Lady Gaga recently opened up about rumors that proliferated early in her career that she had a penis — and explained why she never denied them.
Earlier this week, Netflix dropped its new show What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates. The five-episode series features conversations between the billionaire Microsoft founder and various thought leaders and celebrities about the most pressing challenges of our age. In its second episode, Gates tackles truth in the age of digital misinformation, and one of the experts he turns to is Lady Gaga, who knows a thing or two about how false claims and rumors can spread online.
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“So, when I was in my early twenties, there was a rumor that I was a man,” the “Born This Way” singer explains to Gates. “And I went all over the world. I mean, I traveled for tours, for promoting my records, and almost every interview I sat in they said, you know — well, there was this imagery on the, on the internet that had been doctored. And they were like, you know, like, ‘There’s this rumor that you’re a man.’ Like, ‘What do you have to say about that?’”
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As them notes, rumors that Gaga had — as one dubious gossip site put it at the time — “both male and female genitalia” seem to have peaked in 2009, a year after the release of her debut album The Fame. A photo taken that June during her set at the Glastonbury Festival appeared to show a bulge in her underwear, and the famously vicious gossip blogs of the decade used it to fuel wild speculation about the singer.
In August 2009, ABC News even reported on the rumors, quoting the pop star’s manager as saying that they were “completely ridiculous.”
But Gaga herself steadfastly refused to address the speculation. When asked about the rumors that she “had a male appendage” by 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper in 2011, she simply replied, “Maybe I do. Would it be so terrible?”
“Why the hell am I going to waste my time and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis?” she added. “My fans don’t care and neither do I.”
On Gates’s Netflix show, the 13-time Grammy Winner explained why she never denied the rumors.
“The reason why I didn’t answer the question was because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie,” she said. “But I thought about, like, what about a kid that’s being accused of that, that would think that a public figure like me would feel shame?”
“I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of, I thought, of the well-being of other people,” she added. “In that case, I tried to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way. I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point.”
“People assume […] that my performance is what’s not real. But to me, that’s the most real thing that you’ll see about me.”
Lady Gaga talks about how she’s handled misinformation in her career in What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates. Now playing. pic.twitter.com/legQm24FEA
