For many queer people, Mother’s Day is not just a celebration of mothers, but of “mothers” — the artists, mentors and cultural icons inspired by LGBTQ ballroom culture who champion individuality despite pressures to conform.
On this Mother’s Day, we’ve collected some of the best meditations on motherhood from queer icons — some famous in the community and some across the world — to show off all the goodness and complexity the word “mother” can hold.
Beyoncé
Before the queen bee of the “Beyhive” set out on her “Renaissance” world tour, with songs explicitly inspired by queer ballroom culture, she took the time to gush about the influence her own mother, Tina Knowles, had on her life.
The Grammy-winning superstar told Harper’s Bazaar in 2021 about the sense of community her hairstylist mother created among Black women: “I watched my mother nurture and heal those women in her salon, not just by making them look and feel beautiful but by talking with them, listening to them, and connecting with them.”
“She is the perfect mother,” she said in 2006. “She is the perfect amount of friend, and she teaches me things and corrects.”
Beyoncé, a mother of three, has also used her mother as an inspiration as she raises her own children.
“Dear Mama, I am thankful for every part of you and every second I share with you,” she wrote in a Mother’s Day post on Instagram from 2020. “My biggest goal in life is for my children to feel the love you make us all feel. I appreciate you and thank you with every ounce of admiration and respect.”
Miss Lawrence
The actor and social advocate Miss Lawrence Balenciaga (“Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Star”) — reflected on the lessons their mother taught them as a Black, gay, gender nonconforming person, speaking to The Washington Post as they prepared for the Purpose Ball competition at the Strength of a Woman Festival & Summit in Atlanta.
“She didn’t always agree with who I was and how I presented, but that didn’t change the way she loved me,” said Balenciaga, who leads as a” mother” in their queer ballroom chapter in Atlanta. “I have found the most strength through Black women.”
Balenciaga’s biological mother taught them “how to connect to my story with God, and teaching me and showing me what real love is, regardless of what the world says it should be.”
This compassion, they said, has helped them work toward a better understanding between the Black LGBTQ and straight communities.
Saucy Santana
On the “Don’t Call Me White Girl” podcast last year, rapper Saucy Santana talked about coming out to his parents as a teenager in Perry, Fla.
His mother was always an influence in his self discovery, he said — he often wore her heels when she was out of the house — but she had trouble accepting his identity at first.
“Initially my mom was in havoc,” he said. “Because when I came out, I came out like, boom! So I started, like, experimenting in girl clothes, getting my nails done. … So her thing was, damn, you could be gay, but damn, you know, you 17 … slow it down.”
Santana said he got more acceptance at first from his father, a security guard who had raised him to be “tough as hell.” His mother, on the other hand, would routinely throw out his feminine clothes, and eventually told him he needed to move out of the house. Like many young queer people, Santana ended up adopting a “gay family” in lieu of his own — friends who understood his queerness in a way his relatives didn’t.
Eventually, he said, his real mother came around too.
“My mama loves my gay mama to death,” he said on the podcast. “My gay mama was able to love me at a time when my real mama wasn’t. Not because she didn’t love me, but because she just couldn’t understand.”
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga, as one of the most famous advocates for LGBTQ rights, once told People magazine about her experiences of being bullied for being different in middle school.
She said her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, didn’t know at first how to help her communicate her struggles and uplift her emotionally. But over the years, “we’ve found a way to channel kindness into our lives in a way that’s also healed our relationship,” Gaga said.
“I’m just really grateful that my mom holds space for me to be able to talk about how I feel. And because of that, we have a very healthy relationship that is beautiful.”
Madonna
Madonna, who suggested she was gay last year, has spoken often about her mother and namesake, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, whose death from cancer when Madonna was a little girl propelled her current status as an artist, nonconformist and queer icon.
“What I remember most about my mother was that she was very kind and very gentle and very feminine,” Madonna said in the 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare,” in which she posed laying her head on her mother’s gravestone.
“I guess she seemed like an angel to me, but I suppose everybody thinks their mother’s an angel when they’re 5.”
The “Express Yourself” singer took inspiration from her brief experiences with her mother. “She was ill for a long time, and she never allowed herself any sort of self-pity,” she told Interview magazine in 1989, several months after she filed for divorce from actor Sean Penn. But she was driven perhaps as much by her mother’s absence.
“She’s gone, so I’ve turned my need on to the world and said, ‘Okay, I don’t have a mother to love me, I’m going to make the world love me,’” she told Carrie Fisher in a Rolling Stone interview in 1991.
Madonna powerfully demonstrated the eternal link from mother to child when she sang a few lines of a childhood song to David Blaine for an interview in 2014: “Only of things, of beauty to the eye, snowflakes and mountains towering in the sky / Now I know that God made this world for me.”
“My mother sang it to me when I was 4,” Madonna told Blaine. “My children know it too.”