In her best-selling memoir, “Lips Unsealed,” Belinda Carlisle touches on a number of queer topics, from making out with her friend Alice at the bus stop as a young punk rocker in Hollywood, to hitting the clubs with her gay friends in London.
But it was when her son James (AKA Duke) came out to her at 14 that, oddly enough, provided a sense of security for the rock star.
“I don’t know how he did it, but my kid was already the kind of person I wished that I could have been,” wrote Carlisle. “With a vision of who he was and who he wanted to be, this was one piece of the puzzle he was addressing so he could get on with the rest of his life.”
“I looked at Duke with envy,” Carlisle recounted in the book. “At almost 50, I was still sorting through issues from my childhood. How did he end up this together?”
Fresh off performances in the U.K., Carlisle will receive the Harvey Milk Award at the ninth annual Diversity Honors Saturday night at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. When first announced, the award caught her by surprise, she said, and stirred generational memories of losing friends to the AIDS epidemic, fighting for marriage equality and supporting her son’s coming out process.
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