Lady Gaga honors queer music icon Carl Bean and the legacy of his 1977 anthem, “I Was Born This Way” in an exclusive clip from the upcoming documentary I Was Born This Way.
In the film, Gaga, Questlove, and Billy Porter are among those who reflect on the song’s powerful impact on the LGBTQ community. “This song is actually the music equivalent of the Giving Tree,” says Questlove, spinning the track on vinyl.
The clip opens with the chart success the song, released on Motown, had in the United States, climbing to Number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and how it became an “immediate anthem for the gay community,” embraced by house DJs worldwide.
Gaga — who titled her sophomore album after her own Bean-influenced LGBTQ-celebrating anthem, “Born This Way” — reflects on Bean’s legacy. “This was so much more than just a hit song. When that song stopped charting, they didn’t stop playing that song in clubs,” she says. “And the movement didn’t stop.”
In the clip, Questlove adds that the track was “beyond a hit” and one that inspired hope and”revolution.” “It’s an anthem,” he says. “And anthems never die.”
“Anthems unify people. And they help us to celebrate,” adds Gaga. “It’s people coming together to say, ‘This is what we believe in. This is what we care about. We are louder. We are stronger. And we can do it together.’”
Bean would eventually leave the music industry, founding the Minority AIDS Project to help underserved populations at the height of the AIDS epidemic and eventually, the first LGBTQ+ ministry called the Unity Fellowship Church.
I Was Born This Way has been six years in the making and features Questlove, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Billy Porter as exec producers. Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard direct the film which will premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 5.
“This sequence in the film shows the enduring legacy of Bean’s song, and the film demonstrates his lasting influence in so many other surprising ways,” Junge tells Rolling Stone. “There are so many celebrity bio-docs these days, which I don’t disparage — Sam and I have made them — but I think the real joy of documentary is when you are surprised by things you never realized are an important part of our world… hopefully that’s what this film does.”
“Not only was his rendition of the song revelatory, but what he did over the decades with his activism for the LGBTQ+ community was both groundbreaking and heartfelt,” Pollard adds.
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Gaga has long credited Bean — who died in 2021 at age 77 but gave interviews for the film prior to his death — for inspiring Born This Way. Ahead of Pride Month in 2021, she wrote on Twitter: “Born This Way, my song and album, were inspired by Carl Bean, a gay black religious activist who preached, sung and wrote about being ‘Born This Way.’ … Thank you for decades of relentless love, bravery, and a reason to sing. So we can all feel joy, because we deserve joy.”
