Lesley Gore

I’m not going to claim that the music industry is no longer homophobic. I can hear the laughter from here if I did. But if you think it’s bad now, it must have been so much worse back in the 1960s. Hard enough to suddenly be hugely famous at seventeen. Harder still to realize in the next few years that you are in fact attracted to women. And it’s only 1966. Lesley Gore wouldn’t come out for nearly forty more years despite living in a relationship with jewelry designer and activist Lois Sasson since the mid-1980s. It’s lovely to note that there is a ring for sale on Sasson’s website called the Lesley.

Gore grew up in Brooklyn with her brother, Michael. Their father owned the Peter Pan Children’s Wear company. IMDb says Quincy Jones discovered her at a party; Wikipedia says her uncle, producer Howie Horwitz, gave him a tape. (Well, it just says “her uncle,” but I think this is a safe assumption.) Either way, Gore, a junior in high school, recorded “It’s My Party.” It hit gold, and it seems fans started camping on her front lawn. She would follow “It’s My Party” with “Judy’s Turn to Cry” and then the great “You Don’t Own Me.”

The change in what was popular left Gore behind. She said she would’ve been more successful if she looked more like Mary Travers, but there it is. She went to school—there’s a joke in academia circles to be made about the fact that she went to Sarah Lawrence—graduating in 1968 while still making appearances as a singer and recording. There is likewise a joke to be made about the fact that she appeared a couple of times on Batman, which her uncle produced, as one of Catwoman’s henchwomen. Something something sapphic something something, amirite?

Researching exactly what she wrote is, of course, deeply difficult. No one wants to tell you a lot of the detail on who composed movie songs. It seems unlikely to me that “Out Here On My Own” is the only movie song she wrote—co-wrote with her brother, actually, who won both for the score and for the song “Fame,” because the wrong song won as usual—but I suppose it’s possible. It’s a fantastic song, at least, and between it and “You Don’t Own Me,” which admittedly she didn’t write herself, that’s a couple of really solid things to remember her for.

I know that one of the problems with the queer community is that there are not a ton of elders. In part, this is the lingering effects of the AIDS epidemic, especially for gay men. But the effect of the closet is at least as big a problem. At least Gore was able to come out before she died and talk about what her life had been like. The Bridget Fonda character in Grace of My Heart (who performs a song co-written by Gore) is in part based on her, and she was when she was dying writing a Broadway musical to be about her life. What an interesting life it must have been.