Janet Jackson: LGBTs Are An All-Embracing Community That Has Always Inspired Me

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Speaking to Billboard, Janet Jackson shares how the LGBTQ community has inspired her work:

It’s a loving, all-embracing community that has always inspired me.

I don’t often listen to my own work, but when I go back to [1997’s] Velvet Rope, I put on “Together Again” and remember the friends I lost to AIDS.

It was important to me to honor them not mournfully but joyously in a celebratory song. Their spirit did so much to bolster mine.

Sometimes when people talk about Velvet Rope, they call it my edgiest or sexiest record. Yet the heart of the record is not about sex at all. It’s about how, in defiance of death, we will all be “together again.”

It’s an anthem to undying love.