Two years ago, Berklee’s commencement address was delivered by singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, who was a Berklee guitar major for three semesters beginning in 1979, and who reminded the graduating class of 2006 that “it’s not so easy being a musician.”
When Etheridge was the age of most college graduates, she said, she was playing in rough bars, with no discernable prospect of a recording contract. She was also dating a young woman—“you do know I’m gay,” she told the graduates—who was “kind of just coming out, and she decided it was time to call her parents and tell them she was gay.”
And she did. She telephoned her mother and talked about herself and described Melissa, her girlfriend, and she said that she hoped her parents would accept “that this is what I am.”
There was silence on the phone, followed by a disappointed sigh.
“We’ve always known you were gay,” the woman’s mother said. “But why do you have to date a musician?”
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