In my neighborhood, the message was loud and clear - faggots need not apply. If my fascination with singing, baby dolls and my momma’s hair care products weren’t a dead giveaway, then the little flutter that surged through me when I saw cute boys - and not girls - was.Īnd from early on, I knew there was something very wrong with it.

I couldn’t explain why, but I just felt different. I knew I was gay pretty much right from the start. In this exclusive excerpt, Freedia details the coming-out process, the power of bounce music and why the offer to give Miley Cyrus twerking lessons still stands. On her show, Freedia comes off as affable and grateful - belying her diva persona - and these traits are only solidified and expanded in the book. In the new autobiography, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva!, written by Freedia and co-writer Nicole Balin, the musician details her tumultuous upbringing marked by domestic strife and the fear of coming out as gay to her friends and family in an environment where gay men were killed for being out.īut the book juxtaposes these scenes with earnest humor. The rapper-singer earned national acclaim in recent years with Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, a reality show on Fuse detailing Freedia’s struggles and successes, both personally (Freedia’s mom had battled cancer for years before passing away in 2014) and professionally.īut the show could only scratch the surface of Freedia’s life.

More than a decade before the word “twerk” entered the global lexicon, Big Freedia had been proselytizing the dance and bounce music - an uptempo strain of hip-hop popularized in New Orleans in the early 1990s - throughout New Orleans and beyond.

Big Freedia by Big Freedia