SAUSAGEMAN
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And we listen.
“On my tour,” she declared, “I’m going to be in my bubble dress on a piano made of bubbles, singing about love and art and the future. I should like to make one person believe in that moment, and it would be worth every salt of a No. 1 record.” She dropped the accent for a moment now—the real girl, unartificed, was right underneath—and leaned in. “I can have hit records all day, but who fucking cares?” she explained. “A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, what ever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’ But how wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say, ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’ Because, for a minute, everybody in that room will forget every sad, painful thing in their lives, and they’ll just live in my bubble world.”
Though she may not be bisexual herself—of the many friends of hers interviewed for this article, not one of them recalls her ever having a girlfriend or being sexually interested in any woman offstage—her politics are inclusive, and she wants to promote images of as many sexual combinations as are possible on this Earth. Gaga says she’s a girl who likes boys who look like girls, but she’s also a girl who likes to look like a boy herself—or, rather, a drag queen, a boy pretending to be a girl. There’s little that gives her more pleasure than the persistent rumor that she is a hermaphrodite, an Internet rumor based on scrutinizing a grainy video. That’s not Madonna. Madonna wouldn’t pretend she has a penis.
At 11, she began attending a full day of acting classes on Saturdays. “I remember the first time that I drank out of an imaginary coffee cup,” she says, closing her eyes. “That’s the very first thing they teach you. I can feel the rain, too, when it’s not raining.” Her lids pop open. “I don’t know if this is too much for your magazine, but I can actually mentally give myself an orgasm.” She hisses a little, like one of the deviant vampires in True Blood. “You know, sense memory is quite powerful.”
She was still a good girl at school, even if she got in trouble with the teachers once in a while: not for short kilts but inappropriate shirts. “I was fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than I am now,” says Gaga. “I would wear shirts that were low-cut, and the teachers would tell me I couldn’t wear them, and I’d point to another girl who was wearing the same thing. ‘Well, it looks different on her.’ It wasn’t fair.” She shimmies her shoulders a bit. “At that time, my breasts were much bigger, and firm, and delicious.” (Another high-school nickname: Big Boobs McGee.)
Gaga started performing her songs with Starlight at small venues, and go-go dancing under a red lightbulb at Pianos—she’d wear a bikini and Luc Carl’s fingerless black gloves, too big for her small hands. Dancing, diet pills, and one real meal a day was the way she finally lost weight, according to a friend. “I was naked on a bar with money hanging out of my tits and ass,” she says.
“I believe that everyone can do what I’m doing,” says Gaga, spreading her arms wide. “Everyone can access the parts of themselves that are great. I’m just a girl from New York City who decided to do this, after all. Rule the world! What’s life worth living if you don’t rule it?”
