Liberation Music: CNP Honors Gay Disco Anthem ‘I Was Born This Way'
“I’m walking through life in nature’s disguise
You laugh at me and you criticize
Just because I’m happy
I’m carefree
And I’m GAY, Yes I’m GAY
Tain’t a fault tis a fact
I was born this way.”
According to the New York Times, I Was Born This Way, released in 1975, is “the first record to feature lyrics about being an out-and-proud gay man.” At face value that statement is significant, but when you look further, it has a much deeper meaning. Here’s the truth: Charles Valentino (then known by the mononym “Valentino”), a Black gay man, sang the first record to feature lyrics about being out and proud. The lyrics were written by Bunny Jones, a Black woman, in 1971. CNP plans to honor the legacy of this groundbreaking song in LIBERATION: Remembering I Was Born This Way—a two-part event kicking off in July.
A former owner of hair salons in Harlem, Jones founded Gaiee, an independent record label focused on producing LGBTQ music. According to a 1975 interview with Jones in The Advocate, she expressed how she felt that “gays are more suppressed than Blacks, Chicanos, and other minorities. You hear of great designers or famous hairdressers and that’s about as far as society will let gays go,” said Jones.
After partnering with musician Chris Spierer, the pair produced the song, featuring a then 22-year-old singer and dancer named Charles “Valentino” Harris. Before lending his vocals to the song, Harris was performing in a revival of the Broadway musical Hair in Long Island, NY.
After reportedly selling up to 15,000 records out of the trunk of her car, Jones’ big break came when Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, acknowledged the song was a hit. Jones struck up a distribution deal with the label, and Motown re-released Valentino’s I Was Born This Way, but not on Motown, on Jones’ original label Gaiee. The song became a hit in New York City, and became a #1 disco hit in London in 1975, but didn’t catch fire as Motown had hoped. About the public reaction to the song, Harris told The Advocate in 1976, “New York went up! It was great! My mother would turn on the radio and go around the apartment singing it. Oh, God! It was really incredible.”
Carl Bean, a former member of the legendary gospel group The Alex Bradford Singers, purchased a one-way ticket from Newark, NJ to Los Angeles. It was in L.A., that Bean’s demo caught the ear of Lee Young (who he affectionately calls “Pop”), the brother of Jazz legend Lester Young. Bean recorded and released his debut album, All We Need Is Love, with his band Universal Love, produced by Young, on ABC Records in 1974.
Bean, who’d been signed under the Gospel division at ABC, knew he needed to break free of the confinements of that genre to spread his message.
“I said, how can I approach the Blues division? Because B.B. [King] had put this thing out, ‘I like to live the love that I sing about in my song,’ and it was doing well. And, Bobby “Blue” Bland was on the label. So I thought, well, maybe that's the division that'll get me out of this Gospel hold,” stated Bean in an interview with CNPs Creative Director Johnnie Ray Kornegay III.
In 1976, Lee Young, Jr., the son of Lee Young Sr., went to work at Motown Records. Young Jr. was playing Bean’s music one day, and it caught Berry Gordy’s ear. At Gordy’s urging, Motown then approached Bean to re-record I Was Born This Way with a focus on the burgeoning Disco music market. Bean brought in the voices of The Sweet Inspirations to sing backgrounds, slightly altered Jones’ lyrics, and I Was Born This Way was re-released again, but this time on the Motown Records label in 1977. Bean’s Gospel-influenced Disco version became his signature song and his only release on the label.
For part one of CNPs event, Charles Valentino will join Kornegay for a conversation about the history and creation of I Was Born This Way. During part two of the event, Singer/Songwriter Kipper Jones will join Kornegay for a dialogue about Gospel music’s influence on Dance music. The conversation will be anchored by snippets of a January, 2021 two-hour phone interview conducted by Kornegay with Archbishop Carl Bean.
Click here to register for this important conversation about Black music history.
