Lady Gaga is opening up about a chapter early in her career where rumors spread she was a man — and why she never denied those claims.
The Oscar and Grammy Award winner said she was intentional not to take the bait surrounding the scuttlebutt about her gender.
“When I was in my early 20s there was a rumor that I was a man,” she recounts in an episode of the new Netflix series “What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.”
Gaga, now 38, continued: “I went all over the world. I traveled for tours and for promoting my records and almost every interview I sat in — there was this imagery on the internet that had been doctored — they were like, ‘There’s rumors that you’re a man. What do you have to say about that?’”
While she didn’t appreciate the line of questioning, the “Bad Romance” singer — known for her androgynous looks at the time — didn’t want a potential response to be viewed in a negative way.
“The reason I didn’t answer the question was because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie,” she told the billionaire entrepreneur. “I thought, what about a kid who is being accused of that who would think that a public figure like me would feel shame?”
“I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of the well-being of other people,” she added. “In that case, I tried to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way. I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point.”
The New York City native, and staunch LGBTQ+ advocate, said she’s “used to lies being printed about me since I was 20 years old.”
