OUR HERO: MARY J. BLIGE FIGHTS AGAINST AIDS AND FIRES HOMOPHOBIC STAFF

I didn't know much about Mary J. Blige until this new Advocate article. I had no idea she loved the gays so much. She helps in the fight against AIDS, and will terminate any of her staff members she finds to be homophobic. Woohoo! Makes me wanna go buy her new album (If I weren't such a pauper that is!).

On her gay following she says:

“The majority of my fans are gay,” Mary says matter-of-factly. “The majority of them are, and I have to really make sure that they know I’m paying attention to the fact that they support me, and I support them.”

Asked at what point she realized that the children had made her their own, she immediately replies, “I realized that years ago. Like, probably during...was it Share My World or Mary? It was probably during the Mary album that I realized I had so many gay fans, because one of my managers at the time was gay and him and all his friends were die-hard Mary fans. And then there’s a lot of gay women that love Mary J. Blige -- a slew of gay women. And that’s never been something to bother me. Never. Because we’re all people at the end of the day.” She pauses for a second, then continues.

“When I was growing up,” she says thoughtfully, “my neighborhood was full of everyone -- black, white, Latino, gay, straight. A lot of people that I knew were gay, but they were great people. They were good people. It’s not like they were alien. They were just people. That [acceptance] was just something that was always in me. I’ve never been a judgmental person because I have been through so much hell myself…”

And on fighting AIDS:

In the fight against AIDS, Blige has done more than support from the sidelines. She has jumped in on our side. Longtime fans know of her involvement with AIDS organizations and awareness programs like Minority AIDS Project and her being a spokeswoman for MAC cosmetics’ Viva Glam III and IV campaigns. The death of her friend and songwriter Kenny Greene (who was responsible for many of MJB’s early hits, most notably “Love No Limit” and “My Love”) was her personal impetus for involvement in the cause. But it was noticing the silence around the disease that finally prompted Blige to take action.

“I was motivated,” she says, “by the fact that it came and was so huge, and then all of a sudden it disappeared, and it was the thing that everybody swept under the rug. It was the elephant in the room that nobody’s looking at. It made me be like, Oh, this is right at our front door. This can touch us. So why wouldn’t I want to get involved with something that can help save all our lives, save everybody’s lives? That’s why I wanted to get involved, because I knew that…” She pauses. “I had friends that… One of my gay friends that was a songwriter with me, Kenny Greene, was one of my really good friends and he died from AIDS. I was like…” She sighs deeply and falls silent before resuming the conversation. “And then everybody was just dropping off, dropping off, dropping off, but no one was saying anything.”

And, finally, on how she deals with homophobic staff:

“I’ve heard a couple of guys say foul things, and those guys are not around me anymore because when they say things like that, I’m looking at them like, What makes you so scared? You don’t know who you are? I guess it all boils down to them not being sure about themselves and what they wanna do, whoever that is. I won’t say any names. And I don’t dislike them or anything -- it just makes me wonder about them period. ’Cause if you’re not sure about that, then you ain’t sure about a lotta things!” she laughs.