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Hours before Adam Lambert hit the American Music Awards stage for a wild spectacle of a finale, he was already the talk of the red carpet. It seemed of all the divas performing that night — Janet, Whitney, Rihanna, Gaga: the ones who need no last name (or first) — plenty considered the American Idol runner-up to be queen supreme. “Don’t you wanna see what his hair looks like?” singer and presenter Melissa Etheridge cooed with tween-like glee. “And just how much makeup he’s gonna wear? Finally — finally! — we’ve got a real diva. I can say it.”
Adam Lambert shocks, Taylor Swift soars: the 2009 AMAs in photos.
But as countless pop and rock stars both gay and straight have learned, with the pipes and popularity often comes responsibility — whether it be to your fans, the media, the public at large or an organized movement. Lambert learned that early on in Idol, and the lesson was reaffirmed more recently when the editor of Out magazine chose to call out the Idol imaging machine (and Lambert’s apparent complicity in a make-me-seem-less-gay plot) in a scathing letter to readers. It too was a big topic of conversation during the pre-show and a heated one at that.
“I think he’s just afraid and so is his management,” offered celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. “It’s difficult because he doesn’t have that many people to look up to. There are only a few openly gay successful pop stars.” Said Etheridge: “We in the gay community, we’re never happy. We want everyone to say we’re like everybody else, but then if someone doesn̵...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily