Whitney
For those who know me, one of my greatest and earliest loves is music. When I think of my young self, she is always singing and dancing, sometimes writing music, and always imagining the day she would join the ranks of Mariah Carey, Paula Abdul, and Whitney Houston. Paula was a fleeting phase. Mariah was my true obsession. And Whitney is a never-ending love story. A classic.
I make pretty consistent references to praying to Whitney as though she were a deity. She means a LOT to me.
There was a time when she was shamed in the public eye, made fun of the same way they laughed at Amy Winehouse, I remember seeing a small clip of her show with bobby brown on this early 2000s show “the soup”, and being upset and horrified at what this beautiful icon had become.
I recently watched a documentary about Whitney and I was surprised to learn some things about her. I knew it would break my heart, but it touched me in a completely different way than I expected.
Late in the doc they drop the bomb that she experienced sexual abuse as a child which will make anyone use drugs to numb, but ultimately that’s not what did it. Caught between being a celebrity and wanting to be her own woman, Whitney never got to belong to herself.
Whitney had a long-term female lover, and her marriage to Bobby Brown was a sham. She was a black gay woman, living in a straight white world. The intersection of homophobia and racism that she held inside of her just split her open. She lived a life of multiple masks and personalities between her private and public personas.
She must have been so intensely strong to keep showing up, keep performing, keep singing, when she was hurting so much inside. She turned to drugs to hide the pain of hiding her true self.
On some level, we all know this pain. The pain of masking. The fear of not being accepted. The fear of coming clean. I’m reminded of another female icon, Ani Difranco, who has lived her life as a bisexual out loud, “Imagine you’re a girl, just trying to finally come clean, knowing full well they’d prefer you were dirty and smiling”.
They would prefer us dirty and smiling. The dirt hides our truths. The dirt is a mask for the true self. But if we can come clean, no matter how they prefer us, no matter what society tells us, or our families, or religion, or whoever we imagine is judging us, maybe we can be free.