Honoree: Melissa Etheridge (2026)

Melissa, thank you for being here.

You took time out to be with us for this Elton John Impact Award special.

Thank you so much for being here.

It's an honor to have you here.

It is my pleasure.

Thank you so much.

So I'm gonna get right into it.

You were out before almost any other women in rock music were out, and was there anyone in particular you were hanging out with at the time that actually inspired you to say, "You know, I can do this my way.

I'm gonna do it right now"?

Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

If I back up a little bit, in the middle of the '80s, I was playing in women's bars.

I was playing in lesbian bars.

So I was meeting the lesbian community of Southern California, and they were fierce.

This is the '80s.

This is when AIDS just hit us, and we were starting to really come together and try to make a difference, try to advocate, try to ...

I mean, it was, it was the first time gays had stepped into the political arena.

And actually, one of the people that really, really influenced me was Kate Clinton.

She's a comedian, and she was big on the lesbian circuit.

But I started playing the women's music festivals, and that's where it got really political.

This is all women.

There's a certain aspect of militant feminism, you know, in it.

It's [laughs] it was this really intense stuff.

I was like, "Whoa, that's, that's kinda crazy," but I loved playing my music.

And they would slowly take me to this benefit and, "Oh, can you sing for this thing?" They would slowly kinda get me in front of large groups of gays and lesbians that were advocating and doing all this work, and I started [laughs] going, "Oh, I, I, I'm ...

" This is starting to come to a, a place where I felt I needed to for me to come out.