It’s easy to make the time Cyndi Lauper struck out on her own sound dramatic. There was her hardscrabble childhood in Queens, her absent father — and the stepfather who paid her much-unwanted attention.
But Lauper already wrote the perfect sentence about her decision to leave home herself. It’s the first sentence of the first chapter of her 2012 memoir.
“I left home at seventeen,” she wrote. “I took a paper bag with a toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple, and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book ‘Grapefruit.'”
That was 50 million records, two Grammys and 44 years ago, but teen homelessness is an issue that has stuck with Lauper. These days, she’s focused on advocating for gay and transgender kids thrown out by their parents — an issue she raised at a Senate subcommittee hearing about youth homelessness Wednesday.
“Basically, the kids come out and they get thrown out,” she said, according to ABC. “Maybe there’s something I can do besides just being a famous person and singing to them.”
Lauper’s efforts to do something besides “just being a famous person and singing” go back more than a decade. She’s written a song about Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student whose killing inspired “the Laramie Project”; organized a campaign against the bullying of gay people at schools and workplaces; pushed for the passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act; and built a homeless shelter for LGBT youth in New York City.
But this is more than garden-variety celebrity activism. Lauper’s work is born of personal experience — and memories of when “the bathroom became a dangerous place” in her childhood home.
“I heard a creepy giggle and saw my stepfather’s pear-shaped shadow against the frosted glass,” she wrote of the day she saw her stepfather peeping in on her in the tub. “I even saw his crazy eye looking through the hole. It was too much.”
Though Lauper left home that same day, the experience wasn’t a new one.
“My sis and I lived most of our lives dodging pedophiles,” she wrote.
More than a decade later, Lauper, about to record her first solo record, “She’s So Unusual,” was faced with a unusual prospect: Should she record a song by another artist called “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”? The original, penned by Robert Hazard, wasn’t too promising: The “fun” of the song stood for “coerced bedroom shenanigans,” as the Atlantic put it on the 30th anniversary of the release of Lauper’s version. Lauper, citing her history with her stepfather in her memoir, said she was skeptical.
“So when you ask me if I knew that ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ would be a hit,” she wrote, “and I say I didn’t want to do the song at first because I didn’t think it was especially good for women, maybe you understand better why.”
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Her manager, however, said that, sung by a woman, the song would take on a whole new meaning. And Lauper came around.
“I said to myself, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll make an anthem!'” she wrote. “‘Maybe it’ll be something that will bring us all together and wake us up.’ It would be a movement right under all the oppressors’ noses, and no one would know about it until there was nothing they could do to stop it.”
This plan was accomplished with a few lyrical tweaks. Perhaps most important were the lines that made the song about more than just doing the nasty: “Some boys take a beautiful girl/And hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun/Oh girls, they want to have fun.”
“It was very blatantly feminist,” Lauper said. “… It doesn’t mean that girls just want to (have sex). … It just means that girls want to have the same damn experience that any man could have.”
The song became a juggernaut. It was nominated for a Grammy. Lauper became the first woman to have four consecutive top five Billboard singles. The unforgettable video — featuring the orange-haired Lauper prancing about New York and co-starring the World Wrestling Federation’s “Captain Lou” Albano as Lauper’s father — won an MTV Video Music Award.
Mission accomplished.
“‘Girls’ was engineered to be an anthem of women’s sexual freedom at a time when feminism was becoming a big part of cultural consciousness — and it helped set a template for how future stars would sing about social issues,” according to the Atlantic.
“For a minute, I made it popular to be the odd guy out,” Lauper said. “All of the sudden, the straight guy was the odd guy out, just for a minute — and that, to me, was justice.”
“Girls” was Lauper’s first, but not her only anthem. “True Colors,” from her second solo album, became a standard in the gay community. Lauper didn’t write the song, but she jumped at the chance to sing it when it was offered to her. A friend had died from AIDS the previous year, she told the website Curtains Up, and she sang to honor him. Years later, when she opened the True Colors Residence, her shelter for homeless LGBT youth, she put a plant for that friend in its garden.
Lauper speaks about her advocacy for the gay community in the same indignant, impassioned tone she used to argue for a feminist version of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.”
“Because I’m a friend and family member, OK?” she told the Huffington Post when asked what inspired her work in 2012. “Because I’m not gonna stand by one of my best friends and watch them be discriminated against and have all their civil liberties stripped down — or my sister or my cousin or whoever — and just stand there and shut up.”