Patti LaBelle Outs a Very Dead Luther Vandross

Luther Vandross loved Patti LaBelle. So much so that he formed a fan club for the female R&B singer while still in high school and eventually became her best friend. The kind of pinky swear pals who out one another post-mortem to score points with Andy Cohen’s exaggerated overbite.

If you’re on Watch What Happens Live, you’re not there to talk supply side economics. Andy Cohen’s going to rhetorically flip you back to his limited areas of interest. In case those aren’t clear, Sam Smith is sitting right next to you discussing his lack of a single gender. Here’s the sole pre-production note: bring out your gay. Patti LaBelle did literally, by outing Luther Vandross who passed away from fat shitty health at merely 54 years old.

“We talked about it. Basically, he did not want his mother to be – although she might have known, he wasn’t going to come out and say this to the world. And he had a lot of lady fans and he told me the he just didn’t want to upset the world.”

When a man who can get as much pussy as he wants on a nightly basis decides to aim for zero year after year, you don’t need to read the tea leaves. Everybody knew Vandross was gay. The Velvet Voice clearly made a conscious decision to keep that fact, and his entire personal sexuality, to himself. That can be seen as an assault on politically correct mores. Or incredibly refreshing. Now he’s dead and his mom finally kicked it, so, let me score some Andy Cohen fanbase points.

We live in a world where digging into people’s pasts and parsing dirt is an acceptable form of social sharing. Even laudable. It’s how you earn likes from the feebles. It’s always worth trying to resist the temptation to gossip. Not like Andy Cohen can beat it out of you. Dick hickeys are easy to prevent. With friends like these, who needs activist enemies at Slate and Buzzfeed?