I'm Coming Out

I'm not gay, but I too thought she was singing about "coming out of the closet." But when I learned that she was married to two different men and also has five children, that didn't really make sense. It could just mean she's going out on the town, or coming out of her shell, or just announcing her presence. Debutantes also "come out" when they are first presented at a society function...

You're actually wrong. Nile Rodgers has said in a recent interview that he got the inspiration to write the song while hanging out at The Gilded Grape, a gay drag bar in midtown Manhattan:<br /> <br /> “Diana Ross made this one famous”. He smiles, as I’m Coming Out leaps from the amp. Rodger’s in his best Diana Ross falsetto sings; “I’m coming out, I want the world to know, got to let it show…” Recalling the moment of inspiration for this song, Nile is side-splittingly hilarious. “I was in a gay club, and it was just after a show with Chic — I’d say it was early 1980 — I went to the bathroom and while I was there, I noticed three drag queens - all dressed as Diana Ross - standing next to me peeing!” The image is so outrageous, laughter suddenly fills the air. “I thought to myself, I gotta write a song for Diana Ross, she must be huge!” The single was written and to this day Ross begins every show with it, Nile tells us. One fan asks about the hidden meaning, in some of Nile’s songs, to which he replies, “The meaning of I’m Coming Out… That was the only song I ever lied to the artist about! Diana Ross asked me was it a gay song, and she was worried what that might do to her career, can you believe it?” He laughs, “All I said was, it’s like you’re ‘intro song’… When you ‘come out’ on stage, this is the song you come out playing — it’s like ‘I have arrived’!” He enthuses. “The record company thought a ‘gay song’ would be career suicide, so I kept quiet about that, but you know what Diana Ross’s biggest record is to this day…?” Rodgers smiles the smile of a man who subverted the clueless record label honchos and is met with more cheering and applause.

"The societal climate under which it was released ..." you mean the societal climate that gave us The Village People? The societal climate that had an openly gay network TV character (Billy Crystal on "Soap") and a character pretending to be gay on the top-rated show in the country (John Ritter on "Three's Company")?<br /> <br /> The general public might not have understood the implied meaning of the song, and Diana Ross almost certainly didn't, but you can bet your assless chaps folks in the disco scene did.

At the link above you will find an account of how and why the song came to be.<br /> <br /> We invest songs with meanings that are important to us regardless of what the creator of the song had intended. That's just normal human stuff. <br /> <br /> Either way I think the song is dope as hell. Great party music.

@Pancakemels ew.com/music/diana-ross-nile-rodgers-im-coming-out/

**However Diana didn't write it