Lady Gaga: People told me my show was ‘too gay’

WHEN Lady Gaga first started touring, her critics believed her shows had one big problem.

Lady Gaga performs onstage during the ‘Joanne’ World Tour at The Forum in California. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

THESE days, Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters” come in tens of thousands to honour their idol.

But back when she was just getting started, doubters thought no one would bother showing up to her shows.

“When I started out, people told me, ‘Your show is too gay,’ ” she told a packed crowd at New York’s Citi Field on Monday. “ ‘No one is gonna come.’ They told me there was no commercial audience for me.”

Gaga has proven the critics wrong.

“They” were obviously wrong. On her Joanne World Tour, which began August 1st, she’s impressed fans and critics with superb choreography, a hits-packed set list and her ever-powerful voice.

In the first of two successive hometown shows, Gaga credited her time on the Lower East Side for her love of the avant-garde and joked, “Everyone [says my music videos] are so fashion ... and I’m like, that’s just what a party in Brooklyn with my friends looks like.” She also made sure to shout out friends and family, including longtime collaborator Tony Bennett, who was in the crowd.

Later, Gaga went into touching detail about the inspiration behind her latest album. Joanne (released in 2016), she told the crowd, was named after her late aunt, who passed away from lupus as a teenager before Gaga was born.

The singer recalled painful family dinners at her grandparents’ house in New Jersey: “We’d be sitting there eating, and ... my grandparents would start to cry and my father would get all choked up and would have to leave the table.”

With this new album, Gaga hoped to assuage some of that grief — by assuming Joanne’s persona. “Maybe I did become my dad’s sister to heal his pain. [But I’m] so glad that I did.”

This story originally appeared in the NY Post and is republished here with permission.

Originally published as Lady Gaga: People told me my show was ‘too gay’