Grace Jones

What we need in order to properly categorize Grace Jones is an “icon” category. Film? Yes, she’s done film. TV? Yes, that, too. She’s written her autobiography, delightfully titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. Music? Of course. She’s tall, striking, and talented. Even if you’ve never played the video game she was in or seen any of the art created of her, she’s instantly recognizable. She is Grace Jones, and she is magnificent.

Her father did not want her to be who she was. He was from a strict Pentecostal sect in Jamaica that believed that music should only be performed for the glory of God. Jones has stories of appalling abuse and refers to herself as having been crushed by the Bible. The family moved to New York when she was a teenager, near Syracuse. In community college, she took an acting class, spent a summer doing summer stock, and moved to Manhattan. She dove into the counterculture, befriending Andy Warhol and working as a go-go dancer under the name Grace Mendoza, to keep her parents from finding out.

Jones is tall and angular and has cheekbones that could cut glass, and that’s what has drawn attention to her since she was young. Unfortunately, there has been an unpleasant current of exoticism underneath some of it. She was in a long-term relationship with Jean-Paul Goude, who helped create her image. His art shows a good eye, but it also uses some unpleasant imagery that ties to iconography of slavery and Jim Crow and so forth.

As with many entertainers, it’s that exoticism that has created some of the long-term fascination with Jones. A woman whom Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly called too tough. A woman who seems more fierce than long-term boyfriend Dolph Lundgren. And that intensely dark skin, of course. She is a powerhouse, and definitely one of the people in the category of “grandmothers in better physical condition than I am,” but she’s a definite icon in multiple senses of the word.

Her androgynous nature in the ‘70s created an appeal to gay men and made her the Queen of the Gay Disco. That, too, is part of who she is. She wrote a song called “Williams’ Blood,” a reference to her own maternal grandfather, John Williams, who toured with Nat King Cole. Her parents wanted her to be a Jones, like a brother who is the pastor of a megachurch. However, she instead felt the call of her apparently drinking, womanizing grandfather. Courting a gay audience in the ‘70s would have been part of that as well. Grace Jones is who she is, no matter what anyone else wants her to be, and a gay audience can appreciate that.