Lady Gaga’s Millennial Nostalgia Campaign

On the evening of Mayhem’s release last week, I walked into my local gay bar and prematurely ruined the bartender’s night. My friend and I, both millennial queers, were sharing our initial reactions to the album as we waited for drinks, when the nosey Gen Z butch tending bar interjected with an overblown “oh no.” A new Lady Gaga record, they explained, meant chaos for the night. Whatever drag queen or DJ was scheduled in the back room, it didn’t matter—the evening would devolve into “Abracadabra” on repeat. And they were not pleased.

Lady Gaga will never go out of style with the millennial gays, at least, and in fact she might be the last of her kind: the ally pop star, from an era just before being queer and out became perfectly acceptable for a diva. When gay marriage passed in New York state in 2011, I walked out of the Billboard offices on 8th Street and there was a whole-ass parade passing by, blasting “Born This Way” all the way to Stonewall. It’s just one of many recollections soundtracked by Gaga, sometimes not by choice but because she’s been around for the entirety of my adulthood, maturing alongside my generation. Other memories include: watching her perform “Bad Romance” on a then-new episode of Gossip Girl while pregaming for the pregame in college; seeing her scandalize SXSW in 2014 with vomit-soaked performance art involving a mechanical bull—and witnessing her romance a hometown crowd not even two weeks later as she closed down Roseland Ballroom; singing “Shallow” at karaoke so many times I lost my voice for 2-3 days; telling my unhinged landlord that no, I couldn’t help her kill a squirrel in the stairwell because I was drunk in Jersey at the Chromatica tour.