Journey to Chromatica, Part 1: The Fame

An expedition to self-discovery through the music of Lady Gaga

In the summer of 2008, I was fourteen years old. Everything was changing at a rapid pace — every summer passes in the blink of an eye when you’re a teenager. I vividly remember so much and yet even more things are buried deep in murky half-memories. I can close my eyes and see complete pictures of moments, down to the detail. Other things are only a feeling, but they’re wrought with emotion.

There was a day in the middle of August when my family spent the afternoon helping my sister move into her dorm room to begin her first year at college. I barely remember how it went. There’s a blur of moving bodies and college dorm knick-knacks bought at Target. Large plastic tubs filled with books and clothes and hangers and shoes. The glow of the dorm lobby’s Vitamin Water vending machine staring back at me. The sharp, visceral pang of anxiety I had every time I heard anyone say the name of the dormitory: Gay Hall. That feeling you have when you’re a teenager that people in college are so much older and wiser than you, and they’re all looking at you, some random kid brother who’s here to say goodbye to his sibling.

But I remember that morning. I woke up an hour and a half before the alarm was supposed to go off to wake us all up. Bright yellow sunlight was flooding into a dingy, ground-floor motel room through thin curtains. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep so I reached for my first-generation iPod Touch that was laying on the floor beside the bed. I wanted to listen to The Fame. It was the only thing I had listened to on our five-hour drive from Bismarck, North Dakota to the tiny college town of Morris, Minnesota. The album had leaked a couple of weeks before its August 19th Canadian release (a whole two months before it was scheduled for release in the US), and I was already obsessed with it after spending the better part of the summer cycling between “Just Dance” and a leaked demo pack of scrapped album tracks like “Dirty Ice Cream” and “Rock Show.” It was just so…pop. Lady Gaga was completely unabashed in her mission statement. She was confident, bawdy, sexy, and she knew what she wanted. I, however, did not.

And I remember that evening. We said our goodbyes to my sister after a for-family-and-new-students barbecue on one of the lawns at her school. My dad, my mom, and I piled in our family’s SUV along with the now-empty plastic tubs and our overnight luggage. I sat in the backseat as we drove the five hours home, listening to The Fame the entire time. My sister wasn’t going to be there when we got home. There wouldn’t be someone to laugh with, joke with, and drive around with. There wouldn’t be anyone I could tell my secrets to who I knew would keep them secrets until I was ready to tell them. So, I sat in the backseat, hurtling towards home, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been out of the closet for a month. Every single thing was different now.

A couple of weeks later, I started my last year of middle school. In North Dakota, the schools used to be organized so middle school was grades seven through nine, with kids moving to their new high school at the start of their sophomore years. Grades seven and eight were essentially two full years of torment for me — literally, from the very start.

The first day at Horizon Middle School (go Huskies!), I was an anxious mess. I was terrified of having a locker to open, finding the right classrooms, and meeting new people. Funnily enough, the whole “will they know I’m…different” thing took a backseat to every other first-day jitter. That is, until the end of that first day. As I was putting my books away in my locker and getting ready to head outside to go home, a boy I had never met who wasn’t even in any of my classes walked up to me, leaned on the locker beside mine, and asked me: “Hey, are you a faggot?”

Fuck.

A blur again. I remember how my heartbeat felt as it thumped against my chest. I remember stammering a “no.” I remember I started to shake while putting things into my backpack. I remember getting one glance at Andre Pagan’s face after I told him no, closing my locker, and walking away as fast as I could. The next thing I remember, I was at home and crying in my bedroom.

This kind of thing continued over two years. I had books knocked out of my hand by Sean Davis while he called me a faggot. The classically trite “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” line yelled at me while I was walking up the stairs. Whispers and lingering stares. People pointing at me from across classrooms. Older boys in the grades above me sexually harassed me in the locker room while I was trying to change after gym class. They’d get close to me and tell me that I wanted to suck their dick before doubling back with threats to bash my face in if I kept looking at them.

I didn’t tell my parents about any of this happening for a long time. Some of it they still don’t know. None of my friends ever came to my defense whenever it happened. And kids are smarter than people give them credit for, it was all done in quiet corners when no adults were around to intervene. By the end of eighth grade, my self-worth was almost entirely depleted. I had no desire to continue being tormented every single day for another year. On top of all of that, I wasn’t even out. Preserving the secrecy of your identity from the world is one of the most exhausting things a human can do. Living through every day steeped in a lie is not a real life.

So, that summer I made a decision. I was going to come out.

If I didn’t come out I was going to die. There was no way that I would be able to live every single day being tortured at school and then coming home to exist with a soul-crushing secret. I had stopped envisioning any kind of future for myself beyond my current circumstances. It was a choice to live or to die, so I thought I would give living a shot first.

In June 2008, I told my sister, who assured me that nothing had changed about her love for me and that she would keep it a total secret until I was ready to tell our parents. In retrospect, I’m sure it wasn’t a shock to her. After all, for my birthday earlier that month, I had asked her for a copy of Madonna’s Hard Candy. It wasn’t difficult math to do.

One month later I woke up one morning and immediately began to sob. I just knew that it was the day. I went to my mom and begged and pleaded with her to cancel my clarinet lesson that morning because I had something to tell her, but I couldn’t say it yet. I spent the day with my stomach in knots and eventually went to her room, sat on the bed with her for what felt like hours but was probably actually about twenty minutes, and eventually blurted out, “I’m gay.”

My mom always had an inkling. She told me that when I came to her that morning she had suspected this was what I wanted to tell her. “After all,” she told me, “you used to love putting on all of the jewelry from your sister’s Pretty Pretty Princess game.”

I asked my mom if she could tell my dad on my behalf. Something inside me was too scared to tell him directly, which I still don’t understand. My dad is the most kind, loving man in the world and no part of me thought this revelation would incite any kind of outburst from him, especially after my mother’s sweet response. I just couldn’t do it. And frankly, I don’t really remember any specific conversation I had with him about it that summer. It just sort of…was. My family accepted me with open arms and loving hearts. The unbearable weight of living in a lie had been lifted from my shoulders, and for the first time in years, I felt some fucking levity.

Then Lady Gaga came along. The Fame’s hypnotic pop melodies grabbed me from the very beginning. It’s an album about living a fantasy; a record of excess delusion that encourages the listener to craft their reality and ideas of personal fame to dance along with Gaga. And then, of course, there was her fashion! Leotards paired with blunt-banged blonde wigs, hair bows, dresses that had geometric plastic shapes sewn on, studded sunglasses, disco sticks. She never looked quite the same twice, and although I wasn’t ready to dress in a way that would call any more attention to myself than there needed to be, I was so in awe of her ability to transform herself with every new appearance. It was high fashion meets DIY aesthetics; she was like a hyper-assured pop alien and so completely human at the same time. She was just fucking weird, and for the two years before her debut, all anyone told me was that being weird or being different was the absolute worst thing you could be.

This idea Gaga was pushing — that you could manifest your superstardom by being nobody other than yourself — was exactly what I needed to survive my last year of middle school and to ultimately start being happy in my new, true life.

Going back into the halls of hell for ninth grade was made so much less terrifying by constantly repeating the mantra of “Just Dance” in my head: it’s gonna be okay! And miraculously it was. Gaga’s star was blowing up, and the most popular musician in the world was unapologetically and openly bisexual and constantly using her platform to be outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. I felt confident walking into school every morning — I wasn’t afraid to be myself anymore and I wasn’t afraid of anyone else. I dared people to try me. I was tall, chubby, and filled to the brim with years of gay rage. But besides that, it didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me because, at the end of the day, Gaga loved me, as cringe-worthy as that may sound now.

One year later, after taking the stage to accept her Best New Artist award at the VMAs following the historic and iconic “Paparazzi” performance where she bled to death on stage, Gaga removed her red lace Alexander McQueen face covering, held up her award, and proclaimed, “it’s for God and for the gays!” It felt like she was speaking directly to me. Me, who was sitting on the couch sick with a sore throat and trying to finish his geometry homework on a Sunday evening. Still couldn’t tell you how to work a protractor.

The Fame was the beginning of what I now know is a lifelong love and dedication to Gaga and her music. It came at a time in my life where I needed it more than anything, something that has shown itself to be a pattern with every Gaga release. With every record and album era that has followed, it has felt like my old friend Gaga is giving me something I desperately need at that moment.

Her music has scored the last twelve years of my life. It has followed me from fresh-out-of-the-closet baby gay to pop obsessive to near-suicidal high school junior to New York newbie desperate to find himself. It has scored my brightest days and my darkest, drunkest nights. It has brought me back from the brink of destruction when I thought the only happiness left for me was going to be found at the bottom of a bottle — and I don’t care how cliché that is because it’s simply the truth. Lady Gaga’s music and career and love saved me from myself many, many times over. She has seen me through abusive relationships, deaths of loved ones, near-alcoholism, shitty retail jobs, a hospital bed, unrequited love, and a lot of late-night chicken sandwiches procured by my beloved old college roommate.

I can’t thank her enough for what she has done for me. So, I thought in honor of the masterpiece that is Chromatica — an album that feels like the culmination of every emotion and trauma and joyful moment I’ve experienced up to now — I would write about my journey to self-discovery through her music. So, strap in! We’re taking off soon for the world of Chromatica. And, much like Gaga’s own career trajectory, it’s only going to get crazier from here.