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Melissa Etheridge’s Lucky Life

My first encounter with Melissa Etheridge’s music was in the winter of 1992, when my friend Maggie popped a cassette of Never Enough in her car’s tapedeck. “Do you hear what she’s saying after that song ‘Must Be Crazy For Me’?” Maggie asked me. She replayed the tape and we listened to Melissa Etheridge saying gleefully, “I didn’t say it! I meant it, you know I meant it!”

Maggie gestured to the tape again and said, “She’s gay. She’s gotta be gay.”

Growing up in small-town Colorado without a visible lesbian community, we didn’t know that Etheridge had been playing in lesbian bars and at women’s music festivals for years. Although her lyrics-which were always carefully gender-neutral-could be interpreted as suggestively lesbian, it wasn’t until 1993 that Etheridge came out, declaring, “I’m real proud to say I’m a lesbian.”

Over ten years later, 43-year-old Etheridge has become the most famous lesbian musician in the world, having sold over 25 million records worldwide, with eight albums and two Grammy awards to her name. Last February she released her eighth album, Lucky, just a few months after she married actress Tammy Lynn Michaels (Popular, The L Word) in a Malibu wedding that was featured on ABC’s In Style Celebrity Weddings.

Etheridge has gone through her share of ups and downs as a celebrity, including her much-publicized breakup with Julie Cypher in 2000, shortly after the couple announced that the father of their artificially-inseminated children was rock legend David Crosby. Etheridge has weathered these public invasions of her personal life with an aplomb that is rarely seen in our media-saturated society. Most recently, her announcement that she was diagnosed with breast cancer showed the same steady strength and personable attitude that has characterized nearly all of the coverage of her relationship with Tammy Lynn Michaels.

In response to the news of Etheridge’s diagnosis, fans created pink bracelets emblazoned with the words “Be Strong,” the proceeds of which go to benefit the Dr. Susan Love Breast Cancer Foundation. News reports about Etheridge’s surgery, which was successfully completed last week, have been uniformly positive-another sign that this musician has done what few other lesbian celebrities have been able to do: create a public persona that resonates with many people, gay or straight, male or female. Few other lesbian couples have been featured in a People Magazine spread or a Cartier ad the way Michaels and Etheridge were shortly after their engagement.

Etheridge’s popularity has a lot to do with her music, which has always been decidedly mainstream, middle-American rock and roll. As she told The Advocate in 1994 shortly after she came out, “I have always been the working woman’s singer. I come from the Midwest. Mine is heartland music. My audiences are very mixed.”

After touring with Etheridge this summer, comedian Kate Clinton noted in an interview with AfterEllen.com that Etheridge’s concert audiences are “very mixed….After I did my set I would just kind of go through the screaming crowds, and…there was this one couple…a man and a woman…they were both very white-haired and they were standing, singing the words as well, and they had to be in their seventies. It was just so cool.”

Etheridge was born in Leavenworth, Kansas on May 29, 1961 to a father who was a math teacher and a mother who was an army computer specialist. She began taking music lessons as a child, started writing songs by the time she was ten years old, and began performing with adult musical groups when she was 12. Her childhood was not an idyllic one, however; in her autobiography The Truth Is…(2001) she writes about being sexually abused by her older sister.

After high school, Etheridge briefly attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she also began singing in lesbian bars. Although Etheridge had a girlfriend in high school, she credits her time at Berklee with opening her eyes to the gay community. She soon dropped out of Berklee, however, returning to Leavenworth to save money to move to California, where she planned to start her music career.

It was during her stopover in Leavenworth that she came out to her parents-with decidedly mixed results. Her mother discovered that Etheridge was a lesbian by finding that her daughter had brought a lover home with her, and it took years before their relationship became close. (In 2003 her mother participated in her marriage ceremony with Tammy Lynn Michaels’s mother.) In contrast, when Etheridge came out to her father just before her 21st birthday, he was immediately supportive.

After Etheridge moved to Los Angeles she began playing in women’s bars, and soon found a manager, Bill Leopold, to represent her. It was at the Que Sera bar in Long Beach, a lesbian bar, that Island Records CEO and founder Chris Blackwell first heard her sing, immediately signing her to a record deal.

Etheridge’s self-titled debut album was released to favorable reviews in 1988 and eventually went platinum. One of the most memorable songs on that album-and a song that nearly every lesbian has probably heard – is the sexy bar song “Bring Me Some Water,” which was nominated for a Grammy. While filming the video for that song, Etheridge met Julie Cypher, who was working as the video’s assistant director. Although Cypher and Etheridge felt an immediate attraction to each other, Cypher was then still married to Lou Diamond Phillips, and it wasn’t until 1990 that Cypher left Phillips and moved in with Etheridge.

The success of Etheridge’s first album was followed by the platinum-selling Brave and Crazy, and in 1992 her album Never Enough won her a Grammy for the song “Ain’t It Heavy.” The following year Etheridge came out publicly in an unprecedented arena – President Clinton’s Triangle Ball, the first inaugural ball especially for gays and lesbians.

Speaking to The Advocate in 1994 about her decision to come out, Etheridge said, “I always intended to do it, but I didn’t know when or where. I just couldn’t dodge it anymore. I felt like I was lying, and my music is so much about the truth.”

After she came out she released the album Yes I Am, which featured the Grammy-winning song “Come to my Window.” Although she has released several albums since then, including Your Little Secret (1995), Breakdown (1999), Skin (2001), and Lucky (2004), none have yet resulted in the chart-topping hits like those that came out of Yes I Am. Nevertheless, she continues to have an extremely dedicated fan base and regularly tours around the world.

Etheridge has rarely used her music as a political tool, but she has consistently been a vocal supporter of gay rights. After her two children, Bailey and Becket, were born to her partner Julie Cypher, Etheridge legally adopted both children in order to maintain parental rights, and she has continued to be an advocate for the rights of gay parents.

In 2000, Etheridge’s 12-year relationship with Julie Cypher ended, and the two worked out a unique child custody arrangement for the first year after their split, purchasing houses with adjoining back yards so the children could go back and forth between both mothers on their own. Her seventh album, Skin (2001), was largely a breakup album focusing on the pain of ending her long relationship with Cypher, but it also contains one of the happiest songs she has written, “I Want To Be In Love.”

Her wish was granted in 2001 when she met Tammy Lynn Michaels, then 26, at the L.A. bar Felt. Although Michaels had known she was gay since childhood, she had been largely closeted her entire life until she was outed to crewmembers on the set of her television series Popular. She explained to The Advocate in January 2004, “I was devastated that somebody else had to tell my friends, my guys that I work with 18 hours a day….And so I was talking to some professionals, and they were like, ‘Look, baby, you’re depressed, and the only way you’re going to get out of it is if you start with the truth.’ I was like, ‘OK-we wrap at 4 in the morning. Why don’t we go to Felt that night? I hear it’s ladies’ night.’ I hadn’t been in a lesbian bar in forever; I was like, I need to own being gay again and quit being ashamed of it again. And then this one [Melissa Etheridge] comes in and I was like, Whoa! Jesus!”

After Michaels asked Melissa Etheridge out to dinner, they began dating, and agreed early on that they would not appear at public events together until they were sure their relationship was something that might last. Their first public appearance together was on the red carpet at the premiere of Alan Cumming’s film The Anniversary Party several months after they had met. Their debut as a couple marked the way they have continued to deal with the press: in a low-key but matter-of-fact way that allows them to maintain a certain amount of privacy while simultaneously providing enough photo ops to appease the masses.

They publicly announced their engagement in April 2003, drawing almost uniformly positive coverage, as did their marriage in September 2003, which was even featured on an ABC television special about celebrity weddings.

Etheridge’s happiness is apparent on her most recent album, Lucky, which she has acknowledged was inspired by her relationship with Michaels. In her website’s biography she notes, “Skin was the bottom, but since then I have met the most amazing woman ever, got myself together and found a center of a place to stand where I love myself and made my life good for me. I started writing and performing from a place of, ‘Oh, I feel good, this is fun, I feel sexy.'”

Etheridge’s seemingly charmed life hit a major snag when she was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this month, following a self-exam in which she discovered a lump. In order to quickly deal with the cancer, she cancelled the remaining 11 tour dates on the Lucky tour and went into the operating room the following week. In a message on her website after her surgery she stated, “the good news is they took out the tumor and a few lymph nodes, only one of which was positive…the centinal node (for those that know breast cancer speak). After that my margins are clean! I still have both of my breasts and whether I will keep them is a bridge I have to cross later. What an unexpected journey this is.”

She added that her next step to a full recovery is chemotherapy, and that she plans to continue working on an ABC sitcom pilot in which she plays a gay music teacher who is raising a child with her straight male friend.

Reflecting the degree to which Etheridge has been embraced by mainstream America, this week she is on the cover of People Magazine for a story on breast cancer survivors. For those of us who first came out while listening to Melissa Etheridge’s passionate rock and roll, the news of her recovery-and her acceptance by the mainstream press-is great news indeed.

Get tour and fan club info, photos and more at Melissa Etheridge’s official site.

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