Whitney Houston’s intimate friendships with other women created rumors about her sexuality throughout her career. Now Robyn Crawford, known to be one of Houston’s closest friends, is releasing a book, A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston in which she “confirms” that she had a romantic relationship with Houston in the early 1980s.
In several interviews, Crawford says that she decided to tell the story of her alleged sexual relationship to Houston in order to “honor their friendship,” and offset the coverage that predominantly focuses on Houston’s drug addictions towards the end of her life. Several media outlets have been quick to jump on the speculation train and are covering the alleged relationship in problematic ways.
In an interview on NBC’s Dateline, anchor Craig Melvin urged Crawford to recall the exact moment when the relationship became physical; in many other contexts, borderline harassment. Crawford plays into the mystique.
“The first summer that we met was the first time our lips touched,” she said. “And it felt wonderful.”
Below are some of the headlines, some written in graphic detail:
What’s wrong with covering the possibility that Whitney was queer, and shouldn’t the LGBTQ community be exuberant at the thought of welcoming the Queen of Soul into our already giant repertoire of gay icons? The short answer is no.
Speculation about someone’s sexuality, if that person did not come out during their lifetime, is inherently disrespectful. It erases the fact that most people can love and receive pleasure in a myriad of ways but also do not wish to confine to the labels of “lesbian” or “bisexual” because of the violence and rejection associated with those terms. If— and this is a huge if— Whitney did identify as queer, we are taking away her agency and disrespecting any valid reasons she might have had for not being public about her desires.
One of those reasons might have been her religious mother “Cissy” Houston, who made a career as a gospel singer and currently leads a youth choir at a Baptist Church in Newark. In an interview on OWN less than a year after Whitney’s death, Oprah asked Cissy if it would have bothered her if Whitney had been gay.
“Absolutely,” she said.
In her novel, Crawford writes that Whitney feared their alleged sexual relationship would have negative impacts on her career, especially at a time when AIDS was associated with the homosexual “lifestyle.” If their relationship had been made public, Whitney’s career would likely have flopped in a decade when less than one-third of Americans approved of gays and lesbians. Nobody chooses to hide their relationships so we have to believe that Whitney had good reasons not to talk about Crawford— reasons relating to her own safety and well-being, reasons that we should respect after her death.
We constantly ask queer people to do the impossible: to be brave enough to publicly articulate their most private desires and also accept the rejection and assumptions that will inevitably follow. Anyone who does not do so is deemed inauthentic, fraudulent, “closeted.”
It is not Houston’s sexuality we should be scrutinizing but instead, our disturbing obsession with the sexuality of others. What is the point of gossiping about someone’s queerness unless that knowledge will inherently change our opinion of who they are? And if someone’s sexual habits will indeed change your perception of someone, then I have bad news: you’re homophobic.
Robyn Crawford’s decision to talk about her relationship to Houston seven years after the singer’s death is deeply suspect, even more so because she stands to profit handsomely from her book.
But if as a culture, we are ready to move past the tired trope of guessing whether someone was gay or not, we should stop supporting media that articulate people’s sexualities on terms not their own.
