Why Canadian music icon k.d. lang is an 'an exemplar of lesbian excellence'

Consummating the obsession implicit in her band’s name, lang employed Cline’s former producer Owen Bradley, who reunited her studio musicians on lang’s “Shadowland” to revive bygone country and cabaret for 1988.

On the title cut, a previously discarded song so difficult Bradley considered it “unsingable,” the narrator drifts in a post-love limbo — not dead, yet trapped behind her torch. Gliding without gaps between her mezzo-soprano and falsetto in a way ordinary singers cannot, lang occupies this sensual purgatory, making it seem delightfully deluxe, as LGBTQ artists so often do. Likewise navigating between staginess and sincerity, lang combines country, blues, rock, and jazz in the same way she unites tinsel and torment. For some this made her as impure as Freddie Mercury, and similarly polarizing. The night I first saw lang, when she opened for Chris Isaak in 1987 at NYC’s Bottom Line and blew my gay mind, my straight Village Voice editors felt she was contrived. If this country Canadian lesbian with soul vocal clarity, a postmodern sense of quotation, and a cowpunk band baffled intellectual New Yorkers, Middle America was likely to condemn her to the queer margins.

A month after moving to San Francisco, I reviewed lang at the Fillmore on New Year’s Eve 1988. Surrounded by her people, free to camp it up yet be authentic, lang radiated the gusto she brought to ”Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.” This crowd didn’t respond politely, like at the Bottom Line. They greeted her as if she were what they’d been waiting for: an exemplar of lesbian excellence — a dykon. Starting my life over in gay mecca during a gay plague soon proved problematic, but the community that night made those challenges worthwhile.

Having grown up in rural Alberta’s prairie, lang grapples with who she is and where she finds her truth on 1989’s “Absolute Torch and Twang.” She locates the latter in the wide-open spaces conveyed by capacious tracks such as “Trail of Broken Hearts” and “Pullin’ Back the Reins,” which recall Jimmy Webb’s vast expanses of melody for Glen Campbell. “Big Boned Gal” salutes her bonny self in the third person with a whoop that is similarly voluminous. When lang sang it live, the elation of female fans who’d never heard themselves musically venerated made it even more festive. She was them, and they were her.

Yet Nashville barely noticed that “Twang” snagged a country Grammy. As before, lang didn’t receive US airplay proportional to her artistry or sales. And when in 1990 she kissed a cow, identified as a vegetarian, and supported animal rights in a PETA ad, the meat and country music industries flipped out. “That’s not what I call ladylike,” said one Kansas broadcaster. Clearly his beef went beyond her beliefs.

lang’s courage continued through her participation in “Red Hot + Blue,” 1990’s eminent AIDS benefit album of Cole Porter covers that launched the Red Hot series of compilation albums and related media. Unlike the contributions from U2 and Neneh Cherry, lang’s rendition of “So in Love” doesn’t diverge from the gay songwriter’s Broadway base. The update came in its video, in which at first she’s merely doing laundry. When lang pulls a slip out of a sink and gives it a kiss, it’s implied that the character she’s playing is mourning a female lover who just passed from AIDS and that she may also have HIV. “I’m yours ’til I die!” lang belts at full throttle in the heart-wrenching final shot, in which she looks squarely at the camera as if to her departed, while the lighting grows nightmarish and then radiant, reflecting both her turmoil and allegiance. No other music video reveals more about the epidemic.

Having further asserted her masculinity in 1991’s “Salmonberries” — a dreamlike film by “Bagdad Cafe” director Percy Adlon, who’d also created her “Red Hot” clip — lang explores her womanhood throughout 1992’s “Ingénue.” Its femininity suggests not only her heart’s permeability but also her love object’s gender. “Watch over me with a mother’s eyes,” she sighs on its Joni Mitchell-esque opener “Save Me” — not words one sings to a guy.

Elsewhere, “Ingénue” brings interiority. Like countless other queer musicians, lang had been privately out for ages, but she still masks herself reflexively: Her heart hides what “The Mind of Love” reveals. “Outside Myself” testifies that she’d been fearful so long she’s nearly numb. These and other diaphanous songs linger in that same shadowland between thought and action. For an extroverted presence like lang, such restraint amplifies her allure. In real life, she’d been pining for a married woman. The entire album feels designed to will this gal out of another’s arms and into hers.

All that desire coalesces on the final track, “Constant Craving,” in which lang conjures yearning of galactic scale. Forbidden to marry each other or have children without a heterosexual pretext, generations of gay people had no choice but to turn away from the life force that populates the planet. lang does the opposite. She’s saying that despite all her fretting on the previous nine tracks, she resolves to stand tall in perpetual thirst and never falter. “Always someone marches brave / Here beneath my skin,” she blazes. Leaning into key notes and holding one after the other without the slightest wavering of pitch or power, she transmits her devotion’s steadiness. Not only channelling that élan vital of which she sings, lang embodies it. Nothing will stop her from loving her likely unobtainable beloved.

We know “Constant Craving” comes from a specifically queer place, but it also captures urges so comprehensive that the song’s universal appeal cut through what happened next. Three months after “Ingénue”’s release, lang came clean. “I don’t want to be out like Phranc is out,” she admitted in The Advocate. Some today might consider that cowardly, but would you be willing to be pelted with pennies while you’re performing? Having already weathered the PETA backlash, she understandably feared another.

Instead, “Constant Craving” became a Grammy-winning breakthrough after her announcement — an achievement akin to the success of “Ziggy Stardust” two decades earlier in the wake of David Bowie’s proclamation of bisexuality at its launch. Like many songs in this book, “Constant Craving” set a cultural benchmark far higher than its US pop chart position — thirty-eight, despite protracted radio play — and that helped “Ingénue” go double platinum.

“I feel this great emancipation,” lang told me in a 1992 interview on the heels of her Advocate cover story, “a lot closer to my audience than I ever have before.” This reward was profound. “‘Ingénue’ was about totally releasing what’s inside of me and not being concerned with the industry at all.” Its success exemplifies that if the right LGBTQ artist defies those who tell them they mustn’t be themselves or talk about their identity, they can create artistic verities that society thinks it doesn’t want but has been itching for all along.

Rather than exploiting this shift, lang continued bucking convention. Although superior to the substandard 1993 Gus Van Sant film it scored, lang’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” soundtrack received much of its exposure through house-remixed LGBTQ club hits. Fully eschewing country, 1995’s “All You Can Eat” adds R&B flavours alongside alt-pop so suave it masquerades as easy listening. Paradoxically, not even that radio format played this or any other subsequent lang record in the US.

We didn’t need radio play to keep buying lang. Both “Eat” and 1997’s “Drag” — a left-field cabaret concept album forged from covers of songs about smoking and addiction — went gold. With 2000’s “Invincible Summer,” she trades the saturnine frost of her post-country records for sunny West Coast pop, especially on “Summerfling.” Here, lang is as disencumbered by love’s potential as she’d elsewhere been hobbled, and in its Bruce Weber-y video, she wakes up with a woman beside her.

To observe her landmark’s twenty-fifth anniversary, lang revisited “Ingénue” in full. At Stanford University, where I saw her, all the big-boned gals stayed in their seats. Then in her fifties, lang resembled latter-day Wayne Newton, not early Elvis, P. or C. Accordingly, she didn’t perform the album as she did at age thirty. Instead, its liminal songs grew less physical, more spiritual. Having learned as a Buddhist to live in her uncertainties, lang greeted them with equanimity. Reconciling and amalgamating her conflicting sides, lang sang as if she were freedom itself.

This is why the ease of lang’s croon remains insurgent. It reminds the world that lesbians can be sanguine and fulfilled. Even today, women like her are told the right man will “fix” them. Nothing about that voice suggests she is in any way broken.

From “Mighty Real” by Barry Walters, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Barry Walters.