Melissa Etheridge: Our Little Secret

Sara Stratton holds a PhD in American history from York University.

This book owes its existence to rock singer Melissa Etheridge’s
not-so-little not-so-secret: she is a lesbian. Luck’s celebration of
(or attempt to capitalize on) Etheridge’s coming out is a pedestrian
effort. Most of her research was conducted in recent issues of gay and
lesbian journals and mainstream music magazines, and much of her writing
consists of strings of quotations from these sources. Annoyingly,
lengthy citations to the original articles appear in parentheses in the
text, distracting the reader from the narrative flow. Her own prose is
amateurish, and the points she makes are often banal.

The publisher has proclaimed this to be the first “complete”
biography of Melissa Etheridge, a dubious claim unless one considers the
inclusion of high-school yearbook photos and the reminiscences of
distant college friends to be the hallmarks of authoritative biography.
Luck thanks Etheridge and her partner, Julie Cypher, in her
acknowledgments, but it seems that she made no effort to interview them.
That is a shame, for they could surely have provided some reflective
discussion of the unexpected but seemingly crucial role of churchgoing
in Etheridge’s youth, her early skirmishes with political correctness
in the American women’s music scene, and the challenges of coming out
in Hollywood before Ellen DeGeneres made it a prime-time event. Luck
raises all these issues, and then, having no innovative sources to draw
on, lets them drop.

There are a few good pictures in the book, although many are undated
and lack context. The discography is useful. However, it is difficult to
recommend this book to anyone, including even Etheridge’s fans, who
are unlikely to find anything in it that they don’t already know.