A biopic celebrating one of the best voices of our time, the late Whitney Houston, will be hitting cinemas in late December. We were not sure if the singer’s Sapphic relationship with Robyn Crawford would be portrayed honestly in I Wanna Dance With Somebody, or at all, because it is often straight-washed or shoved under the rug. But the two trailers released so far hint at some WLW representation!
In the first trailer (above), Robyn is Whitney’s biggest supporter, which is true to their time together. But it’s a ‘lil more than gals being pals: Robyn smiles and playfully shakes her head in the audience while Whitney looks at her and sings lyrics from “How Will I Know?”: “There’s a boy I know, he’s the one I dream of.” Then there’s the hotel room scene, where they’ve woken up together and heard Whitney’s song play on the radio for the first time.
In the second trailer (above), Whitney’s walking down the aisle to Bobby Brown but it’s Robyn she’s slow dancing with.
Sure, the trailers could be more explicitly Sapphic, but Whitney and Robyn’s connection happened behind the scenes of performance–on and off the stage–which appears the same in the biopic’s snippets.
While the trailers seem open to at least hinting the pair were more than friends, it’s unclear how meaningful or transparent the relationship will be depicted. A film focused on their love, with the singing career and marriage taking a back seat this time, feels much needed. Robyn and Whitney were friends long before Whitney’s stardom.
Robyn was Whitney’s best friend, roommate, maid of honor and assistant. “It wasn’t all about our sleeping together,” Robyn stresses in her 2019 memoir A Song for You, where she confirmed her romantic and physical relationship with Whitney. “We could trust each other with our secrets, our feelings, and who we were. We were friends, we were lovers. We were everything to each other. We weren’t falling in love. We just were. We had each other. We were one: that’s how it felt.”
Whitney ended the physical relationship with Robyn when she signed a record deal with Clive Davis, who is bisexual himself. That point in Whitney’s career is shown in the first trailer: she claims to have a sore throat the night she’s supposed to impress the record executive but her mother pressures her to perform. Whitney belts out “How Will I Know?” while Robyn watches, lovingly, from the audience.
I love that the world got to hear Whitney sing. But the scene made me think—considering how fame and abuse at the hands of men led to addiction–would Whitney have been happier if she didn’t perform for Clive Davis that night and walked off the stage, grabbed Robyn’s hand and ran away from her demanding parents and society’s expectations, before the spotlight owned her?
I Wanna Dance With Somebody hits theatres in December.
