arm up and put my hand around Wendy’s waist and said “There.” And that is the poster. That’s how precise he was about how he wanted the image of the band to be. He wanted it to be way more obvious. We weren’t just the girls in the band.
Wendy: We were the couple.
Lisa: We were the gay girls in the band. It was very calculated.
Wendy: And how did it make us feel? I felt slightly protected by it, which is really ironic. There was so much mystery around him and he never had to answer to anybody or anything and I was so young and dumb that I thought I could adopt that philosophy.
Lisa: It was just like “Here you go. This is the name of the story and this is what it looks like.” And it was all the more reason why we didn’t feel as though we had to talk about it.

Before we continue, I have to ask: Have you come out before? Is this it?
Wendy: We’ve never done a “Let’s come out” interview. We’ve never been in the closet, but we never said, “Let’s get an interview with The Advocate. Let’s get an interview with Out.” I didn’t want to be a lesbian musician. I felt really uncomfortable with that role. I was already fighting, being a guitar player in a man’s world and to have that on top of it — Lisa and I were so very married at the time, it just didn’t seem like something I could handle.

 

Lisa: With Prince and the Revolution, I think that it was just taken for granted that we were supposed to be the gay reps in the band. [Laughs] The blacks, the whites, the gays. And people would say, “Gee, do you think this lesbian thing is going to work for them?” [Everyone laughs] So, after the band kind of split up, the record labels would be like, “You need to be wearing fur coats and sitting on motorcycles and long fingernails . . .”
Wendy: It was just horseshit.

So are they still together? (via Rolling Stone Magazine)
Lisa: Okay (laughs)…

Lisa: No, we’re not together. We were together for many, many years. We made it about 20 years together and now we are not together, but we are still together. I mean, we still share what we … we like to think we can still share the best of ourselves with each other, so, you know, she’ll always be just the most important person.

How did the process of asserting your own identity as a duo conflict with the record company’s perception of your marketability based on the Revolution?
Wendy: To be honest with you, it kind of manifested itself in every aspect of our career at the time. From the songs we were writing to the pictures we were taking to the videos that we wanted to do to the places we wanted to perform to the print that we wanted to give interviews to, it was all in constant contrast to what the business wanted from us. It was extremely frustrating because we were in such a minority as musicians and as young women. We weren’t even considering coming out because we were already dealing with so much adversity coming away from Prince. That on top of it just seemed insurmountable. I don’t think either one of us were prepared at that age to have that be the ultimate battle.

Were the record companies aware that you were lesbians and in a relationship together?
Wendy: They’d never talk to us about it. I think everybody knew, but nobody said to us, “But you’re a lesbian couple.” No one used that kind of language with us.

Lisa: We were so hung up on the fact that these people wanted us to be Prince. It didn’t matter what our sexuality was. After we would leave the record company offices, I remember one of our managers mentioning that the art department people would comment on the way Wendy and I would talk to each other. Like I would say, “Yes, dear,” and they would be all like whisper-whisper after we would leave the room. “They’re gay, aren’t they? They’re like an old married couple.” At that point, we had already been a couple for 10 years. It was very normal for us and very precious.

Wendy: I saw a lot of other women coming out at the time and I didn’t want that on my plate. I wanted my life with Lisa to be so much more private and so much more conventional than that.
Lisa: You know, Wendy, I don’t know if you’ll mind me saying this, but we did slightly differ on our consciousness about it. We would do interviews together and people would ask us questions like, “What is it like living in LA?” And I’d start talking about living in a house together and literally get a kick from Wendy under the table like, “You’re going too far.”

Wendy: Lisa, at the time we were talking to bullshit magazines. I just didn’t want the judgment from people who didn’t know about us or the struggle it takes for gays to fu**ing live a normal life.
Lisa: I know, but I felt that you had to teach by example instead of making some statement.
Wendy: I disagreed at the time. You can hear it still. Lisa and I are so much on the same page as older women, but at the time it was like, “F**k that!” I’m not gonna go there. I want more control of this. I just simply do. I lead the way for Lisa and I to be closeted.

That excerpt, “Computer Blue,” on Prince and The Revolution’s album that Wendy and Lisa did makes so much more sense now.