When Lady Gaga’s camp announced that it would be releasing an exclusive edition — complete with remixes and three additional studio cuts — of the upcoming “Born This Way” album at Target, it excited some of her Little Monsters for the wrong reasons. Gaga, of course, enjoys enormous support from the gay community and is very vocal in reciprocating that love. After all, “Born This Way” is the 1,000th No. 1 single, but the first in 50-plus years of chart-toppers to use the word “transgendered.”
So how, some of her fans wondered, could she choose to support a retail chain that made headlines last election season for using $150,000 of corporate funds to support a political action committee — MN Forward, an ostensibly pro-business political action committee — that supported Tom Emmer in his failed 2010 run for governor of Minnesota? Emmer’s campaign had earlier made a donation to a Christian rock organization that advocates death and violence to gays. Emmer also supported a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel quickly apologized to the public and Target employees for the support of Emmer. But following the apology, further donations to the political right — and specifically to candidates with anti-gay voting records — were made.
Gaga spoke to the issue for the first time in this interview, telling Billboard that she wasn’t comfortable with the Target partnership when it first came up as a possibility, and that she met with “the entire executive staff” at Target, along with her manager Troy Carter.
“That discussion was one of the most intense conversations I’ve ever had in a business meeting,” Gaga says. “Part of my deal with Target is that they have to start affiliating themselves with LGBT charity groups and begin to reform and make amends for the mistakes they’ve made in the past…our relationship is hinged upon their reform in the company to support the gay community and to redeem the mistakes they’ve made supporting those groups.”
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I wonder what the Gays against her will say about this now. God I love this woman.
