued to defy gender stereotypes. Prince produced the decidedly alternative album Lovesexy in the late 1980s, amidst the advent of misogynistic-prone heavy metal and hip hop.
The artist is depicted as a slender, diminutive, androgynous figure against a backdrop of white and lavender blossoms on the cover, a modern spin on Sandro Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
His stance is feminine, with one leg raised to emphasise its shape (while concealing other places); one arm stretched back, the other just beneath his nipple; and a black mane.
The hair on his chest and stomach, the barely-there pencil moustache, and the not-so-subtle erect stamen — the male fertilising mechanism of a flower — right above his crotch are all manly traits.
He’s a Percy Shelley-meets-Blakean ethereal figure, too delicate and exotic for this planet, staring contemplatively off into the horizon.
The aesthetic was diametrically opposed to prominent groups like N.W.A, Bobby Brown, and LL Cool J’s hyper-masculine posture.
His infamous name change to the iconic graphic known as the Love Symbol in 1993 was perhaps his most divisive move of them.
The selection was based on the artist’s identification and branding once again.
The Love Symbol, on the one hand, was symbolic. It was a cross between the two gender signs.
Alchemy has united the male and female into one. Prince opted to identify as an androgynous glyph that signified beyond the confines of gender classifications or even language, rather than as a man in the usual sense.
It was also a more practical move to free himself from his record label, Warner Bros., from his contractual obligations. They might have owned the “Prince” brand, but they couldn’t have owned him.
He determined that they might have the name. He’d continue under the new sign.
At the time, the move was widely panned. Prince’s branding brilliance was once again evident and forward-thinking.
Prince is now associated with the Love Symbol, which has gained international recognition. Perhaps no other musician in music history has produced such a memorable logo.
Of course, many other musicians before Prince, such as Little Richard and David Bowie, experimented with gender limits.
From Michael Jackson to Annie Lennox to Boy George, the 1980s are remembered for their extraordinary mainstreaming of gender-bending in popular culture.
Prince, on the other hand, defied the gender barrier in so many ways.
Hundreds of thousands of fans paid tribute to Prince after his death, applauding him for being a trailblazer in telling individuals of all races, genders, and sexual orientations that it was okay to be different.
It was perfectly OK to reject labels. It was fine to march to your own drum machine’s beat.
The artist’s reinvention of gender is one of his greatest legacies, alongside his brilliant repertoire of music.
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