My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Bette Midler (1945): First Loves

176 Bette Midler First Loves Steven Cordova People tend not to believe me when I tell them this, but I haven’t always associated Bette Midler with gay men, gay liberation , or even gay men who happen to have been show-tune queens living in New York City during the 1960s and ’70s. I did, however, discover Bette in a gay community—a young, emerging community of two. It was summer 1979. I was fifteen years old, and one of my best friends was Rick Dunlap. I was still too young to work, so I went to Rick’s everyday, boarding the bus on the west side of San Antonio , Texas (not the best part of town to be from, meaning it 177 was black and Latino), and getting off on the north (wealthier and whiter) side. Rick and I spent hours there, listening to music, and smoking pot while his father holed up in his large, airconditioned bedroom at the back of the sprawling Dunlap house. What must have happened in the marijuana haze to bring Bette Midler into our lives was that one day Rick and I got tired of listening to San Antonio fare—AC/DC, Cheap Trick, Heart, Rush, and Yes—so we unearthed his sister’s LP collection. Not much grabbed us, but there was one album entitled The Divine Miss M. We put it on, and it sounded all the better for being scratched, for clicking and snapping as it played. We tapped our feet and shook our hips to the World War II–vintage tune “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Filled with adolescent ideas of romance, we kept time to “Going to the Chapel.” And we were probably unwittingly shocked by how sweet girly songs, like “Do You Want to Dance,” “Superstar,” and “Leader of the Pack,” could be transformed into sultry displays of lust. “Leader of the Pack” sounded as though it had been recorded live in a high school gymnasium. I’ve always imagined that Midler and company recorded the song on a hot summer day. Bette stripped down to a cheap full slip and ran around the gym, occasionally collapsing, belly up on the gym floor, in fits of passion. Twenty years later, I still walk down the streets of New York— where I’ve lived since I was twenty-two—bellowing “Hello in There,” the version Bette performs on The Divine Miss M. It’s a spare arrangement, just Bette, singing slow and sad to the equally adagio Barry Manilow on piano. We had an apartment in the city, me and my husband liked living there. It’s been years since the kids have grown, a life of their own, left us alone. Well, it wasn’t long before Rick and I lit up with our straight Speech and Drama Team friends—Becky, Kathy, Jason, and Bette Midler 178 Elisa—and turned them on to Bette, too. In fact, drama, as much as love, must be what I first associated Bette with. The six of us spent a lot of time together, traveling the state with the team, competing with other high school students in categories like dramatic interpretation, humorous interpretation, and prose and poetry reading. We rehearsed late into most school nights, and we brought home trophies to show for our work. So it must be the moments on The Divine Miss M—when Bette practically speaks the lyrics, or when she throws in an aside for levity—that perked up the ears of an adolescent group of thespians, a little troupe of comedians that took itself very seriously. Rick and I were, of course, gay. We weren’t open about it to each other yet, but soon we would be. Our friends, our drama coach, everyone except our parents would soon know it too. At one tournament in Corpus Christi, I even steamed up the back seat of a car with a boy from another team, a competitor whose name I’ve forgotten. I remember he was cute, and very forward. My teammates and friends had gay experiences, too. (Well, some of them did.) Theirs usually happened on nights they drank too much or the first time they dropped a Quaalude. There were theater-scene cities like New York and San Francisco, where the Divine Miss M enjoyed largely gay audiences. In San Antonio, my friends and I provided the theater. The summer of 1979 became...