Saturday Night Magazine December 2001

Rufus Wainwright: Musician, Opera Lover, Golden Girls Devotee

"My music is meant to be like an aria. I discovered opera when I was fourteen. That year, I aws coming out of the closet. I was going to boarding school in the United States for the first time and opera was the only music I could relate to. I used to sit alone in my room with the lights off, listening to Verdi's Requiem and my father would ask, 'Do you want to go toss around a baseball or something?' and I'd be like, 'No, I'm listening to my death mass.' I would go to the opera wearing clogs and a T-shirt and sit in the rafters by myself. But the best experience for me was going to La Scala, the most famous opera house in the world, in Milan, last year. My mother and I got dressed up in these gorgeous outfits and we still looked like street people in comparison to the Italians. They're just too elegant.

"My style- the skinny, flamboyant, not-afraid-to-be-gay look- isn't considered the apex of beauty these days, especially in the gay world. I'd like to make it popular again. These days, a beautiful gay man is one of those guys who works out and looks like he's from a farm. It's gotten to the point where you can't tell if they're straight or they're gay any more. If you had a sports bar next to a gay bar they would look identical. Everybody would be wearing baseball caps.

"There's a song on my album that's about living in the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles. It mentions a party I went to at Marilyn Manson's house where there was a big dining-room table covered in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and chips and really bad wine. And it mentions Bea Arthur because I watched Golden Girls incessantly when I first moved to L.A. Before I moved, I had watched Golden Girls with my grandmother in Montreal. It was a gay-friendly show because it was campy, but it was also about old ladies, so it was good for intergenerational bonding. My grandmother died right before I moved and, after a while, I started to think of Bea Arthur as my grandmother. I dreamed that I might be a guest star on the show. The funny thing is that I did this AIDS benefit in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few years ago and Bea Arthur was the emcee. I walked up to her and told her this long, drawn-out confession about how I thought of her as my grandmother and when I finished, she turned t ome and said, 'I'm not your fucking grandmother,' and walked away. I was rather shocked."