I had never met her parents, but I knew that they were really strict. After school was over, we saw each other a couple of times and just kissed, which was kind of interesting. One day, she disappeared and I didn’t know what had happened to her. A few weeks later, she came back home. I saw her one time and she explained to me that her parents had sent her away to a hospital to cure her of this “problem.” I guess they’d found out that she was seeing me. I don’t really know what happened. But there was resentment in her words when she told me what had happened. I felt like I had brought this on her. It was so overwhelming to me at the time. Because I was so into my world and myself, what was going on between us was perfectly okay with me. My mother, in her own way, was making it clear to me that she didn’t approve of my lifestyle, but my parents would never have sent me away for being a homosexual. It kind of stunned me, the way that people would treat their children as if they were broken, and I sort of put it in the back of my head and tried to ignore it.
My mother had subtly let me know that she didn’t approve of my lifestyle, but she had never verbally expressed it to me. Then I brought home Lisa, a girl I was seeing, and she spent the night with me. When I woke up, there was this note on the kitchen counter from my mother: “I don’t know the nature of your psychological illness, but do not bring that girl over here anymore. If you’re going to continue this behavior, you can’t live in this house.” That letter just cut me like a knife. Of course, my mother and I never spoke of the letter afterward. There was no further communication on the subject between the two of us.
But it did cause me to question myself. I knew that I was having these “unnatural” feelings. I never figured that my mother knew. And I was crushed by her response. Surprisingly, my mother’s letter prompted me to seek guidance about my feelings of homosexuality. I decided to talk to the chaplain of the church where I was working. It seems a strange choice of where to go to unburden myself, but I’ve always been fascinated with religion. I was raised Methodist. My mother’s family went to church every Sunday, but I don’t believe that my curiosity toward religion is spiritual in nature. It never really moved my soul. I am just fascinated with the way people so easily give up their minds and opinions to it. And how they so strongly believe in the boundaries set forth by organized religion. I appreciate the sense of community that people get from belonging to a religious group, and I definitely understand the sense of comfort and safety, though I myself never knew that feeling from a church. When I was a teenager, I used to go to all kinds of churches just to get the experience of different groups. I witnessed people speaking in tongues, and I loved the emotional release I felt when a Baptist congregation was singing and praying. I was quite involved in my church youth group, playing the guitar and even writing religious songs.
But I had a pretty good relationship with the chaplain and trusted he would understand. I explained to him that I had gotten this letter from my mother, and I just put the whole story out there to him. His response floored me. He said, “There are probably some people in this church that would say that it’s wrong for you to love another woman. That it’s a sin. But I can’t go along with them on that way of thinking. I can’t believe that God would have invented a love that could be wrong.” He encouraged me to get on with my life. He helped me to understand one of the most valuable lessons of my life: to be true to myself. To stand in my truth and be who I am.
San Francisco, 1983
Christmas in Boston, 1981
I performed at the Westport Connection Lounge at La Veranda restaurant in Kansas City until I made enough money to head to Los Angeles.
Saying hello to old friends at my concert in Leavenworth, 1994
I guess the last place I expected to get approval of my feelings was the church. No doubt, a different person could have damned me to hell, but he was really, really supportive, which was fortunate for me. He encouraged me to be who I am. To not shut down my feelings but to embrace them and deal with them the best I could. That was no easy task when I lived in Leavenworth, Kansas, and no easy task as a member of my family. I moved out of the house shortly thereafter. It was the best thing for everyone.
I found an apartment in Kansas City and got a job playing the piano at La Veranda Lounge in the Grenada Royal Hotel. Just like at Ken’s in Boston, I got the five to nine slot. The headliners in the nine to one slot were Rhett and Scarlett. There was a gay bar in Kansas City—the Dover Fox, a cute little place. Mixed (both men and women), which you hardly ever got. I dated, saw a couple of women, but nothing serious. My eyes were set on Los Angeles, on fulfilling my dream. Rhett and Scarlett eventually got fired, and I took over the nine to one slot at the Grenada. It enabled me to save enough money to buy a car and get ready for my trip. I started doing some of my own material at the Grenada, which just increased my desire to get discovered, to make a record, to do all those things I’d dreamed about since I was a kid. It didn’t happen in Boston. It sure wasn’t going to happen in Kansas City. There’s only one place to go to do that: Los Angeles. My dream was still in place, still bright and clear in my head. I was about to turn twenty-one and it was time to leave Kansas behind and make the move to L.A. to be a big, famous rock star.
Before I left for Los Angeles, I felt I had one unfinished task that I just had to deal with. I had to tell my father about my sexuality. I wanted to come out to him and be open with him about who I am. I sat him down in the living room, and I said, “Dad, I want to talk to you. I have something I want to tell you. There’s something I need to say. I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it, and I’ve been afraid to tell you.” Blah, blah, blah; I went on and on and on until I finally just came out and said, “I’m a homosexual.” My dad looked at me like I was from Mars and said, “Is that all? Well, I knew that. It was kind of obvious.” He said that although he didn’t understand it, if it made me happy, he was fine about it. That was my dad. From then on, his support made a huge difference in how I carried myself about being gay.
Los Angeles
• • •
AFEW DAYS AFTER MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, I PACKED everything I owned into my car and I drove all alone for four days from Kansas City to L.A. That was a great drive. It was a very liberating experience for me. I was just leaving everything behind. I was driving somewhere I had never really spent any time, and I was going to make a brand-new life for myself. I didn’t know what I would end up doing, but I knew that if I was going to make it in the music business, I had to be in Los Angeles. That’s where the heart of the music business beats, and I wanted to be a part of that in the worst way. My Aunt Sue lived there and I called her a few days before I packed up my stuff and asked her if I could stay on her couch for a few weeks. She was a little dubious because, as I found out later, my sister had stayed with her in the past. It was a pretty awful experience for my aunt, so she didn’t know what to expect when I arrived. But she was great to take me in the way that she did.
The first thing I did after settling in was to start looking for work. There weren’t a lot of places for me to play in L.A. This was the early eighties and my sound wasn’t exactly what was happening in the music scene at the time. Groups like the Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, and Culture Club were on the radio, and I didn’t sing, or look, like that at all. Needing money, I auditioned for the Great American Burger Company, a noisy family steakhouse where they had singing waiters and waitresses. I’d never waited on a table before, but I could sing and entertain. The manager of the restaurant auditioned me by telling me to take my guitar over to a table and just start singing. I was supposed to go over to a random table and just sing? Okay. I took a deep breath and I stood in the middle of the room and I began to play. It seemed like the people were enjoying my performance, but they kept right on eating. Out of nowhere, this little girl—she must have been four or five years old—just sticks her tongue out at me. I stared at her for a moment as emotion welled up inside me. But I shoved it down and finished my song. Then I slipped out th
e side door without saying a word to the manager or anyone. That was not what I came out to California to do.
I started to play at a few bars around Los Angeles and Hollywood, but I wasn’t really making any money. I was really low and I was at a place where I said, “This sucks.” I’d call home and try to sound positive, but it wasn’t going quite as I had planned at first. I played at a place called the Candy Store, which turned out to be a black nightclub that had a cabaret. My set list was mostly cover tunes from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. I’d started off with “Me and Bobby McGee,” which got no reaction from the crowd at all. I shifted gears and went into George Benson’s “On Broadway.” For this song, I’d play the guitar and then hit it, using it to get all the wacky percussive sounds out of it while I was singing. And these crowds loved it. They hooted and hollered and were on their feet. It was always nice to win over a suspicious crowd, but I didn’t feel like I was growing with my music. I didn’t feel like I was going anywhere.
On the bright side, I was really able to be sexually free in Los Angeles. In fact, I discovered that my father had two gay brothers, George and Carl, who lived in Los Angeles as well. They were very understanding of my sexual preference, completely supportive, and helped me get into the gay community in L.A. When I came out to them, they came out to me. They told me about a bar called Flamingo’s, a women’s bar that was right down the street from my aunt’s house. I started to go there, though I didn’t know a soul. I’d sit in the bar all by myself. Every time I think about it, it’s just so lonely; but that’s what you do in a new city when you’re waiting for your new life. Loneliness wasn’t powerless. It was powerful. I used it to drive my ambition.
I met a woman who I really liked. I wanted to take her to dinner, but I didn’t have any money, so, for forty bucks, I hocked the typewriter I used to type my lyrics on. Then I prayed that the dinner wouldn’t be more than that. We went to this Mexican restaurant and, thankfully, dinner was only twenty-four dollars. Only I would hock something to take a girl out to dinner! It’s not like I would have done it for myself, but I was only too happy to pawn something that meant a lot to me for the sake of taking this girl out. On our date, I played my demo tape for her. She was totally unimpressed. She put her brother’s demo tape in the cassette player, and I was squashed. It was then that I realized I was one of thousands of struggling musicians looking to make it in the business. Up to that point, I was thinking that I was really special. Before I moved to L.A., I was a musician in Kansas City or Boston and I could use my music as a source to impress a woman—you know, help with the seduction—and, for the most part, it worked. But this was L.A., baby, and everyone had a demo tape. That was such a dose of reality. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t get very far, but, eventually, I did get my typewriter back.
Not too long after that date, I met a girl named Nancy at Flamingo’s. My aunt was out of town, so I decided to bring Nancy back to the house the night we met. Sometimes, when I think about it now, it was kind of creepy that I did that so often, but it never stopped me. In typical Melissa fashion, it was like, “Here we go! I got a new friend.” Nancy lived in Long Beach, and when I called her to go on a date, she said, “Come down.”
And so, I went down to Long Beach. This was in 1982, and Long Beach was beautiful. It was crisp and clean, bright and beachy. Everybody was tan and it was just California, and here I was with the palm trees, the ocean, and a new girlfriend. She had a nice little apartment. I liked that these women had their own apartments and their own lives and their own jobs. Long Beach was really a special time in my life. I definitely think that those were some of my happiest years. I was very free. I was just beginning on my career path. Everything was new. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I was still me, but a freer version of myself than I could ever have been in Kansas. I didn’t think enough about it to create anybody different, but I knew that, in Los Angeles more than anywhere else, I could be closer to the woman I felt I was on the inside. And then I discovered Long Beach. I could belong to a community. I was meeting new people and making lots of new friends. I had met most of them through my playing at the bars, so everyone thought of me as a musician. I wasn’t little Missy Etheridge, the different one, anymore. I was starting to become Melissa. And it felt good.
My first night in Long Beach, Nancy took me to a bar called the Executive Suite. Over in one corner there was a piano, so I asked the manager if they had live music. She said that they did, and she asked me to come back and audition. Of course, I came back on a Sunday and I got the job—five nights a week, playing during the cocktail hour, before the disco opened at night. It was, like, finally! There it is, there’s my living, and none too soon. I was down to nothing. I had no money left.
Everything I owned was in my car, which made it relatively easy to make the move south to Long Beach. I would stay at Nancy’s house. Nancy and I lasted for only a few weeks. Lesbians get serious, like, on the second date, but it was, yet again, a rather complicated situation. I was kind of seeing her, but Nancy was also seeing a guy. I so wanted someone to say to me, “Oh yeah, you’re it, boom! That’s it, everybody else is gone from my life.”
I met another woman and, a few days after meeting her, I packed up all my things, which wasn’t much, put them back in my car, and moved in with her. I left Nancy a note. Yeah … a note, which was just horrible. She knew that something was going on. I’m so bad at expressing my discomfort. I just close up. I have no tolerance for confrontation; I become emotionless. I just push emotions away. I could feel something for what seemed like a minute and then “Oh no, no, that’s not right,” and I’d leave and I’d never confront or take any responsibility if there was an issue. I learned this type of response from my family. We just turned it all off. We didn’t talk about anything. If there was any type of trouble, we’d sit there and act like it’s not happening, and that’s exactly what I did as I drove away, leaving my unhappy ex a note on the kitchen table.
Early on in Los Angeles and Long Beach, I used to call my mom from a pay phone and try to tell her that things were going to be fine with me and that she needn’t worry. But Mom was always hesitant about my desire to pursue music as a career. Communication was never our strong suit, and I finally sat down to write a song that would express to my mom how I felt about her, about leaving Kansas, and about being in L.A. I never finished it—I couldn’t find the right music. But the words were pretty reflective of what I needed to say to her at the time. I still felt that I hadn’t won her approval or her unconditional support. Though she’s inferred in a few of my songs, I have never written anything other than the following about my mom:
Goodbye, Mother, I realize
You couldn’t be here just to say goodbye.
I know you don’t approve of a songwriter girl
Leaving to be part of the Rock and Roll world.
If I could ever find a way
To tell you of my dreams
But Mother, someday
They’ll be coming to hear me.
Hello, Mother, it’s kind of hard to hear you
I’m calling from a booth in L.A.
Right outside a nice fancy club
The lady said that I could play as often as I like
No, Mother, it’s just for free
But some even come and listen just to hear me
I’d like to write you
As I’m sure you would me
But we both know how time is.
I found a club in Long Beach, Mother,
The money’s not too bad
I found a friend
She shares her house and her life
Even when I lay my guitar to rest
She still wants to hear me.
Father called, said you couldn’t really talk
But to tell me hello
And I got the bill yesterday
You forwarded in an empty envelope.
I played last night to a room full of ladies
They kno
w my name, Mother.
A lady hired me
And is paying me a hundred dollars.
She’d never heard me sing
But she knew they loved to hear me
They come from all over to hear
This girl sing.
Yes, they’re coming Mother, they’re coming
To hear me.
I’ve got people callin’ me
Askin’ me to sing
Some to manage, some to design
A girl who’s a star in some funny way
Sometimes it’s lonely surrounded by smiles.
The woman I left Nancy for was Linda. I met Linda the first night I played the Executive Suite bar in Long Beach, California. These two girls came in and they were very tan. Linda was wearing a white gauze shirt, which showed off the tan even more. Her friend Jill wasn’t as tan, but Linda was very tan—beautiful dark skin with long dark hair. She’s half Hawaiian, so she’s very exotic looking. I was, like, wow! It’s so funny that their tans are the first things that come to mind when I think about the night we met. I’ve always had a thing for dark and exotic-looking women. The night we met, Linda and Jill were pretending that they were French—speaking with these really cheesy fake French accents. I knew they were playing around, but there I was, up on this tiny little stage singing, and I thought they were great, especially Linda. I was new to Long Beach and didn’t know a lot of people, and they seemed like the kind of women I wanted to know. I was intrigued. At the time, I was staying at Nancy’s house. The next morning, the moment Nancy left for work, I called Linda. I went to her house, and we ended up on the couch making love. She was exotic, sexy, feisty, and full of passion.
The two things that she always said about that first day that I came over were: I parked in their driveway (I guess a lot of people, when they first come over to someone’s house, will park on the street. What did I know? I was just a girl from Kansas!) and I was looking at the books in her bookshelf, which she claimed really impressed her. She loved that. She’s a very literate woman, who was also a writer. Books were everything to her.
The Truth Is ... Page 5