Review: Memoir "I Was Born This Way" Recounts Improbable of Life of Disco Hits and AIDS Activism

Talk about unlikely disco hits!

Back in 1977, a singer named Carl Bean had an unlikely hit called "I Was Born This Way," a pro-gay anthem on the Motown label. But before the song that made him (momentarily) famous, Bean had lived a life of an almost unimaginably horrific sexual abuse. Later, after his singing career had waned, Bean reinvented himself again, as a Christian minister and influential AIDS activist.

Bean writes all about it (along with co-author David Ritz) in a compelling new memoir, I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher's Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ (Simon & Schuster, $24, 253 pages). 

Born poor and black to very young parents, Bean was raised by relatives in the deeply segregated Baltimore of the 1940s and 50s. But because he was an effeminate, soft-spoken boy, a long string of sexual predators, including family members, seemed drawn to him from the age of three.

Because this was a time before both sexual abuse and homosexuality were spoken of aloud, Bean suffered in silence — and his jaw-dropping abuse at the hands of mostly adult heterosexual identifying men was suffered in complete silence.

When Bean later discovered his own homosexuality, the abuse he had experienced led him to make his own bad choices, which he bravely recounts here.

But he also had obvious musical talent from a very young age, and hard work and random chance (along with life-changing appearances by popular singers like Dionne Warwick) resulted in his singing the song of the book's title, perhaps the country's first openly gay hit song.

Later, Bean says, he had a chance to record follow-up songs, but declined because the record company wanted him to sing about heterosexual love. After so proudly declaring himself an out gay man, that seemed hypocritical, so Bean (after more hard knocks) moved onto the next stage of his life: that of Christian minister and AIDS activist.

If the memoir has a flaw, it's that it doesn't always paint the clearest, most evocative picture of specific scenes from Bean's life. And despite lots of detail about the abuse Bean suffered as a boy, the book is strangely quiet on Bean's later romantic life, especially his post-disco years.

Did he ever find the love of his life? If not, how did he make peace with it? Or maybe romantic love was simply never an interest of his or a priority? After all the abuse he had experienced, I was, frankly, dying to know this — the way in which he personally reconciled himself with being gay — more than I was interested in hearing the more general way he had been touched by Jesus.

Still, Bean seems like an extraordinarily decent man, and he's done amazing HIV/AIDS-related work, especially in communities of color, where the disease has often struck the hardest. I also appreciate his racially and sexually inclusive approach to life. As with his 1970s hit, he strikes me as once again being a perfect gay emissary to the heterosexual world, especially Christian communities.

It's impossible to read this book and not be very moved by the story of Bean's simultaneously tragic and uplifting life.