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Lady Gaga continues to be the best.
Allow us to take you back to a very weird time on the internet. The year was 2011. The world was obsessed with all things royal wedding. Charlie Sheen was “winning,” but not really. Everyone had seen Bridesmaids in cinemas at least three times. And, according to countless online rumours, Lady Gaga was maybe, possibly a man.
The rumours had started a few years earlier after a 2009 photo of Gaga performing at Glastonbury with what some people thought was — well — an unusual bulge, began to make the rounds.
The rumours were gross — symptomatic of a society that still had (and in many cases in 2024, still has) unhealthy preconceptions about gender. The idea that a woman could be mistaken for a man was thought (by many) to be the worst, most embarrassing thing that could ever happen to you. But Gaga was ahead of her time. Refreshingly, she didn't seem to care.
The way he looks at her!
“We all know that one of the biggest talking points of the year was that I have a d***, so why not give them what they want? I want to wear a d*** strapped to my vagina,” she said proudly to Q in 2010. “I also carry myself onstage in a masculine way and sing in a low register. This is not out of nowhere, right? I want to comment on that in a beautiful, artistic way. How I wanna show it. And I want to call this piece 'Lady Gaga Dies Hard'.”
A year later, Gaga was asked about the rumour during an interview with Anderson Cooper in 2011.
“A lot of artists would have put out some sort of statement saying ‘This is absolutely not true’, but you have fun with it,” Cooper said.
“Maybe I do. Would it be so terrible?" she replied. "Why the hell am I going to waste my time and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis? My fans don’t care and neither do I.”
Now, Gaga has reflected on the frankly bizarre rumours in a new documentary, What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.
“When I was in my early 20s there was a rumour that I was a man,” Lady Gaga said to Gates in the documentary. “I went all over the world. I travelled for tours and for promoting my records and almost every interview I sat in — there was this imagery on the internet that had been doctored — they were like, ‘There’s rumours that you’re a man. What do you have to say about that?’”
As Gaga explained, the reason she didn't respond to the rumours was because she didn't want to indicate that there was any shame attached to being mistaken for a man.
“The reason why I didn’t answer the question is because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie and I thought: What about a kid who is being accused of that who would think that a public figure like me would feel shame?” she said. “I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumour was not in the best interest of the well-being of other people.”
Instead, she leant into the rumours to make a “disruptive point.”
As if we needed another reason to love Gaga.
