Lady Gaga has just debuted her brand new single at the 53rd Grammy awards in Los Angeles. Her first all-new material for well over a year, Born This Way has been trailed by a mountain of hype and conjecture. This is par for the contemporary celebrity course. What is not, though, is the nature of the song, which is nothing less than a contemporary LGBT call-to-arms.
Elton John has recently called Born This Way "the anthem that's going to obliterate I Will Survive" – a laudable ambition indeed for anyone who's heartily sick of that Gloria Gaynor warhorse (which, by the way, is not an exclusively gay record). Gaga herself has been more circumspect: "It has been in my heart for over a year," she recently tweeted, but otherwise has, sensibly, fought shy of making any grand claims. Anthems are adopted, not hyped.
Born This Way begins as it means to go on, with Gaga intoning over swelling synths: "It doesn't matter if you love him or capital H-I-M/ Just put your paws up/ Cause you were born this way, baby." Then the rhythm kicks in, and it's classic um-da um-da late-disco/hi-energy, albeit with psychedelic 21st-century time-stretching production touches. It's a big sound without being ponderous, and sticks in your head like a burr.
The lyrics are ballsy enough, certainly within the US context, to run the risk of offending the many and vociferous religious groups: ''I'm beautiful in my way/ Cause God makes no mistakes/ I'm on the right track, baby/ I was born this way." It also makes some sharp points about the self-hatred that many gay people and outcasts of all kinds share: "Don't hide yourself in regret/ Just love yourself and you're set."
It's important to remember that Born This Way is not, of course, a self-improvement tract but a pop record, from a performer at the top of her game. Lady Gaga is the quintessential 2011 pop star: her records are a winning mixture of electro-pop with contemporary R&B touches, and her subject matter feeds into the media's self-obsession on the nature of fame and the devouring, if not sadomasochistic, nature of 21st-century celebrity.
Part of this involves the courting of controversy, and Gaga pushed her public persona to ever more hallucinatory extremes. She has long included gay imagery in her videos as part of her armoury: Telephone included a make-out scene with Beyoncé, while Steven Klein's nine-minute epic for Alejandro fused homoerotic, horror and religious imagery. The subsequent public spats merely boosted net views and sales.
With everything she does under such close scrutiny, Gaga knows that releasing a gay-friendly single will bind in her gay, "lesbian, transgendered" target audience, who find their preoccupations reflected in her songs. And there's the other side of the coin, which is that it's just polite to recognise the concerns and lives of the people who are your fans – and to give them a bit of support.
Neither is Born This Way just a gay record. If there are sections within her mass audience who might baulk at the message, then she has pre-empted that by making the song all-inclusive in the later verses. "Whether you're broke or evergreen/ You're black, white, beige, chola descent," Gaga raps, whether you're "Lebanese or Orient/ Whether life's disabilities left you outcast, bullied or teased/ Rejoice and love yourself today."
This lyrical inclusiveness can seem programmatic, but then she is talking about something that happens to many people, including herself: "They used to call me rabbit teeth in school," she recently tweeted, "and now I'm a real live VOGUE BEAUTY QUEEN!" Revenge is a prime pop motivation and, indeed, can lie behind the manic drive to overachievement shown by many who feel themselves excluded from the mainstream.
Gaga's knowledge of gay politics is explicit in the song's title. Born This Way echoes a founding gay-lib document from 1975, when Bunny Jones recorded a young man called Valentino on a song she had just written. The title was I Was Born This Way and the lyric went: "I'm walking through life in nature's disguise/ You laugh at me and you criticise/ Just because I'm happy, I'm carefree and I'm gay/ Yes I'm gay/ Tain't a fault tis a fact/ I was born this way."
Released on the Gaiee label and later picked up by Motown, I Was Born This Way sold well and had a wider impact as the first openly gay record. It's better known in the version released in early 1978 by a gospel singer and future minister called Carl Bean: "It's God's way of making a statement through me," the singer said at the time. "I'm very positive about it because it is something that should have been said a long time ago."
I Was Born This Way was released at the peak of disco – the musical form most associated with gay visibility. The first out-of-the-closet performer to have an international hit was Sylvester – former member of drag queen group the Cockettes – whose You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) swept the board in 1978. Soon afterwards, the cartoon-like Village People took gay subculture into the mainstream with huge hits such as YMCA and In the Navy.
Just over a decade on, Dusty Springfield released a song called Born This Way on Reputation, her album collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys. Written by Geoffrey Williams and Simon Stirling, the song's lyrics are much vaguer than the Bunny Jones track, but have a similar meaning: "You can't spend your whole life/ Just fooling around/ Break away/ And take the time to break the ties/ And leave it all behind you and say/ That's the way I am."
The idea that sexuality is inborn, rather than some lifestyle choice or unfortunate disease, is at the heart of much modern gay identity formation. It flies in the face of the old contra naturam argument, and gives the lie to the idea that homosexuality can be converted, or "cured". It also offers a kind of counterbalancing self-assertion that is necessary in the face of hostility and prejudice: as Lady Gaga sings: "In the religion of the insecure/ I must be myself."
Certainly, gay anthems are born rather than made, but Born This Way has a good pedigree. Referencing I Will Survive and including the cosmic "star" imagery beloved of disco – imagining yourself a space boy or a space girl is a great way of avoiding trouble on planet Earth – it shows a deep understanding of gay life and, further, what it is to be an outsider of any hue.
Born This Way may make more waves in the US, where it is one of several loosely defined "gay anthems", including Katy Perry's Firework, Ke$ha's We R Who We R – with its echoes of I Am What I Am, from La Cage aux Folles – and Pink's Raise Your Glass. This has coincided with an upsurge in activism, concentrated around the "Don't ask don't tell" policy and the bullying of gay youth in schools – highlighted by the It Gets Better video campaign.
Even so, it is sobering to consider the similarity in theme between the Lady Gaga and the Valentino songs. In the intervening decades, there have been great improvements in the lives of many gay people, but prejudice still exists – and it hits the most vulnerable. The point always has to be restated. While gay teens face extraordinary levels of bullying, records such as Born This Way will remain as necessary as they are generous in spirit.
Born This Way is out now. Jon Savage's compilation of gay pop, Queer Noises, was released in 2006.
