Even before days at Continental Baths, Bette Midler says it ‘never occurred’ to her not to accept gays

Bette Midler never had to evolve when it came to accepting gay people into her life.

‘I had been in the theater for a long time, from the time I was a young person, and I’d always known gay people – and they were just, like, gay people!’ the 68-year-old star tells PrideSource.

‘(They were) just ordinary friends. People that you knew, and that you never thought twice about.  You didn’t think of them as being different, although looking back on my high school years, I think there were a lot of people in my high school – this is so many years ago; this is 50 years ago – who probably were gay and didn’t ever talk about it.’

There was one classmate in particular who comes to mind.

‘One of the kids that I went to school with, an enormously popular guy – really funny, really wonderful – who was in my Latin class, wrote me before he passed away from AIDS to tell me that he had been gay and that he had contracted AIDS.’

Before she became a Grammy winner and an Emmy winner and a two-time Oscar nominee, Midler made a name for herself performing at a gay bathhouse in New York City.

Her shows at the Continental Baths became legendary and her gay fan base just grew from here.

She lost many people she knew during the worst days of the AIDS crisis and says it never occurred to her not to be there for them.

‘These were friends of mine – people that I had worked with, people that I had danced with, people I had broken bread with my whole life. You do what you do because there’s nothing else to do. There’s no other option.’