Key Sentence:
- Anamika’s mom wonder, seasoned-LGBTQ + album also come as a developing human way of life.
- Manufacturer Fernando Garni Bei and fanatics explain why.
I treated the release of Lady Gaga’s Born That Way as seriously as any unlicensed teenage girl: I asked my mother to take me to the mall to buy a physical copy. The tape was released on May 23, 2011, the day before my fifteenth birthday. The weather is a cosmic coincidence, but I can almost see that the CD is a birthday present from Mother Monster herself when I close my eyes.
I will not admit that I am a stranger to myself, much less to anyone else. I carry a large backpack full of textbooks every day, but my identity is strained as I walk past high school. At the time, I viewed my sexual orientation as an inevitable curse that would alienate me from my friends and family.
Like Gaga herself, I was born into an Italian-American New York family and raised in the Catholic Church, where homosexuality is far from accepted and often shunned. But Gaga took the religious image I knew and turned it into a twisted story of love (“Judas”), unforgiving joy (“Electric Chapel”), and provocative self-acceptance (national anthem album, pro-LGBTQ + title track).
If Gaga, who is openly bisexual and now a personal character, sees me as “beautiful in my way because God makes no mistakes,” why not me?
I found a new song to love, a new reason to laugh at the Mother Monster lyrics, and a clear lens to criticize. And as I’ve learned from talking to Gaga’s staff and fans who still value the album to this day, I’m not alone.
Born This Way follows in the footsteps of The Fame, Gaga’s 2008 debut album, and The Fame Monster, her theatrical, avant-garde successor from 2010. At the age of 25, the singer was bleeding to death at the MTV Video Music Awards, playing sold-out shows, and won five Grammys worldwide.
Inspired, Gaga used that moment of light to capture a more prominent shot of herself, something that speaks directly to the works The Little Monsters have admired for their provocative presentation. It’s the women who aren’t afraid to sing about sex that the “gay community” has shamelessly described as the biggest sensation of their career so far. “He became an icon before our eyes,” trusted songwriter and producer Fernando Garibay told MTV News.
