aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 18, 2008

k.d. lang - Halleluja

RELATED: Ariel Levy says k.d. lang plays coy about her own iconography:

Lang has gotten big. She is more panda bear than mink now, with her salt-and-pepper hair and her vaguely Inuit eyes (lang was raised in a small town on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan, her is heritage Icelandic, Sioux, Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, and German Jewish), but she still has the unmistakable appeal of the unreconstructed butch. Or at least it looks that way to me. “You mean like the actual physical appearance of my person?” she says. “Is that what butch is? How do you define butch?”

Which renders me speechless. k. d. lang, king of the bulldaggers, is asking me what butch means.

“Okay, well, yeah, I am butch, I guess. In my physical appearance. When I show up at the White House and George and Laura just about have a heart attack because they can’t figure out who the fuck I am-or what I am-because I’m in a tuxedo, yeah. Or when every single time I walk into the washroom in an airport, even being famous, people … think they’re in the wrong washroom, yeah. I think about it.”

That’s coy?