Lady Gaga’s 2008 hit “Poker Face” has a surprising queer origin.
During a recent performance of the song at her long-running Las Vegas residency, “Lady Gaga Jazz & Piano” at the Dolby Live Theater in the Park MGM, which ended last month, the pop star let fans in on a little secret.
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“This is not backlash. This is hatred.”
Seated a white baby grand piano and wearing a characteristically outlandish feather headpiece, Gaga teased the audience: “I bet you didn’t know this song was about having sex with men and thinking about women.”
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“Now that’s my kind of poker face,” the singer added before launching into a jazzy acoustic version of the song.
Of course, it’s no secret that Lady Gaga is not only a staunch LGBTQ+ equality advocate but also bisexual herself. As The Advocate noted, the singer came out early in her career, identifying as bisexual in a 2009 interview with Barbara Walters.
But the “Bad Romance” hitmaker has also had to defend her sexual identity. Gaga has only ever been (publicly) romantically linked to cisgender men, leading some to question her bisexuality.
The singer lashed out at those critics during a 2013 release party for her album Artpop in Berlin. “It’s not a lie that I am bisexual, and I like women, and anyone that wants to twist this into ‘she says she’s bisexual for marketing,’ this is a f**king lie,” she said during a Q&A. “This is who I am and who I have always been.”
In fact, Gaga has spoken about the inspiration for “Poker Face” before. She discussed it in the same Barbara Walters interview in which she came out as bisexual and in a 2011 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
She’s also apparently made it a staple of her “Jazz & Piano” show. During a 2021 performance, she stopped midway through the song to recall a conversation she had with a man she was dating after he saw her talk about “Poker Face” on DeGeneres’s show.
“He called me, he said, ‘Do you know I had to explain this to my mother?” Gaga told the crowd. “‘What? That there’s people that are gay?’” the singer remembered responding.