In an interview with gay glossy The
Advocate to pitch her latest studio album, It's the Girls,
Bette Midler laments some of the changes in gay culture.
It's
the Girls, Midler's 14th studio album, is a
collection of girl group covers.
“My favorite thing about girl groups,
real girl groups, is that they put themselves together and they made
their own sound,” Midler
said. “It wasn't a producer that came along and imposed his
idea upon them. They came with their sound and then the producer
enhanced that sound. So a group like the Spice Girls – I know a
lot of people love them and I think they’re adorable – they just
weren’t for me.”
Speaking about the gay culture of the
70s, Midler said she misses the “extreme characters you used to see
in the Village” because “there was a feeling I used to get that
people were expressing themselves in the most elaborate ways.”
“Now the [gay community] has kind of
gone mainstream. It's sort of ordinary now, and a little bit of the
specialness has rubbed away.”
“It used to be the love that dare not
speak its name and now it’s the love that won’t shut the fuck
up,” she joked, then added, “but seriously, the great thing about
the gay revolution is that it has become ordinary and I’m happy to
see how far it’s come and to see the community be more at peace
with itself and, I want to say, more homogenized.”