Beyoncé Is Her Own Category

Renaissance wears its muses like a sequined revolution honoring Black queer imagination.

- By Craig Jenkins

RENAISSANCE

BEYONCÉ. PARKWOOD

ENTERTAINMENT/ COLUMBIA RECORDS.

NILE RODGERS got a million-dollar inkling in 1979 when he stepped into the bathroom at the Gilded Grape, the legendary mob-owned drag bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, home to a colorful cast of regulars including Andy Warhol. The place, Rodgers would later recall in his 2011 autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, was packed with Diana Ross impersonators. “Suddenly it dawned on me that Diana was an iconic figure in the gay community,” wrote Rodgers, who had just agreed to write and produce Ross’s next album. He met with his Chic bandmate Bernard Edwards and hatched a plan “to have Diana talk to her gay fans in a slightly coded language.” Nearly ten years into her solo career, the ex-Supreme was searching for a team to tailor songs to her lived experiences after years of vocalizing her songwriters’ stories. Calling Rodgers and Edwards yielded “Upside Down,” her first No. 1 hit in four years, and “I’m Coming Out,” in which Ross signals artistic rebirth while blessing the Gilded Grape girls with a message of pride and power that girded the community through a decade of death and disenfranchisement as the aids crisis claimed gay men, the U.S. government dragged its feet, and far too many Americans wondered whether this was divine retribution for going against biblical wisdom.