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A Supremes Boy

By Donalevan Maines
DreamBoyYou know you’re gay when you lip-synch songs by Diana Ross. You know you’re really gay when chapters of your memoir are titles of her greatest hits.

Dale Guy Madison is an unabashed fan of Diana Ross and the Supremes who connects the dots of his life in his memoir Dreamboy (www.damngoodman.com) via the music of Miss Ross, both as lead singer of the Supremes and as a solo artist (after all, he had to include her disco hit I’m Coming Out).

The full title is Dreamboy: My Life as a QVC Host & Other Greatest Hits, and in homage to his childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, he includes a Nancy Wilson song that Bonnie Raitt later made famous.

Madison introduces Dreamboy with an explanation of how he structured the book into five “discs,” including “The Happening” (“To a black kid growing up in the sixties, the Supremes were an undeniable symbol of success,” he writes. “You could rise from the projects and one day be on The Ed Sullivan Show”); “Family” (including a gay brother); “I Meant You No Harm/Breathtaking Guy” (in which he dishes on all of his “enrapturing, heartbreaking, and delicious relationships”); “Up the Ladder to the Roof” (when fame eluded him and his drag alter ego FREEda Slave, he moved to Los Angeles and tried to produce a movie starring Joey Buttafucco);  and “Acknowledgements,” serving as album “liner notes” which he contacted Mary Wilson to write, but “she hasn’t gotten back” to him).

Did you know that Diana Ross and the Supremes recorded an album of songs from Funny Girl? This and much more can be found in Madison’s memoir, dedicated to “every little boy who dreamed of sparkle, glitter and glamour while singing Supreme songs in the mirror, but was ashamed to let anyone know it.”

Donalevan Maines is a frequent contributor to OutSmart magazine.

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Don Maines

Donalevan Maines is a regular contributor to OutSmart Magazine.

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