"If I Was Your Girlfriend" - Prince

On Gender Fluidity as a Path to Connection

Prince creates a feminine alter ego to connect with his partner in the same meaningful way that she connects with other women.

“Genderfluid'' was not a term ‘80s kids got to use. Words failed the fourth-grader who was repeatedly asked: “Are you a girl or a boy?” 

“Tomboy” was a slur, not an identity.

“I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand.”

- I Would Die 4 U

Even though Gen X kids didn’t have the tools to articulate gender expression or fluid sexuality, luckily, they did have MTV. At any given hour, the screen glowed with videos of boys wearing makeup or girls with shaved heads. But nothing prepared these young minds for the revelation (or “Revolution,” if you will) of discovering Prince. 

Even though he had released five albums prior to Purple Rain in 1984, this was the moment that alarmed the suburban mainstream and scared Tipper Gore so shitless that she invented those “parental advisory” labels that persist today. 

There was Prince, naked in a bathtub. Suddenly, he stands and stares directly into your soul. No matter how old you were, it was still too young to fully appreciate the societal norms evaporating in that steamy bathtub during the  “When Doves Cry” video. Here was a guy not only in eyeliner, but wearing high heels (when he wasn’t completely nude), dressed in paisley and black lace. Prince’s band was multi-racial and multi-gendered. He had the funky Black bass player, the nerdy white synth player who enjoyed cosplaying as a doctor, the Jewish drummer, and the lesbian couple on guitar and keyboards. It was transcendent. For many queer ‘80s kids, it was the first time they’d seen a woman play a guitar. They wanted to be her. Also they wanted to be him. The contradictions sent hormonal systems into meltdown. Every time Prince & the Revolution appeared on MTV, you were mesmerized. 

From the first moment that Prince materialized in pop culture in 1978, everything about him was shocking. He was only 19 when he recorded his first album. He played every single instrument. And he took an unprecedented amount of control as a producer. Like wunderkind Stevie Wonder before him, Prince was a musical prodigy. Unlike Stevie Wonder, Prince had a talent for making things explicitly sexy. His breakout single, “Soft and Wet,” was a literal ode to the pussy. He was either completely nude or nearly nude in every piece of the album art on his first four records. He sang about lesbians he’d like to fuck (“Bambi”), how great he was at giving head (“Head”), and whether people perceived him as gay or straight (“Controversy”). Shit was mischievous. Prince didn’t invent sexual innuendo, but he did perfect it. 

“I can be a big strong man. I can be a girl, a boy. I can be your toy.”

- We Can Funk

Prince’s orientation was boldly heterosexual. But he was committed throughout his career to gender fluidity and sharing how it helped connect him deeply with a partner. 

Most of us remember much ado about the unpronounceable symbol that Prince adopted as his legal name in 1993 (an act that helped him break a contract with Warner Bros, now Warner Records). The symbol was created as early as 1982 when it began appearing in album art or Prince’s fashion choices. Most don’t remember what it looked like — an overlay of the male and female symbols. He called it the “Love Symbol,” but it also signified this idea that Prince could easily morph between masculine and feminine personas. Although most of his lyrics about gender-play come from a deep sense of lust and sexual longing, things got interesting in 1986.

Prince had begun work on what would’ve been an LGBTQIA wet dream of an album. He experimented with high pitches that imbued his vocals with a feminine quality. He created an alter ego named “Camille” and wrote songs for the character. How Prince came up with the name is a mystery. Some believe he drew inspiration from Herculine Barbin, an intersex person in 19th century France who was forced to live for some time as a man because of a judge’s orders. Barbin chose the nickname “Camille” while living as a man. The work of Michel Foucalt featured Camille as a sexual misfit who could not be categorized in traditional gender norms. The French film “The Mystery of Alexina” was based on memoirs of Herculine “Camille” Barbin and was released in 1985, one year before Prince started work on the album. Prince recorded eight songs for the project and Warner Records made test copies, but the album was nixed weeks before its release. 

Some speculate the project got dumped because the label refused to move ahead with an album that didn’t have Prince’s name attached. And he was adamant about releasing the project under only his new alter ego. Although the Camille album disappeared, most of its songs emerged on Prince’s magnum opus, Sign O’ the Times.

The single, “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” along with its B-Side, “Shockadelica,” were leftovers from the Camille project. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” stands out because of how different it feels from other Prince songs. Prince uses his high-pitched, feminine vocalization from the Camille alter ego, and the lyrics eschewed the usual lustful aesthetic and opted instead for vulnerability as a way to connect with a partner. If only Prince could understand a lover in the same tender, intimate ways that she related with her platonic girlfriends. The traditional norms of masculinity stripped him of the chance to connect to this kind of love. The lyrics ask, “Would you let me wash your hair? Could I make you breakfast sometime? Can we go to a movie and cry together?” He wants to be everything that she had to seek elsewhere. 

“If I was your girlfriend, would you remember, to tell me all the things you forgot when I was your man?”

Prince is said to have written “If I Was Your Girlfriend” for his then-fiancé, Susannah Melvoin, because he longed for the kind of closeness she had with her twin sister (Wendy, the lesbian guitar player from his band). This song was life changing because, even though an ‘80s kid couldn’t articulate it as a youth, the song finally placed the concept of gender fluidity outside the realm of sexual fetish. He tapped feminine energy so deeply that it made you feel like a plethora of options existed other than wife and mother, or husband and father. 

While mainstream audiences were shocked by Prince’s fluid aesthetic and lyrics, scores of young queer kids in the ‘80s felt truly seen for the first time. Queer hip-hop/R&B artist Frank Ocean was born the same year Sign O’ the Times was released. Ocean covered Prince’s “When You Were Mine” and wrote on Tumblr:

"He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from an irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity, etc. He moved me to be more daring and intuitive with my own work by his demonstration — his denial of the prevailing model... A vanguard and genius by every metric I know of who affected many in a way that will outrun oblivion for a long while."