February 11: Ari Gold

Ari Gold, the first gay American pop singer to be out of the closet from the very start of his career, was born on this date in 1977 into a Modern Orthodox family in the Bronx. “Inasmuch as R & B and Hip-Hop music scenes are sometimes considered homophobic,” writes Victoria Shannon at www.glbtq.com (the online queer encyclopedia), “Gold’s audacity in queering this musical genre is especially impressive.” Gold attended Yale and NYU before recording his first album in 2001, which included some explicitly gay songs. His singing and acting career goes back to age 5 and has included supplying girls’ voices for Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and for Jem and the Holograms, a syndicated cartoon. He was “knighted” in 2010 by the Imperial Court of New York at the Night of a Thousand Gowns, which raises money to combat HIV-AIDS; his newest album, Make My Body Rock, features his new stage name, Sir Ari Gold. To see him in action, look below.

“As long as my friends are being beaten on the street, as long as there are still kids killing themselves because of shame, and as long as we are still fighting for our basic civil and human rights, I will continue to shout from the queer rooftops.” —Ari Gold