Feminist singer Lesley Gore dies at the age of 68

Lesley Gore, who rose to teen stardom with her 1963 hit “It’s My Party” and emerged as an early feminist in pop music, has died at age 68. Her death was announced by her longtime partner, jewelry designer Lois Sasson, who said Gore died of lung cancer in a New York hospital. Born Lesley Goldstein, Gore was a middle-class teenager when, according to legend, one of her recordings of a singing lesson in New York found its way to legendary producer Quincy Jones. Jones soon visited her parents’ home in New Jersey and persuaded her to sing “It’s My Party,” which had already been recorded as a side track by English jazz singer Helen Shapiro. Featuring studio effects such as doubling of Gore’s voice and background horns, “It’s My Party” turned the 16-year-old into a pop sensation long before the concept of a teen star became mainstream. The song’s lyrics — “It’s my party / And I’ll cry if I want to / You’d cry too if it happened to you” — have become quotable for generations of Americans charmed by the song’s story of a girl who gets stood up by her boyfriend and goes off with “Judy.” Although the song evokes the dating scene in the conservative postwar era, Gore herself was a lesbian, though she says she didn’t realize her sexual orientation until she was in her twenties. Gore soon scored another hit with “You Don’t Own Me,” in which the teenager demanded of her partner, “Don’t tell me what to do / And don’t tell me what to say / And please, when I go out with you, don’t put me on display.” The song, which was later covered by Dusty Springfield and a trio including Bette Midler in the film The Wives Club, was unusually candid in an era long before Beyoncé and other successful women in music embraced feminism. In a 2005 interview, Gore said that, unlike Hollywood, the music industry had “always been a man’s world.” “It’s always been a patriarchal situation, and women are always pushed, not necessarily, but definitely to a lower level,” she told AfterEllen, an online publication about lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment. However, she called Jones a “great mentor” and said he was “a very sensitive man and a wonderful human being.” “He was able to get a great performance out of me because he made me feel good in the studio,” Gore said. – ‘Low acceptance’ for gay artists – Gore said in the interview that she never hid her sexual orientation but was careful not to “rub it in anyone’s face.” “Times were very different back then, so I just tried to live as normally as humanly possible. But as honestly as humanly possible,” she said. “There was very little acceptance of gay people. I think the record industry, by and large what’s left of it, is still totally homophobic.” Gore continued to record and released a comeback album, “Ever Since,” in 2005. She also made guest appearances on the 1960s television series “Batman” and was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the music for the 1980 film “Fame” with her brother Michael Gore. Gore also embraced her international audience. An avowed fan of Charles Aznavour, Gore recorded versions of her original songs in French, but also in German and Italian. But she never achieved the fame of her earliest works, as music trends changed quickly after the Beatles took the United States by storm in the 1960s. Gore told the website Digital Interviews that she still considers “You Don’t Own Me” her signature song. “After some 40 years, I still end my show with that song because, to be honest, I can’t find anything stronger,” she said. “It’s a song that grows every time you play it.”