By Karen Ocamb

Melissa Etheridge wasn’t just fawning over Dennis Kucinich — she was having a genuine epiphany about the Democratic presidential candidate during the LGBT forum in Hollywood sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign and Logo, and broadcast live by the network on Aug. 9.

The Grammy and Oscar-winning singer/songwriter told IN Los Angeles magazine that she is still in the process of picking a presidential candidate. Whoever she selects should be thrilled since Etheridge is releasing a new album Sept. 25, The Awakening, and the attendant publicity will surely now include a question about politics, thanks to the forum and her good friend, environmentalist Al Gore. (Etheridge’s Ford Excursion runs on diesel biocorn oil.)

During an Aug. 16 phone interview with IN Los Angeles, Etheridge talked extensively and candidly about her experience as a panelist at the forum.

“I was amazed that it was happening, and I was amazed that I was fortunate enough to be picked,” Etheridge said. “I’ve been around enough to know it’s not just because I’m a nice person. I understand what celebrity is in our society right now and—HRC, Logo and MTV—if you go to the intersection of those three, I think I’m there.”

HRC said her role on the panel —which included HRC President Joe Solmonese, journalist Jonathan Capeheart and (heterosexual) moderator, journalist Margaret Carlson—was to “bring a personal human element to it. That’s why I felt OK by saying, ‘This is my experience .. and let me give you just a little bit of information about myself.’”

Etheridge said that Jon Stewart’s spoof of her on The Daily Show “was just the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It looked like all I did was get up there and talk about myself. It was pretty funny. But that’s what I felt my purpose there was—to kind of mushy up the hard edges.”

But reading about herself on the blogs was difficult. Though she says having cancer has “freed” her, it is nonetheless really hard “for a girl from the Midwest. I want to please everybody. I want to be good.”

When HRC announced that she and Solmonese would be the panelists, without mentioning that journalists would be added later, the reaction among bloggers was intensely negative. “When the reaction came out,” Etheridge said, “it was like, ‘No! No, you guys. I’m not just some singer. I’ve done a lot of work.’”

Indeed, Etheridge received her political training when she came out in 1992 from National Gay and Lesbian Task Force board member and entertainment attorney Alan Hergott and his partner Curt Shepard (who now heads up Governmental Affairs at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center) and NGLTF Executive Director Urvashi Vaid. Her subsequent political mentors have included former HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch and former Vice President Al Gore.

Etheridge’s commitment to live authentically in the moment extended to the forum, especially when listening to Kucinich.

“I actually had an epiphany of my own during the whole thing because I belonged to the class of folks that were like, ‘Oh yeah, Dennis Kucinich and [former Sen. Mike] Gravel—they’re saying all the right things, but they can’t be elected,’” Etheridge said. “I thought, ‘OK, then at least let me get Kucinich to talk about some interesting stuff. I’m going to bring out medicinal marijuana, because, well he’s not electable.’

“I’m sitting on the talk show couch listening to him,” she said, “and I’m going, ‘Holy crap! This man speaks exactly what I feel is possible in the future. He is speaking exactly the world I wish to live in, the world I wish to create, the world I wake up everyday and go, my world can be this way, help me see that the world can be this way and work toward it.’ I promise you—I was not a Dennis Kucinich fan before I got up there on that couch. I was, [Sen. Barack] Obama, [Sen. Hillary] Clinton, here we go. And I swear, sitting there and actually hearing those words coming from a presidential candidate …

“So for me, that was my moment of, ‘Wait a minute! Why am I saying that what I want can’t be? Why can’t Dennis Kucinich?’ and then my voice is going, ‘Are you kidding? Look at him.’ So I am in the process of my own little epiphany about the candidates. But that was my most significant moment.”

Etheridge said she was caught off guard by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s response to her question about whether homosexuality is a matter of choice or biology. Richardson’s answer, that being gay is a choice, caused an uproar that he tried to quickly squelch post-forum, saying he didn’t understand the question because of jet lag.

“I was a conduit for something,” Etheridge said. “I have nothing against Bill Richardson at all. I didn’t know much about him. I liked him. I thought he was a nice guy. I thought, ‘Wow. Here he just went all through his stance on gay rights and I’m just going to throw him a little softball here, let him talk.’ I just thought the answer would be, ‘Whatever it is, this is America. We all deserve the same rights.’ I thought he didn’t hear my question. … I’ve been interested in the dialogue that that exchange brought up.”

Etheridge intended to challenge Clinton on how her husband’s administration let gays down, but she came up with the phrase “thrown under the bus” as she was talking.

“Those of us who were there in 1992, it was our first sort of coming to awareness of gay liberation, gay rights, gay issues and politics,” Etheridge said. “I remember—there’s David Mixner, there’s you [editor’s note: Karen Ocamb conducted Etheridge’s first coming-out interview], there’s Michelangelo Signorile—we were there pushing. And I was at the Triangle Ball [during the Clinton Inauguration ceremonies, where Etheridge first came out] with Alan Hergott and Urvashi and Curt Shepard. It was a huge thing for our community because ... we were all coming together. We felt that we had all done this and we were going to get heard. And I think [the Clintons’] intentions were there. They tried. And then they got smacked down, and they never got back up again and never tried anything, and they kept throwing us under the bus. And I just had to tell her. I said I felt like a lot of people in the community—all of us who were there in ’92—really felt that way. So I felt obligated to do that.

“I think she was thrown a little off guard,” Etheridge continued. “I think it surprised her because there was a defensiveness. It was funny that Gravel had just said a politician can tell you to go to hell and you look forward to the trip. And then she comes out and she’s like, ‘Well, Melissa, I don’t see it that way.’ She said [we had] to get [the Defense of Marriage Act] in before the [federal anti-gay marriage] constitutional amendment; but everyone knows a constitutional amendment would have taken years. It seemed like someone saying, ‘Yes, yes. I heard you and I did that. But you could have gotten hurt a lot worse.’ But we thought we were electing someone who would at least stick up for us.

“And then she went to the ‘because I have cancer, I want things to happen faster,’” Etheridge said. “Just this morning, that popped through my head again and I went, ‘What?’ What if Lyndon B. Johnson had said that to Martin Luther King? ‘Sorry that you’re black, but you have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.’ No, that’s not leadership. That bothered me. That bothered me personally, somebody saying that to me. So again, I had my own, ‘Wait a minute.’ I was kind of a Clinton gal … so I’m having my own little thing here.”

At the end of the forum, Clinton “came over to me, and I said, ‘I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. But I felt that this needed to be said so that you could be seen answering it.’ I really wanted her to know that was for the community. ... She’s a politician. She’s not my friend. I’m not hers. I don’t know.”

What Etheridge does know is the spiritual potency of her new album, The Awakening, which she likens to John Lennon’s Imagine, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, and Innervisions by Stevie Wonder, in how the music speaks to a secret longing.

“They were singing from truth,” Etheridge said. “We sought that out as young people. We would go into the basement and listen, and they would speak to us. It fed your soul.”

The Awakening, Etheridge said, is an album about “what happens when you walk in truth. What happens tomorrow if you become the change you want to see? You change tomorrow.”