Condemning Gaga

The grave site of Yul Brynner, dead of lung cancer at 65.

I don’t know Lady Gaga but I admire her, and her impact on culture — particularly queer culture — is clear. She’s a true mega-star and a real artist. While pop music is ephemeral by design, she knows how to drive it brilliantly and she’s an actual musician and writer, not a proxy for “producers” tapping out grooves on their laptops.

I don’t love everything she — or any prolific artist — creates, but I respect her.

That said…

As an addict myself, I understand how relapse works, but the exuberant glorification of cigarette smoking she displays in her new video with Bruno Mars is more than an apparent relapse. It’s a grotesque embrace and endorsement of what the CDC has named, “the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.”

And it’s not just that she’s smoking again after her 2020 interview with Zane Lowe in which she proclaims unambiguously, “I completely quit — I quit cold turkey. But it was so hard. If you don’t smoke, don’t smoke! Because quitting is worse. It is so brutal. And I will never smoke again because I think I saw Jesus for an entire week. It was so awful.”

And again… I’m an addict. I know exactly what, “I will never [use] again” means. I don’t blame her or any addict for relapsing, or for failing after “white knuckling” it and thinking they’re cured.

It was mere weeks ago that iconic smoker David Lynch revealed that he now has emphysema. I grew up watching movie stars and the characters they played smoke. I’ll never forget Yul Brynner’s posthumous commercial, knowing he would soon be dead from lung cancer.

George Harrison, David Bowie, Andy Kaufman, Patrick Swayze, James Baldwin… all died from cigarette-related diseases. My own father died at age 53 and everyone in the family knows why and knew perfectly well then. If you’re alive, you already know victims of cigarette smoking with “over 16 million Americans living with a smoking-related disease” right now, a half-million of whom will be dead by this time next year. It is a massive killer.

I’m so pissed off at this star who doesn’t know I’m alive, whom I will never meet, because it’s leading her little monsters in the wrong direction, just as so many have in the past.

PEOPLE WILL DIE because of Gaga’s decision to showcase and glamorize cigarettes and Bruno Mars is complicit. Millions of people emulate her. Again, cigarettes are highly addictive and the cause of more than 480,000 deaths each year. We shouldn’t be celebrating this “artistic choice” no matter what the transgressive charge of smoking may mean for someone.

The glorification and glamorization of cigarettes is one nostalgic trope we should have left in the dumpster of history. We need to stop broadcasting how stupid, reckless, and dangerous we can be. There is no good, justifiable, or worthy reason to smoke cigarettes and I condemn Lady Gaga for this.