10
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
June 14, 2002
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eveningsout
Chastity Bono recalls her early days in the closet
by Joe E. Jeffreys
Chastity Bono says that her new memoir, The End of Innocence, is “something very personal to me and something that I wanted to get out there." Having grown up in the media's glare, the 33-year-old daughter of Sonny and Cher says that the period covered in the book, roughly her early 20s, "was a time in my life that played such a huge role in who I am today."
In the early 1990s Bono's life centered around two things: working with her thengirlfriend Rachel to form a band and record a CD and her budding relationship with Joan Stephens. The band eventually signed and recorded with Geffen Records, and Bono's book offers a detailed "Behind the Music" for all Ceremony fans.
The memoir's backbone, however, is Bono's warm and intensely personal account of her relationship with Stephens, a high school friend of her mother's she had known all her life. A few years into their relationship Stephens was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. As her lover, Bono, then 23, became her primary caretaker during a series of debilitating treatments until Stephen's death from cancer.
"By the time I sold this book I really didn't want to sit down and write this book, because I was really feeling good for the first time in about six years," Bono says. "I was afraid it was going to drag me back into that time but it didn't do that and it was really good for me to take a look at it in such detail."
Having previously written Family Outing, a set of coming out stories including her own, Bono says that she writes because "I want people to know that there are more complexities about me and that that is what allows me to do the kind of work that I am able to do now."
Deeply closeted during the period covered by The End of Innocence, Bono relates in its pages her feelings when she was outed by the Star supermarket tabloid in 1990.
Today she says she "wishes I had come out before. It would have been much easier for me emotionally and I don't think it would have hindered the music career at all and looking back I think it might have helped."
In 1995 Bono came out on the cover of the Advocate, and has since become a spokesperson for various lesbian and gay causes including the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. To-
the end of innocence
BONO
day she feels that the community needs to work towards passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and "some form of legally recognized union-I don't want to say marriage because people are afraid of that word in this context."
Bono says that at this point in her life she has grown accustomed to the media's attention.
"It has afforded me wonderful things. I like to get involved and do things. I like to talk about things that I think are important and that has made me someone that people are willing to listen to."
Sounding like a likely candidate to follow in her father's political footsteps, Bono says that her memoir's title says it all.
"It is about that time in my life when I lost all my innocence and grew up to how harsh the world is."
Chastity Bono will be reading and speaking on June 21 at 7:30 pm at An Open Book, 685 North High Street, in Columbus.
Joe E. Jeffreys is a freelance writer living in New York City.
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