Cher (49 page)

It was also an era where the editor of
OutWeek
magazine began regularly “outing” celebrities on the cover of its magazine. His name is Michelangelo Signorelli, and he made Chastity Bono one of his targets. “Michelangelo—whatever the fuck his name is—Signorile . . . so he wrote this article in
OutWeek
[magazine]. It’s a great article, actually, and he was right on the money, but it really pissed me off at the time,” she was later to admit. By presenting the facts, Chastity’s secret was open for further scrutiny.

“I got a call from my mom’s publicist,” recalls Chastity.

She’d gotten an advance copy of the
Star
and read it to me. My first reaction was, “Can’t we stop it? Isn’t there something we can do?” She said, “No, it’s done, they’re running with it.” My Mom was completely freaked out. She had warned me, “This could happen, be careful.” And here it happened. Before that I used to go out to the bars, and I would go out to gay pride events and stuff like that. . . . She always told me, “Be careful. If this ever got out, I don’t know if you could handle it.” But I didn’t think it would happen, because it had really never happened before. You didn’t have that shit before me (64).

Her first instinct was to deny the rumors. “Then the publicist had me do an article with the [
National
]
Enquirer
that said I wasn’t gay. So that was totally embarrassing, stooping to the level of giving an interview to the
Enquirer
” (64).

The February 13, 1990, issue of the
National Enquirer
featured the headline-grabbing cover story “Branded a Gay, Cher’s Daughter Chastity Fights Back—THE TRUTH ABOUT CHER, MEN & ME—Exclusive Interview.” In the article, Chastity is quoted as claiming,

I live in an apartment in Greenwich Village with two other women—but they’ve been my friends since I was a student at NYU and it’s a typical economical arrangement. I like to pay my own way and you show me a 20-year-old who can afford to live alone in New York. I date men. I don’t have a steady boyfriend—I go out with guys I find appealing, and I go out with them for however long we like each other (190).

“I lied,” Chastity recalls.

But at that point I didn’t feel bad about lying because I was just so pissed off that it even happened, that they were invading my privacy that badly. I lived in total fear with my shades drawn. I was being followed and hounded. No, I really didn’t have any guilt about lying. I was pissed. I hated the gay community. I was beyond angry because I found out that it was a gay man who leaked the original story. They were getting quotes from people in the gay community saying, “Oh, I saw her at this club.” This gay bar called the Cubbyhole had its bathroom wallpapered with my tabloids. They were selling T-shirts of me at Gay Pride [events] (64).

Chastity admits that she was horrified to learn what the press could legally do when it was printing stories about the private lives of public figures. Although she had been a public figure all of her life, this was all coming at her during a time in which she was struggling to find her identity.

Most people who are stars wanted first to be artists, and in our society we raise famous artists to the level of stars. Because you have a particular talent at something and are making a living at it, why does that give the media unfair advantages over you that they wouldn’t have over an ordinary person? I learned a lot about what the press could legally do when I was outed, because they couldn’t say the name of the girl I was with. They blacked out her face because she was not public domain. I was. I was the daughter of Sonny & Cher (64).

Throughout the early 1990s, Chastity became one of the tabloids’ most regularly covered celebrities. Among the headlines from this era are “Sonny Blames Cher for Daughter’s Gay Nightmare” (
Globe
), “Cher Told Daughter Chastity Filmed Lesbian Movie” (
Star
), “Cher Defends Lesbian Daughter” (
Star
), and “Cher’s Lesbian Daughter Chastity in Late-Night Catfights with Gal-Pal Roommate” (
Star
).

While she was busy denying all of the rumors, Chastity’s love life went down a tragic path. After she broke up with her first girlfriend, Heidi Shink, Chastity began an affair with family friend Joan, who was her mother’s age. No one was more surprised at the affair than Chastity herself. “Here was this woman that I had loved for years who had loved me,” she was to recall. “Our relationship turned romantic and sexual” (64).

Unfortunately, while she and Chastity were lovers, Joan became fatally ill. “Looking back on it now,” says Chastity, “I think that’s why it happened because she was going to get sick and she needed somebody who had the time and the love and the patience to take care of her and help her through and to get on to the next place” (64). Joan became very
sick in July of 1993. She had already been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins lymphoma once before, in 1989. Surprisingly, Cher was fine with Chastity’s relationship with Joan. She had gotten over her initial fears about her daughter’s sexuality. Recalls Chastity, “She was really cool. I told her, ‘I’m seeing Joan,’ and she started laughing. She said, ‘Well, I think this is going to be a very good life experience for you” (64).

While Joan was still ill, Chastity met her next girlfriend, Laura. “The first time I ever met Laura was at a Hollywood party. One of my dearest friends works with her at E! Entertainment. I was still with Joan, and Joan was healthy.” After Joan died, Chastity put her focus on her rock band. At one of the band’s performances, Laura reentered her life. “She was at a gig I played, and we talked a little,” Chastity recalls. “I was kind of ready to have something for myself again. She was able to talk to me in ways that my friends couldn’t—about what had gone on with Joan. She was so compassionate and open. At the time I thought she was an angel sent to me to get me through my grieving. It was an instant connection” (64).

Finally, by 1995, Chastity was tired of being hounded by the tabloid newspapers about her sexuality. On the cover of the April 18, 1995, issue of
Advocate
magazine, Chastity publicly admitted she was gay. With a relieved smile on her face, Chastity looked radiant on the cover of the magazine, which heralded its exclusive interview with the headline “Chastity Bono Out At Last.”

She said at the time,

I definitely feel that if k. d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls, and Janis Ian hadn’t come out, I wouldn’t be coming out now. I’m certainly too wimpy to be the first person on the block to do something. However, maybe my being one more person doing it is going to make another person do it. It’s like that silly hair commercial “Tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on” (64).

After Chastity had made her public announcement, she felt relieved of the burden of hiding her personal life. She became a contributing writer for the gay and lesbian newsmagazine the
Advocate
and later worked for organizations including the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). As much publicity and media coverage as Chastity received for her courageous pronouncements about her personal life, even more publicity was generated by her famous parents’ reactions. Ironically, it was conservative Sonny
who was able to handle it in stride, and it was Cher was felt upset and hurt by her daughter’s actions.

Cher even surprised herself with her strong reaction.

I think one would expect—I would even expect—for it not to make any difference to me, and for me to handle it easily. If you had asked, “Who will handle it better, my father or my mother?” no one would have said, “Oh, Sonny Bono is probably going to be the one who comes through it like a champ, and Cher is probably going to fail on all scores.” But, I freaked, and he was cool. I was also really upset that I was the last person to know. I felt stupid in that way, and I felt really fucked. I hated that everybody in the family knew but me (26).

After all of the nonconformist activities of her very public life, what was it that upset Cher the most, the fact that Chastity was a lesbian, or that Sonny knew about it first?

I don’t know that it was more than anything else, it was just that for so long I was hoping it wasn’t true, and then when it was true, I just felt I had done something wrong.
If I had been a better mother
. . . .—all of the stupid things that people from Ohio are supposed to feel, not mothers who are Cher, who have lots of gay friends and all that shit. As far as I was concerned, I really wasn’t supposed to feel that way, because it wasn’t liberal of me at all. It wasn’t really who I thought I was, but it didn’t make any difference. Those were my feelings and even though I am not very proud of them, that is what it was for me; that was my experience, and I cannot try to lessen it by pretending that it wasn’t. Nor am I ashamed of it. I was surprised by it. The reason I am not ashamed by it is that I was in so much pain about it, and I don’t really know why. But it was genuine, unbelievable pain (26).

When Cher was finally able to reconcile her feelings, Chastity interviewed her for a cover story in
Advocate
magazine. “Emotionally, I just didn’t want it to be the truth,” said Cher in the 1996 article.

I was talking to my friend the other night about this. I was telling him my reaction, and I was saying that I thought I would have had a much different reaction based on my so-called philosophy. But when it comes to your own children. . . . I think that whatever my reaction was, it was a disappointment to me. But that’s what it was. No, your being gay was not something I was hoping was a fact of life (26).

With all of the gay friends she had in her life, what were Cher’s fears based upon? “I don’t think gay life in the olden days was able to be nearly as healthy as it is becoming. I didn’t want you to have a deviant lifestyle; I didn’t want you to be breaking new ground. I think maybe some part of me that was real Americana was hoping you were going to get married and have kids—or not get married and have kids” (26).

Cher also voiced her concern that Chastity had opened herself to further prejudice. According to her, “Unfortunately, for a lot of people in America, when they think of gay, they think of drag queens going down Christopher Street [in New York City], stuff that is so over-the-top that they can’t relate to it on any level. If people have a hard time with the way I dress and look, it is very difficult for them to see grown men dressed like that” (26). Most of all, Cher felt that she had done something wrong in her children’s upbringing. “I felt guilty,” she claimed, admitting, “Both their childhoods were not exactly Betty Crocker” (24).

Chastity was also able to see the irony in much of what her mother’s life had been about, and had represented to millions of people around the world, both gay and straight. “My Mom got pregnant with me during a movie she made called
Chastity
,” she pointed out. “I’ve never seen it, but I hear that it has some type of lesbian overtones. Nothing overt, but it’s about a young girl discovering herself” (64). Cher had been surrounded by gay men and women all her life. She had even portrayed a lesbian on the screen in
Silkwood
. It was as though she could handle it in other people’s lives, but not her own daughter’s life.

Cher had been less upset when Chastity quit school after only a handful of classes at New York University. Said Chastity,

It’s weird because she’s an extremely educated person for having no formal education. Education, unfortunately, wasn’t stressed very much in my family. I think because they were so successful at not needing it, they didn’t see the point in it for me. Not having it worked great for them. Look where they are now. My Dad’s a congressman, and he doesn’t even have a high school diploma (64).

What infuriated Cher even more was the fact that the tabloids had forced her into a corner, and made both she and Chastity confront the subject in front of the countless millions of readers of the
Star
, the
National Enquirer
, and the
Globe
. “I’ve also had a problem with those newspapers,” admitted Cher.

The couple of weeks that that stuff came out, there were also some things that weren’t of as much interest to people—about Elijah being a Satanist, and a guy who cut off his ear and sent it to me. Fuck it. I’m tired of dealing with those people. It’s just so difficult to prove that they are doing it with complete malice. I’ll tell you something if Chastity joined the Ku Klux Klan, then I would be out of my mind. There are certain things that I think are bad and certain things that I don’t really care about. It would be a lot more important to me that Chastity be a good person than what her sexuality is. She is everything I would want her to be—sensitive, smart, talented. But it made a lot better story to say that I was out of my mind about it (8).

Chastity says of her own experiences of being a target of paparazzi photographers, “The first time my girlfriend and I were followed by street photographers, she wanted to bash them. But I said, ‘No. Then you would be the lesbian Sean Penn. Just grin and bear it’ ” (191).

Finally, Cher was able to get over her hurt and anger, and to accept Chastity as her own person and not as an extension of herself. Today, Cher and Chastity are closer than ever. Says Cher of her daughter, “[She is] one of the coolest people I’ve ever known” (24).

Looking back on her mother’s negative reaction, in 1997 Chastity was to state,

Now, I’m glad she reacted badly. People can more easily relate to it. They can say, “Well, even Cher had a hard time.” But she was able to get past it. I really believe a lot of responsibility in coming out is on the gay person’s shoulders. Often we come out and that’s it. We’re still not sharing our lives. Our parents have an “I know it, why talk about it?” attitude, so we exclude parts of our lives from them. To help the parents’ process, we have to share our lives on a regular basis. It’s amazing how it changes the relationship. When I was 18, my Mom wasn’t like a friend. She was a parent. As I became confident with myself, I started showing what I was doing, and our relationship became completely different. We’re friends now. We talk a lot. I had always thought we were just kind of different and didn’t understand each other. I didn’t realize how much of the responsibility was mine. I didn’t let her get to know me (191).