Earlier this week, Lady Gaga revealed on Instagram that her signature 2011 song “Born This Way” was inspired by Carl Bean, a famed gay Black activist known for his community work and empowering music in the 1970s.
The announcement was accompanied by a slew of photos over the weekend when Gaga received the key to West Hollywood, California. The city’s mayor Lindsey P. Horvath, declared May 23 “Born This Way Day.”
May 23 is the 10th anniversary of Gaga’s 2011 album Born This Way, which featured a power-pop title single that became a gay anthem. Perhaps the defining gay anthem of the 2010s. (Sorry, Katy Perry. “Firework” is still a forever bop.)
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Gaga said in her caption that Bean’s song “I Was Born This Way” was the basis for her classic. According to Vice, Bean released the Motown jam in 1977. Like Gaga’s version, Bean’s song is an unequivocal gay anthem, featuring the lyrics, “‘I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay/I was born this way.”
Gaga ended her Instagram caption honoring Bean’s legacy. “Thank you for decades of relentless love, bravery, and a reason to sing. So we can all feel joy, because we deserve joy. Because we deserve the right to inspire tolerance, acceptance, and freedom for all,” she wrote.
In addition to his musical career, Bean was also an AIDS activist and ordained minister. According to a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview, he founded the Unity Fellowship Church. “My ministry will always be a continuum of dealing with the disenfranchised, providing for the poorest of the poor, the undocumented person, persons who can’t speak the language, persons in and out of the prison system, kids out of the gangs...to touch those who are considered the untouchables,” he told LA Times.
Gaga isn’t the first to honor Bean’s contribution to today’s queer acceptance. As Ebony reported, in 2019 the intersection of Jefferson Boulevard and Sycamore Avenue in Los Angeles was named Archbishop Carl Bean Square. At the time, Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson praised Bean’s work with the Minority AIDS Project and Unity Fellowship Church. “He did this during a time when the resources and attention were focused on white gay men and not communities of color,” Wesson told Ebony.
In 2010, Bean released an autobiography also titled I Was Born This Way. In a 2009 interview for Simon & Schuster Books uploaded to YouTube, Bean promotes his book and recounts his reason for devoting his life to the ministry of the queer Black community
“I was determined that I was not going to sit silent and let them be ignored by the very institution that they have dedicated their lives to, which was the church,” he says. “So I decided to stand up and take the church on.”
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