Affairs, drugs and Elton John: Rufus Wainwright’s turbulent youth
He lost his virginity at 13, then fell into addiction. But the acclaimed musician has made peace with his past – and found love along the way.
‘There was a definite, unspoken prejudice about gay men in the folk world,’ says Rufus Wainwright, who tours Australia in 2025.Credit: V. Tony Hauser
At the age of 13, Rufus Wainwright’s life was transformed by two seminal events: hearing Verdi’s Requiem for the first time – and losing his virginity during the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis.
It was Wainwright’s mother, the late Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who introduced him to Verdi’s composition. “To this day, I can’t get over how beautiful and profound it is,” says the 51-year-old musician from his home in Laurel Canyon, California’s famed folk-rock enclave. “It’s such a powerful piece for me that I often break into tears when I hear it.”
Around this time, Wainwright – who tours Australia in January – began sneaking into nightclubs. He believes that McGarrigle and his father, American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, already knew he was gay. Even so, he didn’t tell them until he’d turned 18.
“They reacted horrifically,” he recalled in 2010. “There was fear, worry, shouting. I can’t blame them. If you were a gay male in the late ’80s, you were basically presumed dead because of the AIDS epidemic.”
The media-fuelled panic didn’t help.
“I thought I was going to die,” Wainwright says. “I was afraid to get tested. Every little zit and every little blemish was suddenly cancer in my mind. It was pretty much the dominant factor in my life until I was 30.”
Cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine, alcohol and crystal meth all took their toll, temporarily robbing him of his eyesight. His friend, Elton John, who had previously conquered his own addictions, convinced him to enter rehab.
Last year, when Wainwright turned 50, he released his 11th studio album, Folkocracy – 25 years after his self-titled debut earned him Rolling Stone’s “best new artist” award. His work spans pop, rock, opera, classical and indie; he has set Shakespearean sonnets to music; recreated Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert; and has written and performed a track for the 1988 children’s adventure film Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller.
Yet only now has he fully embraced folk, the genre that brought success and acclaim to his parents and his younger sister, Martha Wainwright.
“I gravitated towards opera, which has been a safe haven for homosexuals for hundreds of years.”
Rufus Wainwright
“There are two reasons that the timing felt right [to make a folk record],” he says. “The first is that I’d been nominated for some Grammy Awards but I’d never won, then I realised there were a lot of folk music categories, so I thought to myself, ‘I should just make a goddamned folk record and get my Grammy’.” (He lost to Joni Mitchell, which he considers an honour.)
“Then I spoke to my producer and my husband and we realised this is a really nice idea, and it made sense to return to my roots and revisit the sensibility that I grew up with.”
But Wainwright struggled to find his place in the folk scene when he was younger.
“How can I put this?” he says. “There was a definite, unspoken prejudice about gay men in the folk world [when I] was growing up. Lesbians abounded, but in terms of the more macho side of the form, there was always a lot of emphasis on, ‘How fast can you play this instrument? How aggressive can you be in terms of dominating an audience? How many beautiful, willowy folk goddesses can you seduce?’
Wainwright, pictured in 2012, says his late mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, ‘was rabidly interested in infusing music into me and my sister’.
“As a gay man and a young person, I felt like I did not fit in at all. I gravitated towards opera, which has been a safe haven for homosexuals for hundreds of years. But I think it’s changed and become more inclusive – it’s gone through a bit of a reckoning – and folk has quite masterfully managed to insert itself into different genres, whether it’s Americana or Beyoncé making a country record or Orville Peck.”
The artists Wainwright has collaborated with include Chaka Khan, David Byrne, Sting, Elton John, Miley Cyrus, Sheryl Crow, Susanna Hoffs and John Legend, among others.
Loudon Wainwright III.
“I’ve tried to maintain my standards and create something unique and special in terms of my vocal sound and my musical sensibility,” he says. “I think other artists have always gravitated towards that.”
Recently, he invited Bruce Springsteen to work with him. “I got a response saying that he’s thinking about it,” Wainwright says. “I’m just overjoyed that I can get a message to people like that and they’ll respond.”
When Wainwright returns to Australia in January, he’ll perform six stripped-back shows: just him, his piano and his guitar.
Kate McGarrigle with son Rufus at an event in New York in 2008.Credit: AP Photo
“Both my parents loved coming to Australia and were very much beloved there,” he says. “I opened for Paul Simon for a bunch of gigs once and when I was in my 20s I came over for those famous Leonard Cohen concerts.”
In 2011, Wainwright fathered a daughter, Viva, conceived via sperm donation with Cohen’s daughter, Lorca. The following year, he married German art administrator Jorn Weisbrodt.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
- Worst habit? Candy for sure, just like my song: “If I should grab jelly beans, have to eat them all in just one sitting.”
- Greatest fear? Civil war. The idea that it could never, ever happen in America is pretty foolish. We certainly have all the ingredients!
- The line that stayed with you? “What comes from the heart goes to the heart” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
- Biggest regret? I never took dancing lessons; if I had, my ass would have been even more incredible!
- Favourite book? It changes but right now it’s Herzog by Saul Bellow.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? Miss Otis Regrets, lyrics and music by Cole Porter.
- If you could time travel, where would you go? I’d be interested in meeting this guy Jesus that everyone’s been talking about.
“I’d never been in a serious relationship until Jorn,” he says. “I had a lot of affairs; a lot of dramatic mini-break-ups and big beginnings with a quick ending. But with Jorn, we both knew we could serve each other in so many different ways, whether it’s through our attraction to each other, our ambition, or our common love of things like opera and art and culture. We make a good couple at dinner parties, but I think the most important thing with any partner is that it has to work on several levels – not all of them, but a good handful at least.”
The year before Viva’s birth, Wainwright’s mother died of clear-cell sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. He credits her with instilling a deep and enduring love of music in her two children. “When I was a toddler, if I started singing a tune, she’d immediately jump to the piano to figure out the chords,” he says. “She was rabidly interested in infusing music into me and my sister. She recognised early on that we had the talent and the desire and she just ran with it.”
Wainwright was three when his parents divorced, and he and Martha spent most of their youth with McGarrigle in Montreal.
Becoming a dad, he says, deepened his affection towards his own parents.
“You have all these memories of being a teenager and telling them to shut up, and that’s quite brutal when you’re on the other side of the equation,” he says. “I’ve found myself wanting to be kinder to my dad because I know how wonderful it is to feel that unconditional love.
“And my sister and I are so fortunate to have our mother’s recordings and her songs that we can sing ourselves. It instantly transports us back to her and we can feel her presence. It’s a really powerful gift.”
Rufus Wainwright plays at Fremantle Arts Centre in Perth on January 4; The Sydney Opera House on January 8; Melbourne Recital Centre on January 10 and 11; Odeon Theatre in Hobart January 12; The Tivoli in Brisbane on January 14. frontiertouring.com