Okay, Namo, we could debate this forever, and I kind of wish the gay press HAD debated it more thoroughly back then. Instead it became accepted truth overnight that Donna Summer had betrayed us.
But I always felt that Donna had been unfairly lynched by anonymous group of gay white men who were probably on drugs themselves--they were at a Donna Summer concert, after all--and afterward exaggerated the badly expressed religious words of an unthinking black woman because they and their friends were getting sick and dying and we all needed a villain to be be angry at. It was what Lillian Hellman once termed a "scoundrel time," when even good people behaved badly.
So we made an Anita Bryant out of Donna Summer and strung her up on a tree to warn other black female singers to keep their religiosity to themselves. We were scoundrels to do that.
Let's look at the words that were actually reported as having been said at the concert: "God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve but I still love you." Badly chosen, yes of course, but the first part of her sentence doesn't NECESSARILY cancel out the second.
She could very easily have meant to say (I think very probably have meant to say), "PEOPLE SAY that God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve but I DON'T CARE WHAT THEY SAY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU." (My paraphrases in caps.) I don't think she was ever smart enough to express that properly. (I don't think I am either.) But it was never clear to me from what I read that she actually believed that statement herself.
Then backstage, with the anonymous gaggle of probably-drug-addled white boys waiting for their diva, she goes on with more of the religious mumbo-jumbo she's been fed by the African-American born-again types who were trying to get her off the drugs--stupid, callous, unfeeling stuff but stuff a lot of black religious folk believed to be true at the time--and for a long time afterward.
(White religious folk believed it too, but they weren't the ones with sway over Donna Summer at the time. So let's remember this was always about white men judging black religion.)
And now let's get to the part that was not reported--the part that was just remembered by the probably-drug-addled white-boy lynch mob:
What if what she said backstage was NOT that AIDS was God's punishment for "being gay" but that AIDS was "God's punishment for having promiscuous sex"? A lot of freaked-out people believed that at the time--including a lot of freaked-out gay people who had been promiscuous. Including you and me--or, well, me at least, for a year or two or three.
Those boys would have been pretty dismayed to hear their diva talking SH*T like that.
Add now let's add in the fact that MAYBE one or two of those queens backstage were not disco bunnies but punk-rock gays like you, who hated disco and had been dragged there...and add in the fact that most of the white guys writing for the gay press back then were of your too-cool-for-school I-Hate-Disco mindset.
What resulted was a perfect storm of anger. Indignant editorials. Disco and Donna denounced at gay bars. Jokes and exaggeration from drag queens at fundraisers. Records burned. From those anonymous reports onward, Donna Summer could not defend herself against the accusations. She was forever the enemy.
It was a scoundrel time.
Updated On: 5/19/12 at 10:19 AM
