Whitney Houston was the right face for the 1980s, which were ruled by MTV. She was called “a glamorous showgirl shaped by a Svengali” – the powerful Arista Records producer Clive Davis.
People always wondered if Whitney Houston was gay because they thought “she’s not black enough,” which means she must be gay even though she was married to a guy. So let’s look into it and find out if Whitney Houston is gay or straight.
Was Whitney Houston gay?
Witney Houston had a deep dark secret that she was a closeted lesbian. This is what author Gerrick Kennedy says in his new book, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston.”
Whitney hid her sexuality from the public because she felt pressure to fit in with her strict Christian training and the norms of the time. She did this until her tragic death, which happened 11 years ago on February 11, 2012.
“Because her music didn’t fit neatly into the boxes people expected from a Black girl making music in the 1980s, she was seen as not Black enough. She was made fun of. “She carried ‘Whitey’ and had to deal with a lot of talk about her sexuality,” the author writes.
Whitney grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Her mother, Cissy, was a faithful member of Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church and one of the Drinkard Sisters, a gospel-singing family.
The Drinkards played on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” which was a series of black clubs in the South where they played. Cissy was a star in her own right. She sang backup for the King, Elvis Presley, and the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
Whitney felt different even when she was a little girl. She was a girl who didn’t like her mother’s choice of pretty clothes and hair ribbons. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts and run track with her brothers Gary and Michael.
When their parents were at work and Cissy was on the road, the three kids lived with different cousins. Soon, Whitney was caught up in Cissy’s all-consuming desire to get her into the singing business.
“Cissy knew that Whitney was going to be famous, and she knew she could help her get there. She gave her a hard time in church and told her daughter to sing along with the records she and Aretha made. She didn’t put up with any crap,” writes Kennedy.
Cissy’s solo career didn’t take off, and even though she was in demand as a backup singer, the music business was unpredictable. Dionne Warwick, Whitney’s cousin, and a top-charting R&B singer, also helped the young girl develop her voice, which was seen as the family’s way out of poverty.
Also Read: Is Andrew Lloyd Webber Gay? What Is the Sexuality of English Composer?
Has She Ever Been With A Woman?
Yes, she was in a relationship with Robyn Crawford. In the summer of 1980 when Whitney, 17 at that time, was trying to figure out who she was. She worked as a youth worker at the East Orange Community Center in NJ, and she met Robyn Crawford, who was 19 and beautiful and thin.
“They became close almost right away, and they were never apart that summer. Kennedy says, “If you saw one, you saw the other.” Crawford was Whitney’s first close friend and partner outside of her brothers. He was always there for her and was “unwaveringly loyal.”
With Crawford, Houston could be the tough guy who liked to get high, smoke Newports, and cuss.
In the same year, Whitney and Robyn met in the Houstons’ sitting room. “Their mouths touched, tied together by everything they hadn’t said to each other. “That first kiss was long and as warm as honey,” writes Kennedy.
“It was free and honest, loving and tender,” Robyn wrote about her relationship with Whitney Houston in her 2019 book, “A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston.” “We both wanted to touch and explore each other, so we did that until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.”
Together, they laid out in the sun at the Jersey Shore, went to gay clubs, and made out in a rental car until a cop told them to move on.
Whitney went to Robyn’s college basketball games, and Robyn drove her to club shows. Robyn wrote that they also went to Harlem to buy a dime bag of weed and get some cocaine. “In a traditional sense, they were partners, but they never really talked about labels like lesbian, gay, bisexual, or girlfriend,” Kennedy writes.
“We were friends. We were lovers. We were each other’s whole worlds. We didn’t like each other. We just were. “It felt like we were one, so that’s what I wrote in my book,” Robyn said.
They planned the songs Whitney would sing and their future while they were in bed. Kennedy writes that they got an apartment together in the summer of 1980, and Whitney offered to take Robyn wherever she was going.
But when Cissy heard that the two girls were dating, she threw a fit and tried to stop them from even walking together in public. When Clive Davis gave Whitney a record deal, she knew the affair had to end because both the church and the music business were against gay people. She told Robyn the news.
Whitney told her sweetheart, “You know how I feel about you, and we will always have that,” Kennedy writes.
Must Read: Was Bob Lee Gay? What Was the Sexuality of Cash App Founder Who Died at 43?
Whitney Had to Marry Bobby Brown Just to Stop Gay Rumors?
Whitney Houston was married to her husband Bobby Brown from 1992–2007 and Whitney Houston welcomed her only child, daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, with husband Bobby Brown on March 4, 1993.
Now coming back to the story Whitney finally turned to Bobby Brown, a singer from the projects of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who liked the funk of James Brown and Earth, Wind, and Fire and started a group called New Edition.
His “loud, ghetto fabulous” black music made him the R&B king, and girls threw their underwear at him on stage. It made sense for them to work together since Bobby wanted to change his bad boy image and Whitney wanted to stop being called gay. They got married in 1992.
“White America saw a pop princess and an R&B thug when they looked at Whitney and Bobby…We called them “the princess and the frog” when we talked about how they got along. “That was the image that stayed with them for the 15 years they were married,” Kennedy writes.