The first time I saw Cher, I was six years old, sitting too close to the television in my grandmother's living room in St. Cloud, watching a rerun of the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour on a Saturday afternoon. She came down a staircase in a gown made of what looked like ten thousand tiny mirrors and a headdress of feathers, and she rolled her eyes at Sonny, and I decided on the spot that she was the most magnificent thing in the world. Twenty-two years later I have not changed my mind.

I'm Thomas Laprade. I'm twenty-eight, a pharmacist in Minneapolis, and this is my page about Cher: every era, every look, the night I saw the Do You Believe? tour this summer with three of my best friends, and, a little further down, what she has meant to me as a gay man. I'll try to keep the exclamation points to a minimum. I promise nothing.

The Eras

That's thirty-four years, from I Got You Babe to Believe, with number ones in the sixties, the seventies and the nineties. Not bad for a woman they've been calling finished since before I was born.

For Sonny

Sonny Bono died on January 5, 1998, in a skiing accident at Lake Tahoe. He was sixty-two. By then he'd been the mayor of Palm Springs and a congressman from California, and you could think whatever you liked about his politics, and I had opinions, but nobody who grew up on those reruns could hear that news without feeling it.

He was the one who heard her voice when she was a teenager and believed in it. He wrote the songs that made them. On the show he let her get every laugh at his expense and seemed to love her for it. They had a hard marriage and a long, complicated friendship after it, and she spoke at his funeral, and I watched it on the news that night in my kitchen with the sound turned all the way up. Rest well, Sonny. Thank you for her.

The Night We Believed

Wednesday, August 4, 1999. Target Center, Minneapolis.

Four of us: me, my friends Raymond Lovern and Eddie Allred, and Martha Cornish, who has been my best friend since the seventh grade and was the first person I ever came out to. Martha made us all silver sequin armbands out of a thrift store prom dress. Raymond, who is a CPA and the most careful man in Minnesota, bought the tickets the minute they went on sale and kept them in a fireproof box until the day of the show.

The crowd was the best part before the show started. Mothers and daughters. Gray-haired women in sequined jackets who'd seen her on the Comedy Hour when it was new. Teenage girls who knew her from Believe. Straight couples on dates. And gay men, more of us in one place than I'd ever seen outside of Pride, some in leather and some in chinos and a few in full Cher, wigs and all, who looked fabulous and knew it. Nobody cared who was who. That doesn't happen often in an arena in the Midwest.

Then the lights went down and the place screamed for a solid minute before she did anything at all.

I'm not going to give you the set list, because I was too busy to write it down and I don't trust my memory. I will tell you that she changed costumes more times than I could count, that every wig was a different color, that she sang the old hits and the new ones and talked to us between songs like we were at her house. When she sang If I Could Turn Back Time, Eddie, who has never sung out loud in public in the eight years I've known him, sang every word. And when the first notes of Believe came on, the whole arena stood up at once, all thirteen thousand of us, and I looked down the row at Martha with tears all down her face and silver sequins coming off her arm, and I thought: this is church.

We drove to a diner afterward and stayed until two in the morning, and I went to work the next day on four hours of sleep and counted pills with a smile on my face for eight hours straight. I still have the ticket stub on my refrigerator.

Why she matters to us

People ask, sometimes not nicely, why so many gay men love Cher. I can only answer for myself.

I grew up in St. Cloud, in a Catholic family, the oldest of four boys, and I knew I was different before I knew there was a word for it. I spent most of high school trying very hard to be invisible. And here was this woman who was anything but invisible. Who wore exactly what she wanted. Who was told over and over that she was finished, that she was a joke, that she couldn't act, that she was too old, and who answered every single time by coming back bigger. You can't imagine what that does for a kid who's hiding. It tells him that you can be laughed at and survive it, and that you can change your whole life and still be yourself.

I came out to my family at twenty-two, in 1993, at the kitchen table, the week after I passed my licensing exam. It did not go well at first. My mother didn't speak to me for most of a year. Then, in 1995, Cher's own daughter Chastity came out in public, and over the next couple of years Cher talked about it openly, about how hard it had been for her to hear at first and how she came around and stood by her kid. My mother read one of those interviews. She sent it to me with a note that said only, I'm trying. She is still trying. So am I. We're doing all right.

So that's why. Not the gowns, though I love the gowns. It's that she survived everything and never once apologized for being Cher.

If you're a parent reading this, a little lost: Our Son Is Gay: A Mom and Dad's Page was put up by two Milwaukee Catholics whose son came out to them at Christmas in 1996, about what they got wrong, what they got right, and where they are now. I wish my mother had had it in 1993.

On to The Looks >>
every era, every outfit, described in loving detail