Issue 25: k.d. lang Gets a Close Shave

There are few magazine covers of the 1990s more iconic than this one, which helped to usher in the lesbian chic trend.

Is there any magazine cover of the ‘90s more unforgettable than that of k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford? Photographed by Herb Ritts, the Vanity Fair cover featured lang, dressed in a tailored pinstripe suit, reclining in a barber's chair as Crawford shaved her face with a straight razor. At the time, Crawford was the biggest supermodel on the planet, and lang was the hottest star in country-crossover music. It was a sexy and unabashedly queer image with the more desired model in the business servicing the androgynous icon who brought ‘90s butch to the masses. It’s easy to forget that there’s an actual profile accompanying this photo (and even more hot images within!) So, let’s dive right in and see how lesbian chic gained a new queen for a very exciting and complicated era of LGBTQ+ rights.

Vanity Fair. "k.d. lang Cuts It Close." August 1993. Leslie Bennetts.

(Image via VanityFair.com)

(Read the profile here.)

In my piece on Melissa Etheridge, I wrote about how the ‘90s became an era of increased LGBTQ+ power. In the aftermath of the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, activists were louder and more effective than ever in fighting for increased rights across the nation. Before Bill Clinton introduced the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, there was a real sense of change in the air that equal marriage and other such rights could be within our reach. With that came an increase in queer representation in pop culture, as well as a growing number of out celebrities. There was Etheridge but also Ian McKellen, RuPaul, and Sandra Bernhardt. On TV, gay marriages, kisses, and Very Special Episodes were more commonplace than ever, and with more sympathetic approaches to the material than the days where gay-coded characters were either evil or pathetic.

In September 1995, Entertainment Weekly did a cover story on "The Gay '90s" that included images of Smithers from The Simpsons, the Vampire Lestat, Batman and Robin (plus nipples), and Elton John. “Entertainment comes out of the closet”, they declared. It was true, to an extent. Many of the people on that cover weren’t queer but represented a general queering of the culture (like Marky Mark in those Calvin Kleins.) There still existed a pink/blue gender binary that fiercely pushed back against any subversions of it. See how Madonna was lambasted for her Sex book or what happened to Paul Reubens. Out celebrities faced incredibly invasive questioning about their bodies, sex lives, and politics. They had to contend with this (unfortunately still prevalent) idea that they were deviating from the norm, and that cishet culture’s embrace of them was either a fad or something to be quashed. Even worse, it might be something they truly desired.

By 1993, k.d. lang was a true star. Having risen through the ranks of the country music scene, both in Canada and Nashville, she broke out in a big way with her crossover album Ingenue, a blend of country, pop, and cabaret that featured a number of hit singles. She duetted with Roy Orbison, performed at the Winter Olympics, and stomped on stage at the Juno Awards wearing a wedding dress. She had an unbeatable voice that could take on any genre with ease. And she was gay.

(Image via YouTube // CBC)

She didn't officially come out until 1992 in an interview with The Advocate, the year that Ingenue was released, although it was an open secret much in the same way it was for many LGBTQ+ celebrities of the era. Making it official led to some country stations banning her music. Some homophobes even picketed her appearance at the 1993 Grammys. But this was also her commercial peak, where she was winning Grammys, making movie soundtracks, and selling out tours.

As a butch gay woman in the early ‘90s, lang didn’t have a ton of contemporaries. There was Lea DeLaria, who was more hard butch and a niche star on Broadway who didn’t get a proper chance to break out until many years later. Ellen DeGeneres was still in the closet while working the standup circuit. Many celebrities like Madonna and Prince played around with gender roles in their performances, but there was something about lang that made people crazy. The idea of androgyny seemed to baffle Vanity Fair. They described lang in very odd terms that boiled down to, “But short hair? And suits? On a lady?!”

"This is a woman who was clearly born to perform. Not that you'd necessarily know she's a woman at first sight. Tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a black cutaway coat flecked with gold, black pants, and her favorite steel-toed black rubber shit-kicker work boots ("Best boots I ever had. Got 'em for $25 at Payless''), she looks more like a cowboy. Her glossy dark hair is full but short, and when she tosses her head and strides across the stage on those long, strong legs, you suddenly realize she's moving with a kind of physical freedom you've never seen a female singer display onstage before."

The backhanded compliments are revealing in these descriptions of lang’s attractiveness. It’s the gender binary at work, shoving certain styles and traits into one of two boxes, marked Man or Woman, and being baffled to discover there’s an entire spectrum of identity at work in the spaces in-between. Granted, it’s 1993 and mainstream awareness of such queer theory is rudimentary, but it wasn’t totally unheard of. The pre-amble does note that these are "gender cliches" she is bending (ah, the phrase "gender bender", so '90s.) We’ve had centuries of butch, masc, and gender-queering icons to take note from. And it seems odd to declare that lang was “moving with a kind of physical freedom” never before shown by female musicians. Again, Madonna was doing Dietrich cosplay and masturbating on stage only a couple of years prior. The women of the punk scene probably had a few tips to share too.

(Image via VanityFair.com)

Also notable to the piece is that lang’s fanbase, while universal at this point in time, is still dominated by what it describes as "hordes of women with exceptionally short hair." They're "grown-ups, not crazed teenyboppers, but by the time the lights go down they're ready to storm the stage." A musician's fanbase largely being made up of women is hardly a surprise, but the untapped social and commercial power of queer women was only just being tapped. Ani DiFranco was making music about being bi during this time. Melissa Etheridge came out with an album called "Yes I Am." Lilith Fair, while not exclusively queer, was a few years away and built a dedicated audience of gay and queer women.

But lang also crossed over from country because she had a voice to kill for and stage presence to burn. "Critics turn into jelly at her performances, comparing her to everyone from Judy Garland to Peggy Lee to Bette Midler, "k.d. is God!" babbled one American reviewer after a New York concert a while back." Even Madonna loved her, declaring, "Elvis is alive—and she's beautiful!" And hoo boy, kd is hot as hell, then and now. Mac made her the face of their Viva Glam lipstick, part of their efforts to raise money for AIDS charities at a time when most major brands balked at the prospect of embracing their queer customers.

During this period, lang became a poster girl for an interesting cultural and fashion fad: lesbian chic. New York Magazine even put her on their cover as the face of this sudden rebranding of gay women as cool. As noted by Dressing Dykes, 1993 saw a succession of covers and headlines on the seeming prevalence of lesbians in the mainstream, offering a presumed heterosexual audience an insight into a new normal. This would often be qualified with a lot of details. A Newsweek cover story on lesbians included the leading question, "what are the limits of tolerance?"

For lang, this was just the norm as a musician who had always played with style and pushed back against the staid expectations of the country music genre. For Vanity Fair, it was both fascinating and perplexing. Again, they double down on some backhanded acclaim that is positive in message but messy in content:

"One way or another, gender bending has always been lang's stock-in-trade. At first glance she seems undeniably bizarre, but hers is a deeply subversive presence; after you watch her for a while you realize how warped your own stereotypes are. In the beginning you simply see her as unnatural. Her face is utterly bare, devoid of makeup. Her hair has been shorn with what appears to be complete disregard for how flattering the results will be […] She wears clothes that don't reveal or exploit her body, clothes to move in, and boots that could carry you for miles. You can watch her for years and never even be aware she has breasts. She is as different from a female icon like Dolly Parton as if she were another species."

Like, how often were you staring at her chest looking for the boobs?

(Image via Google Books // New York Magazine.)

The following paragraph celebrates how lang defies "what this culture has traditionally defined as feminine" and notes that things like "waist-cinching gowns" and "high heels that make you mince and totter" are all rather ridiculous. But you still sense how the writer is grasping for the right vocabulary. She later says that you'd never call lang "pretty" but that "handsome" is the perfect descriptor for her. It's still very boy/girl, right? And lang certainly is beautiful, handsome, pretty, and everything else. In rejecting the so-called norms, we often fall into reinforcing them, earnestly or otherwise.

The lesbian chic era was full of this: that strange declaration that women (even skinny and conventionally pretty ones) with short hair and no visible makeup were somehow manly in their attractiveness or attitude. Women cutting their hair short has long been a symbol of freedom and resistance, from the flapper girls and their bobs to the proud tradition of the post-breakup chop. But aesthetic can easily be separated from politic.

In Sex, Feminism, and Lesbian Desire in Women, Kate Farhall cites a letter written to Cosmo in 1993, the year of all this lesbian chic, asking for advice on her growing same sex attraction. The response "frames a young woman's lesbian desire as the result of 'trouble' in her heterosexual relationship [...] By positioning lesbianism as a misinterpretation of feelings resulting from an unhappy heterosexual relationship, advice columns discount female-female sexuality as a viable alternative to heterosexuality." Lesbian chic presenting radical sexual and gender rejection of the so-called status quo as "a feminist, depoliticised version" of the real thing not only missed the point; it pushed aside a hell of a lot of lesbians who couldn't or wouldn't conform to a magazine cover standard.

This is not lang’s doing, obviously. She may be hot as f*ck to the masses and could sell lipstick in Mac ads but she was still a butch lesbian who didn’t wear gowns on the red carpet or play second fiddle to men. Bucking the norm carries with it an enormous amount of labour and jackassery. In the piece, the author practically faints in shock describing a nude scene lang did for the film Salmonberries:

"Massive and voluptuous, her body has the gravitas of an ancient female fertility figure, all rounded thighs and belly and breasts. There is nothing boyish whatsoever about that body."

Yiiiiikes.

The Vanity Fair piece also gives her her dues as an excellent and ambitious musician who worked her way up from working class Alberta roots to the Grammys stage. She is candid, funny, and chill in this interview, but still careful. When she talks about going into therapy to help with her difficulty in maintaining intimate relationships, she is quick to stress, “That is not why I’m gay.” She clearly knew that someone would ask that dumb question or posit it in the piece had she not intervened. She was also asked why someone grows up to be gay, which isn’t a gross or leading question at all, right?!

(Image via VanityFair.com.)

Some of lang’s talk of gender is very 1990s, like her description of penis envy, but her point still carries nuance about the unfair expectations of gender:

"As much as I hate it, I admire the male sexual drive because it's so primal and so animalistic. I think that's one of the reasons women have a hard time with them, but it's one of their greatest assets; there's a certain freedom in that. It's very elemental. I think female sexuality gets convoluted because of social pressures. All these different ways women are pulled—everything from being a virgin to not being a virgin, getting pregnant, having a nice body—I definitely have been affected by that disease. I was 170 pounds in the seventh grade, so I don't have a very healthy attitude toward my body. My brother and sister used to call me 'Mama Kath Elliot,' so I was scarred for life." She rolls her eyes, laughing ruefully. "But it has to do with more than siblings. It's social pressure, the pressure society puts on us to be beautiful, thin, stylish."

For her, rejecting gender from her own sexual presentation is a "deep rebellion." She rejects the "overused and misunderstood" term "androgynous" and cites "Elvis, like Mick Jagger, like Annie Lennox or Marlene Dietrich—using the power of both male and female." She's savvy in her contextualizing of her own image. You can see the through-line from Dietrich to lang and all that comes in-between. I also love that she rightly cited Elvis among this clique.

It's also interesting how she doesn’t cite any country singers here, perhaps a reflection of how the country world seemed both sceptical and scornful of her. Despite being 100% country in her upbringing and early music, "We set out to be part of the changing face of country music, but she wasn't accepted by the industry," says Larry Wanagas, lang's manager. "She didn't look like you're supposed to look. You're supposed to look like all the rest of them." She had big allies, like Loretta Lynn and Roy Orbison, but it seems like the notoriously cloistered world of Nashville didn't want this gay woman who played around with genre and gender on the radio. Said her manager, "In 1989 she got the Grammy for best country female vocalist. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers named her the top-selling female country artist, but she never even got nominated for the Country Music Awards." Anyone else reminded of the past 30 years of Nashville nonsense?

And that was before she did ads for PETA and the meat industry attacked her. A gay vegetarian? Too far, dang it!

While lang felt somewhat annoyed at having to publicly come out since she never saw herself as in, doing so was a big deal. Said Torie Osborn, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, "She's been the first major woman pop star who's out and proud and fine about it. It signals a whole new era of possibility for celebrities." lang didn't want to become the nation's lesbian spokeswoman, but being out and her true self was crucial to her longevity and potency as an artist. “The pressure I feel most is the pressure of being an artist and of having to create. No one's making you do that. That is a gift—or a punishment."

(Image via YouTube.)

Lang remained an industry regular, but lesbian chic didn’t last long, and it took even less time for its more flinty edges to be sanded down for cishet palatability. It never embraced stone butches or the vast majority of women of colour (model Jenny Shimizu was one exception.) Trans women were non-existent in this already narrowed space. So-called “lipstick lesbians” were the face of the softened trend. A lot of the headlines noting this adherence to the binary did veer into dismissing femme lesbians, but they also got at the wider problem: when you decide that something is a trend to be sold to the masses, you inevitably end up robbing it of its radicalness so that it won’t offend anyone.

When you decide that someone’s gender and sexuality is to be treated like a new pair of jeans, of course this crap will happen. Lesbian chic may have made a marginalized group “cool” for a bit but it didn’t suddenly bestow upon them equal rights or an amplified platform to speak from. In a 1995 piece by Marguerite Mortiz, she wrote that “the chic lesbian shown in the slick mass market magazine is a creation that succeeds as a commodity but fails utterly as an explanation of who lesbians in all their diversity are and what they experience in this culture.”

In 2013, lang was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. She took some time away from music before announcing last year that she would reunite with her old band The Reclines to perform at the 2024 Canadian Country Music Awards, where she was inducted into their hall of fame. But she hasn’t made a new album since a 2016 collaboration with Neko Case and Laura Veirs. In 2019, she admitted to the BBC that "the muse is eluding me" and "I am completely at peace with the fact that I may be done."

She can rest easy knowing her legacy is a mighty and influential one. LGBTQ+ musicians have never been more visible, from Chappell Roan and Troye Sivan to Lil Nas X, Hayley Kiyoko, Kim Petras, Sam Smith, Megan thee Stallion, and Brandi Carlisle. Ingenue is still an absolute banger too. Lesbian chic may have been replaced by the next trend but one could argue that it still paved the way for the mainstreaming of queer identity and further subversion of the gender binary. The late ‘90s and early 2000s brought with it Ellen’s coming out, The L Word, Willow from Buffy, Fucking Amal, Rosie O’Donnell’s coming out, But I’m a Cheerleader, Anne Heche… much of this came with some messy and often cruel representation, and a lot of homophobic protests, but visibility was emerging at a renewed rate. Eventually, it stopped being front page news when two women kissed on TV.

kd lang didn’t endure because of a trend related to her identity. She was just incredibly good at her job and remained true to her mission, both musically and stylistically. She was there for the unchic queer kids too, and that was what mattered.

(kd + Pee Wee 4eva.)

Thanks for reading. You can find my work scattered across the internet. Over on Pajiba, I wrote about Pink, the age of the Hollywood Chris potentially being over, our enduring cultural obsession with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and the long, slow lead-up to the split of Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry. I delved into the terrible Red Sonja movie for Inverse. I posited that Tom Cruise’s true movie-star successor is Scarlett Johansson for The Daily Beast.

Stay tuned for future issues on Heidi Fleiss, t.A.T.u., the worst movies ever, Pedro Pascal, and much more.

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